Freddie Mercury’s album Mr Bad Guy is back on vinyl

Freddie Mercury’s first solo album, Mr Bad Guy, is brought back to life with a brand new vinyl reissue.

This record was his debut away from Queen and included bangers like “I Was Born To Love You” and “Living On My Own.”

40 years later, Freddie is spinning on the turntable again

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Mr Bad Guy, the album is being reissued on 180 g vinyl in translucent green on 5 December, along with a picture disc edition available exclusively via direct-to-consumer (D2C).

The record was originally released at the end of April 1985. It was the first time Freddie launched a project of his own, separate from the band he had co-founded in 1970.

Instead of Queen’s chameleonic, larger-than-life stadium sound, here Freddie really lets his hair down and goes for songs that blend his unique songwriting with a much more dance- and pop-driven sound – very club, very late-night, very dancefloor.

He summed it up like this at the time:

“I had a lot of ideas bursting to get out and there were a lot of musical territories I wanted to explore which I really couldn’t do within Queen.”

Mr Bad Guy reached number 6 in the UK album charts and produced four singles:

I Was Born To Love You

Made In Heaven

Living On My Own (which hit No.1 in the UK when it was re-released as a remix in 1993, two years after Freddie’s death)

Love Me Like There’s No Tomorrow

A more intimate Freddie – more club, more freedom

Mr Bad Guy showed a very different side of Freddie, one that had already been hinted at a few years earlier on Queen’s more dance-oriented album Hot Space.

This record is, in part, a love letter to the club scene he was immersed in, and in part a chance for Freddie to reveal a much more personal and vulnerable side of himself than ever before.

The album was recorded over several months at Musicland Studios in Munich, co-produced by Freddie and Reinhold Mack, who had worked with Queen since their hugely successful 1980 album The Game.

Before fully committing to a solo album, Freddie tested the waters with his 1984 single “Love Kills”, a pulsing dance track produced by disco legend Giorgio Moroder, which appeared on the soundtrack of a restored version of the iconic silent film Metropolis.
The warm reception to Love Kills gave Freddie the final push to keep exploring that path.

Between Queen and experimentation

There are tracks on Mr Bad Guy that wouldn’t have felt out of place on a Queen album.

“Made In Heaven” is Freddie in full epic-ballad mode, and the band would later rework it for the posthumous 1995 album Made In Heaven.

At the same time, being away from the Queen “mothership” gave him the freedom to experiment much more:

“Your Kind Of Lover” opens with a dramatic, piano-led intro and then bursts into a playful, high-energy groove – classic “Freddie in his element.”

“My Love Is Dangerous” surprises with a rhythm built on a reggae-inspired beat.

And the operatic vocals on “Man Made Paradise” clearly point the way to his later collaboration with Montserrat Caballé on Barcelona.

A classic, with an updated sound

The new translucent green vinyl reissue features a mix of the album by Queen’s longtime sound team Justin Shirley-Smith and Joshua J. Macrae, a version that originally appeared in the 2019 boxset Never Boring.

The idea was never to “modernise” Freddie, but to stay completely true to his original vision, while taking advantage of technology and resources that simply didn’t exist in the 1980s.

As Shirley-Smith explains:

“We went back to the original multi-track tapes. It’s a great collection of songs and Freddie’s vocal performance is absolutely extraordinary.

The idea wasn’t to try to make it sound like they would make it now, it was to make it sound like it would have then if they’d had better technology and more time. And of course, it’s a massive honour to work on anything Freddie did, and we always treat it with the utmost respect.”