Freddie Mercury’s Mr Bad Guy album has vinyl reissue

The 40th anniversary of Freddie Mercury’s Mr Bad Guy is being celebrated with a new vinyl reissue.

Originally released end of April 1985, Mr Bad Guy was Mercury’s first album away from Queen, the group he had co-founded in 1970. It found him breaking free from the confines of a band, swapping Queen’s chameleonic, arena-sized music for a set of songs that combined his unique songwriting with a driving, dance and pop-inspired sound.

Forty years after it first came out, Mr Bad Guy will be reissued on 180g translucent green vinyl on 5 December as well as picture disc LP exclusively via D2C.

“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,” said Mercury of the album at the time.

Mr Bad Guy reached No.6 in the UK album charts and produced four singles in I Was Born To Love You, Made In Heaven, Living On My Own (which reached N0.1 in the UK when it was re-released in remixed form in 1993, two years after the singer’s death) and Love Me Like There’s No Tomorrow.

On My Own

Mr Bad Guy showed a very different side to the singer, one that had been hinted at a few years earlier on Queen’s more dance-orientated Hot Space album. It was partly a love letter to the club scene he was immersed in but also a chance for Freddie to reveal more of himself than he ever had before.

Recorded over a period of several months at Munich’s Musicland Studio, Mr Bad Guy was co-produced by Mercury and Reinhold Mack, who had worked with Queen since 1980’s hugely successful The Game album.

The singer had tested the waters for a solo career with his 1984 single Love Kills, a pulsing dance track produced by disco legend Giorgio Moroder which had appeared on the soundtrack for a restored version of iconic silent movie Metropolis. Love Kills’ success would embolden Mercury to travel even further down that avenue.

A handful of the album’s songs wouldn’t have sounded out of place on a Queen record. The soaring Made In Heaven showcases Mercury the epic balladeer, and would be re-worked by the band themselves for 1995’s posthumous Made In Heaven album. However, the freedom of being away from the Queen mothership allowed him to experiment musically.

The dramatic, piano-led opening of Your Kind Of Lover swiftly erupts into playful energy, My Love Is Dangerous is unexpectedly built on a reggae beat, and Mercury’s operatic vocals on Man Made Paradise point the way to his collaboration with Montserrat Caballé on Barcelona a few years later.

Musical Experiment

The new translucent green vinyl reissue features a mix of the album by Queen’s longtime sound team of Justin Shirley-Smith and Joshua J Macrae, which originally appeared on 2019’s Never Boring boxset. The new mix stays true to Freddie’s original vision but has the benefits of technology and resources that were not available in the 1980s.

“We went back to the original multi-track tapes,” says Shirley-Smith. “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.”

40th Anniversary Special Edition Vinyl Reissue

Side One 
Let’s Turn It On
Made In Heaven
I Was Born To Love You
Foolin’ Around
Your Kind Of Lover
Side Two
Mr. Bad Guy
Man Made Paradise
There Must Be More To Life Than This
Living On My Own
My Love Is Dangerous
Love Me Like There’s No Tomorrow

Celebrating its 40th anniversary, Mr Bad Guy is reissued on 180g translucent green vinyl on 5 December via Universal, as well as on picture disc LP exclusively via D2C.

Pre-order here

Featured image credit: Queen Productions LDT

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