The 40th anniversary of Queen frontman Freddie Mercury’s debut solo album, Mr Bad Guy, is being marked with a special vinyl reissue, honoring one of the most personal and ambitious projects of his career. Originally released in April 1985, Mr Bad Guy was Mercury’s first step away from Queen, the band he co-founded 15 years earlier. The record saw him move beyond the band’s arena-rock scope into a world of vibrant pop, disco, and dance influences, all driven by his unmistakable songwriting flair.
Forty years later, Mr Bad Guy returns on December 5 in a 180g translucent green vinyl edition, with a picture disc LP also available exclusively through 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,” Mercury said when the album was first released.
The album revealed a more intimate side of the singer — one previously hinted at in Queen’s Hot Space. It blended the energy of the club scene that Mercury loved with deeply personal reflections, giving listeners a glimpse into his emotional world. Recorded at Munich’s Musicland Studio, Mr Bad Guy was co-produced by Mercury and Reinhold Mack, who had worked with Queen since 1980’s The Game.
Before Mr Bad Guy, Mercury tested the solo waters with his 1984 single Love Kills, a high-energy track produced by disco legend Giorgio Moroder for the Metropolis film soundtrack. Its success encouraged him to continue experimenting independently.
For Mr Bad Guy, Mercury wrote every song himself and chose not to involve his Queen bandmates. Instead, he assembled a new team that included drummer Curt Cress, bassist Stephan Wissnet, guitarist Paul Vincent, and Fred Mandel, a keyboardist who had toured with Queen.
Munich’s nightlife heavily influenced the album’s tone. The city’s late-night pulse inspired upbeat tracks like “Living On My Own”, featuring Mercury’s dazzling vocal acrobatics and scat-inspired delivery, “I Was Born To Love You”, bursting with joy, and “Let’s Turn It On”, which channeled pure club energy.
Some songs, however, carried the unmistakable touch of Queen. The soaring “Made In Heaven” showcased Mercury’s signature theatrical balladry and was later revisited by the band for their 1995 posthumous album Made In Heaven. The poignant “There Must Be More To Life Than This”, which Mercury said was “about two people who are lonely,” was originally written during Hot Space sessions and even considered as a duet with Michael Jackson. A version with Jackson would eventually appear on Queen’s 2014 album Forever.
Freed from Queen’s structure, Mercury explored new musical textures throughout Mr Bad Guy. “Your Kind Of Lover” begins with a dramatic piano line before erupting into playful energy, while “My Love Is Dangerous” adds a reggae beat, and “Man Made Paradise” foreshadows his later operatic collaboration with Montserrat Caballé on “Barcelona”.
Perhaps the boldest track of all is “Mr Bad Guy” itself, featuring the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra. Mercury described it as a proudly over-the-top creation: “You can go through all the Queen albums and there isn’t one song that actually had a fully-fledged orchestra on it. I thought, ‘I’ll be the first one to do it.’ It’s quite outrageous. I just said, ‘Play all the notes you haven’t played in your life before,’ so they went completely crazy. And that’s the outcome. Very bombastic, very pompous, very me.”
Upon release, Mr Bad Guy reached No. 6 on the U.K. album charts and produced four singles — “I Was Born To Love You”, “Made In Heaven”, “Living On My Own”, and “Love Me Like There’s No Tomorrow”. When “Living On My Own” was remixed and re-released in 1993, two years after Mercury’s passing, it hit No. 1 in the U.K.
The album’s singles were accompanied by elaborate music videos, including “Made In Heaven”’s reinterpretation of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” and “Living On My Own”’s drag ball-inspired party footage filmed at Mercury’s 39th birthday celebration.
This 40th-anniversary reissue features a remixed version by Justin Shirley-Smith and Joshua J. Macrae, first heard in the 2019 Never Boring box set. “We went back to the original multi-track tapes,” said Shirley-Smith. “It’s a great collection of songs and Freddie’s vocal performance is absolutely extraordinary. The idea wasn’t to make it sound modern, but rather how it would have sounded then if they’d had better technology and more time. And of course, it’s a massive honor to work on anything Freddie did, and we always treat it with the utmost respect.”
For Mercury, Mr Bad Guy was both a creative release and a personal reflection. “I put my heart and soul into Mr Bad Guy and I think it’s a very natural album,” he once said. “It had some very moving ballads — things to do with sadness and pain, but at the same time there were some very frivolous and tongue-in-cheek songs, because that is my nature. I think the songs on that album reflect the state of my life, a diverse selection of moods and a whole spectrum of what my life was.”
The Mr Bad Guy 40th Anniversary Edition will be released December 5 via Hollywood Records in the U.S. and Canada and through Universal in other territories, available on 180g translucent green vinyl and as a picture disc LP exclusively via D2C.
You can now click here to pre-order in the Official Freddie Mercury Store, along with a new Mr Bad Guy Merchandise Range or click here to pre-save digitally.
