Freddie Mercury - Mr. Bad Guy

Freddie Mercury — Mr. Bad Guy 

40th Anniversary Limited Edition 180-gram translucent green LP reissue

"Mr. Bad Guy? That's me!" — Freddy Mercury

Originally released end of April 1985, Mr. Bad Guy was Mercury's first album away from the group he had co-founded 15 years before and helped steer to staggering artistic and commercial heights. 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 spectacular 180-gram translucent green vinyl on December 5.

"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 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.

Mr Bad Guy was recorded over a period of several months at Munich's Musicland Studio, where Queen had made their most recent albums. It 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.

Mr Bad Guy found him shouldering all the songwriting duties for the album, purposefully avoiding asking his Queen bandmates to appear on the album. He enlisted a team of crack musicians, including drummer Curt Cress, bassist Stephan Wissnet, guitarist Paul Vincent and Queen touring keyboard player Fred Mandel.

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 box set. 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.

 

Side A

1. Let's Turn It On

2. Made in Heaven

3. I Was Born to Love You

4. Foolin' Around

5. Your Kind of Lover

Side B

1. Mr. Bad Guy

2. Man Made Paradise

3. There Must Be More to Life Than This

4. Living on My Own

5. My Love Is Dangerous

6. Love Me Like There's No Tomorrow

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