The 40th anniversary of legendary QUEEN<\/b> singer Freddie Mercury<\/b>‘s majestic debut solo album, “Mr Bad Guy”<\/b>, is being celebrated with a lavish new vinyl reissue.<\/p>\n
Originally released at the end of April 1985, “Mr Bad Guy”<\/b> was Mercury<\/b>‘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<\/b>‘s chameleonic, arena-sized music for a set of songs that combined his unique songwriting with a driving, dance and pop-inspired sound.<\/p>\n
Forty years after it first came out, “Mr Bad Guy”<\/b> will be reissued on spectacular 180g translucent green vinyl on December 5 as well as picture disc LP exclusively via D2C.<\/p>\n
“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<\/b>,” said Mercury<\/b> of the album at the time.<\/p>\n
“Mr Bad Guy”<\/b> showed a very different side to the singer, one that had been hinted at a few years earlier on QUEEN<\/b>‘s more dance-oriented “Hot Space”<\/b> album. It was partly a love letter to the club scene he was immersed in but also a chance for Freddie<\/b> to reveal more of himself than he ever had before.<\/p>\n
“Mr Bad Guy”<\/b> was recorded over a period of several months at Munich’s Musicland Studio<\/b>, where QUEEN<\/b> had made their most recent albums. It was co-produced by Mercury<\/b> and Reinhold Mack<\/b>, who had worked with QUEEN<\/b> since 1980’s hugely successful “The Game”<\/b> album.<\/p>\n
The singer had tested the waters for a solo career with his 1984 single “Love Kills”<\/b>, a pulsing dance track produced by disco legend Giorgio Moroder<\/b> which had appeared on the soundtrack for a restored version of iconic silent movie “Metropolis”<\/b>. “Love Kills”<\/b>‘s success would embolden Mercury<\/b> to travel even further down that avenue.<\/p>\n
“Mr Bad Guy”<\/b> found him shouldering all the songwriting duties for the album, purposefully avoiding asking his QUEEN<\/b> bandmates to appear on the album. He enlisted a team of crack musicians, including drummer Curt Cress<\/b>, bassist Stephan Wissnet<\/b>, guitarist Paul Vincent<\/b> and QUEEN<\/b> touring keyboard player Fred Mandel<\/b>.<\/p>\n
“Mr Bad Guy”<\/b> was partly shaped by Munich. When he wasn’t in the studio, or spending time with Mack<\/b> and his family, the singer could be found soaking up the German city’s nightlife. The wild heartbeat of its bars and clubs fed into songs such as the exhilarating “Living On My Own”<\/b>, with its incredible, acrobatic vocal performance and scat-inspired singing, “I Was Born To Love You”<\/b>‘s euphoric rush, and the pulsing, funky “Let’s Turn It On”<\/b>.<\/p>\n
A handful of the album’s songs wouldn’t have sounded out of place on a QUEEN<\/b> record. The soaring “Made In Heaven”<\/b> showcases Mercury<\/b> as the epic balladeer, and would be re-worked by the band themselves for 1995’s posthumous “Made In Heaven”<\/b> album. The yearning “There Must Be More To Life Than This”<\/b> (“About two people who are lonely,” according to the singer) had actually been written for “Hot Space”<\/b>, and was even considered as a duet with Michael Jackson<\/b> at one point. A version featuring Jackson<\/b> would later emerge on QUEEN<\/b>‘s “Forever”<\/b> album released in November 2014.<\/p>\n
But the freedom of being away from the QUEEN<\/b> mothership allowed him to experiment musically. The dramatic, piano-led opening of “Your Kind Of Lover”<\/b> swiftly erupts into playful energy, “My Love Is Dangerous”<\/b> is unexpectedly built on a reggae beat, and Mercury’s remarkable operatic vocals on “Man Made Paradise”<\/b> point the way to his collaboration with Montserrat Caball\u00e9<\/b> on “Barcelona”<\/b> a few years later.<\/p>\n
Most outrageous of all is the song “Mr Bad Guy”<\/b> itself, which features the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra<\/b> backing Mercury<\/b> as he gleefully revels in his reputation for devilry.<\/p>\n
“You can go through all the QUEEN<\/b> albums and there isn’t one song that actually had a fully-fledged orchestra on it,” Mercury<\/b> said proudly of the latter track. “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.”<\/p>\n
Originally released in April 1985, “Mr Bad Guy”<\/b> reached Number 6 in the U.K. album charts and produced four singles in “I Was Born To Love You”<\/b>, “Made In Heaven”<\/b>, “Living On My Own” <\/b> (which reached Number 1 in the U.K. 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”<\/b>.<\/p>\n
The singles were accompanied by series of characteristically flamboyant promo videos, including “Made In Heaven”<\/b>‘s recreation of scenes from Igor Stravinsky<\/b>‘s “The Rite Of Spring” and “Dante’s Inferno” shot at a replica of the Royal Opera House stage in a North London warehouse and “Living On My Own”<\/b>‘s OTT drag ball-themed video, filmed at the singer’s 39th birthday party.<\/p>\n
The new translucent green vinyl reissue features a mix of the album by QUEEN<\/b>‘s longtime sound team of Justin Shirley-Smith<\/b> and Joshua J Macrae<\/b>, which originally appeared on 2019’s “Never Boring”<\/b> box set. The new mix stays true to Freddie<\/b>‘s original vision but has the benefits of technology and resources that were not available in the 1980s.<\/p>\n
“We went back to the original multi-track tapes,” says Shirley-Smith<\/b>. “It’s a great collection of songs and Freddie<\/b>‘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 honor to work on anything Freddie<\/b> did, and we always treat it with the utmost respect.”<\/p>\n
Forty years on, “Mr Bad Guy”<\/b> remains a pivotal album for Freddie Mercury<\/b>. It allowed him to flex his creative muscles and seek out new sounds and styles, ensuring he returned to QUEEN<\/b> re-energized and revitalized.<\/p>\n
“I put my heart and soul into ‘Mr Bad Guy’<\/b> and I think it’s a very natural album,” said Mercury<\/b>. “It had some very moving ballads \u2014 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.”<\/p>\n
Celebrating its 40th anniversary, “Mr Bad Guy” is reissued on 180g translucent green vinyl on December 5, via Hollywood Records<\/b> in the U.S. and Canada and via Universal<\/b> for all other territories, as well as on picture disc LP exclusively via D2C.<\/p>\n
“Mr Bad Guy”<\/b> 40th-anniversary special edition vinyl reissue:<\/p>\n
Side One<\/p>\n
01. Let’s Turn It On<\/b>
02. Made In Heaven<\/b>
03. I Was Born To Love You<\/b>
04. Foolin’ Around<\/b>
05. Your Kind Of Lover<\/b><\/p>\n
Side Two<\/p>\n
01. Mr. Bad Guy<\/b>
02. Man Made Paradise<\/b>
03. There Must Be More To Life Than This<\/b>
04. Living On My Own<\/b>
05. My Love Is Dangerous<\/b>
06. Love Me Like There’s No Tomorrow<\/b><\/p>\n
All songs written and composed by Freddie Mercury<\/b><\/p>\n
Produced by Freddie Mercury<\/b>, Mack<\/b>, Justin Shirley-Smith<\/b> and Joshua J Macrae<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The 40th anniversary of legendary QUEEN singer Freddie Mercury‘s majestic debut solo album, “Mr Bad Guy”, is being…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":369471,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[171,975,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-369470","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115526153369619824","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369470\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/369471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}