Freddie Mercury’s solo album, Mr. Bad Guy, will be re-released as a special edition vinyl to celebrate its fortieth anniversary.
Mr. Bad Guy, originally released in 1985, will be reissued on 180g translucent green vinyl, with an exclusive picture disc LP available. The album marked Mercury‘s first effort away from Queen and offered the veteran frontman a chance to explore “musical territories” he wasn’t able to when with the band. Mercury said of Mr. Bad Guy at the time of its release: “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’s solo album would utilise the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra on the title track, a song which Mercury once called “outrageous”. It, along with the rest of the album’s chart-appearing singles, will be part of the reissue set to be released on December 5.
Speaking of the album at the time of its release, Mercury said Mr. Bad Guy was his chance to be “very bombastic” with the musical choices. Included on the title track is an orchestra, which Mercury noted was never a feature of Queen’s work. He said: “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.”
Queen’s longtime sound team, Justin Shirley-Smith and Joshua J Macrae, remastered the album for this upcoming release, which was described by Shirley-Smith as a “great collection of songs” that are made “absolutely extraordinary” by Mercury’s vocals.
Shirley-Smith said: “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.”
Mercury himself was thrilled by the record, and called it a “very natural album” that he had put his “heart and soul into”. He said: “I put my heart and soul into Mr Bad Guy and I think it’s a very natural album.
“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.”
