Freddie Mercury’s debut solo album, Mr Bad Guy, is being reissued in celebration of its 40th anniversary.
The album will be released Dec. 5 on 180 gram translucent green vinyl featuring a 2019 mix by Queen’s longtime sound team, Justin Shirley-Smith and Joshua J. Macrae. The mix originally appeared on the Mercury box set Never Boring. The album will also be reissued on picture disc.
“We went back to the original multi-track tapes,” Shirley-Smith says. “It’s a great collection of songs and Freddie’s vocal performance is absolutely extraordinary.”
He adds, “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 did, and we always treat it with the utmost respect.”
Originally released in April 1985 during a Queen hiatus, Mr Bad Guy was made up of 11 songs written by Mercury, featuring more of a dance-pop sound than the music he recorded with Queen.
“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 at the time.
Although not a hit in America, the album hit #6 in the U.K. The lead single, “I Was Born to Love You,” was later reworked by Queen after Mercury’s 1991 death and appeared on their 1995 album Made in Heaven, which was their 15th and final studio album.
Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
