Freddie Mercury’s debut solo album Mr Bad Guy to be reissued on green vinyl for 40th anniversary
The special edition will be released on December 5, 2025, on 180g translucent green vinyl. A picture disc LP will be available exclusively via D2C
By Callum Wells
Freddie Mercury’s debut solo album Mr Bad Guy is being reissued for its 40th anniversary.
The special edition will be released on December 5, 2025, on 180g translucent green vinyl. A picture disc LP will be available exclusively via D2C.
Originally released in April 1985, Mr Bad Guy was Mercury’s first album outside Queen. It combines pop, dance and theatrical style in tracks like ‘I Was Born To Love You’ and ‘Living On My Own’.
“You can go through all the Queen albums and there isn’t one song that actually had a fully-fledged orchestra on it,” Freddie Mercury said of the title track
“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.
Recorded at Munich’s Musicland Studio and co-produced with Reinhold Mack, Mercury wrote every song and worked with session musicians including drummer Curt Cress, bassist Stephan Wissnet, guitarist Paul Vincent and Queen touring keyboard player Fred Mandel.
“You can go through all the Queen albums and there isn’t one song that actually had a fully-fledged orchestra on it,” Mercury said of the title 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.”
The 40th anniversary edition features a remix by Justin Shirley-Smith and Joshua J Macrae, first heard on 2019’s Never Boring box set.
Mr Bad Guy 40th anniversary edition is out December 5 via Universal
“We went back to the original multi-track tapes,” Shirley-Smith said. “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.”
“I put my heart and soul into Mr Bad Guy and I think it’s a very natural album,” Mercury 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.”
Mr Bad Guy 40th anniversary edition is out December 5 via Universal.