Freddie Mercury’s ‘Mr Bad Guy’ Gets 40th Anniversary Vinyl Reissue in December

Freddie Mercury's debut solo album, Mr Bad Guy, will receive a reissue on 180-gram translucent green vinyl on December 5, marking its 40th anniversary. 

The album was initially released in April 1985. It was the Queen singer's first work outside the band he had co-founded 15 years earlier. The record climbed to Number 6 on the UK album charts and spawned four singles.

"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 at the time, as per the band's official website.

This new reissue includes a remix by Justin Shirley-Smith and Joshua J Macrae, who worked on Queen's sound for years. This mix first appeared on the 2019 Never Boring box set. The team returned to the original multi-track tapes from Munich's Musicland Studio.

"It's a great collection of songs and Freddie's vocal performance is absolutely extraordinary," Shirley-Smith said. "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."

Mercury recorded the album over several months with producer Reinhold Mack. He wrote all 11 tracks himself. His Queen bandmates weren't involved. Instead, he worked with drummer Curt Cress, bassist Stephan Wissnet, guitarist Paul Vincent, and Queen touring keyboard player Fred Mandel.

The work revealed a different side of the artist than Queen's arena rock sound. Songs like "Living On My Own" and "I Was Born To Love You" drew from the Munich club scene, pulsing with influences Mercury absorbed while recording there. "Living On My Own" hit Number 1 in the UK when re-released in a remixed version in 1993, two years after Mercury's death.

Hollywood Records will distribute the reissue in the United States and Canada. Universal handles all other territories. Pre-orders are now open.