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Recorded between Queen commitments, and released three months before Live Aid, Freddie Mercury's uneven 1985 debut solo album arrived to mostly lukewarm reviews and only modest commercial success. Four decades later, this new deluxe vinyl repressing of the 2019 remastered mix does not make a case for Lost Classic status, but it is a pleasing reminder that even Mercury in flippant, throwaway, disco-jazz cabaret mode could still muster flashes of Olympian pop-rock genius.
Mercury claimed at the time that he made Mr. Bad Guy to explore musical territory unavailable to his hard-rocking day-job band, but with hindsight, the apple did not fall too far from the tree. Aside from dialling down the Wagnerian guitar solos, the sonic palette here inevitably recalls Queen in their slicker 1980s phase, notably their embrace of synth-pop, disco and funk on Hot Space (1982) and The Works (1984). This album was recorded at the same fabled Musicland studio in Munich, with German producer-engineer Reinhold Mack again at the controls.
Indeed, some of the stronger tracks here started life as Queen songs, notably There Must Be More to Life Than This, a lush, surging, Beatle-ish orchestral weepie initially recorded as a Michael Jackson duet and earmarked for Hot Space. Sources vary about why this stellar version was shelved, but some claim Mercury objected to Jackson bringing his llama into the studio. Decades later, after much legal wrangling, the original duet version finally surfaced on the 2014 compilation Queen Forever.
Several other Mr. Bad Guy tracks were also later reincarnated as Queen releases. After all, this album was almost titled Made in Heaven, after the operatic, stacked-vocal power ballad that the rest of the band later reworked for their final posthumous Freddie-voiced collection, also named Made in Heaven. Another stand-out cut, I Was Born to Love You, a galloping romantic melodrama couched in Radio Gaga-tinged synthesizer throbs, was rebooted and recycled on the same album.
The weak points of Mr. Bad Guy remain: thin songwriting, anodyne arrangements, too much frivolous filler like Foolin' Around and Let's Turn it On, even an ill-advised stab at reggae on My Love is Dangerous, which thankfully stops short of going full audio blackface in Sting mode.
But the winking nods to Munich's hi-NRG gay clubs, the majestically baroque excess of using a full orchestra on the title track, the infectiously bouncy future club banger Living On My Own, plus rich confections like Man Made Paradise, with its Queen-lite guitar ejaculations and exquisitely intertwined vocals, are all teasing hints of the great album this might have been with a few more full-blooded anthems and tighter quality control.
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