LISTEN: Freddie Mercury’s solo album was his ultimate liberation & his peak queer brilliance
In 1985, Mercury released 'Mr. Bad Guy,' which saw the rock legend embracing openness & fluidity, especially when it came to sexuality and romance.
Mark
Freddie Mercury is synonymous with Queen, and Queen is synonymous with Freddie Mercury, the late frontman whose talent and charisma shone so bright he turned four British lads into rock gods.
And while you surely know all of the singer-songwriter’s biggest hits were with the band—from the anthemic “We Will Rock You” to the operatic “Bohemian Rhapsody”—folks often forget that, in 1985, Mercury released Mr. Bad Guy, his first and only record as the sole credited artist.
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Over a decade into his career with Queen, Mercury had famously pushed the group into new sonic territory, effectively blurring the lines behind rock, pop, and theater. However, there were still places his bandmates weren’t willing to go: “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,” he once said of his desire to go solo.
With Mr. Bad Guy, the bottom line didn’t have to be “rock ‘n’ roll,” so he explored influences from other genres dear to his heart like disco, dance music, and pop. (Apparently, the album was at one point meant to feature a number of duets with Michael Jackson, but the booked & busy pair couldn’t find the time.)
Ever the perfectionist when it came to his craft, Mercury wrote and sang each of the album’s 11 tracks himself, also accompanying on piano & synthesizer, arranging the orchestrations, and collaborating with the sound engineers. Yes, he was overextending himself, but for once he could share a body of work that was his vision, undiluted.
So, with the ability to call all the shots, did Mercury feel more emboldened to channel queerness into his work? Well, yes and no. Let’s not forget how overtly gay some of his work was with Queen in the first place. (Hello, “Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy”???)
But Mr. Bad Guy is notable in the way it embraces a sense of openness and liberation, especially when it comes to sexuality and romance.
Lyrically, there’s a sort of devil-may-care approach to pronouns that might leave you wondering who—man or woman—he’s swooning over from song-to-song. For example, in “Foolin’ Around” he beckons to a beautiful “foxy lady,” while in the very next track “Your Kind Of Lover” he croons, “I wanna boogie down with you bro!”
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Few songs deliver a more powerful and joyous energy as Queen’s hit “Don’t Stop Me Now.”
Then there’s lead single “I Was Born To Love You,” which is as romantic as they come, despite keeping things fairly gender agnostic, though its bombastic video (seen above) depicts a bare-chested Mercury dancing a beautifully adorned home with a gorgeous woman.
Meanwhile, it’s some of the album’s other visuals that feel more overtly queer. The stunning clip for epic power ballad “Made In Heaven” looks like it could be a cut scene from Flash Gordon (the sci-fi comic adaptation for which Queen composed the music), featuring Mercury as a god-like ruler lording over bar bodies—men’s and women’s—clamoring just to get close to him.
And with its chugging bass and sing-a-long chorus, single “Living On My Own” feels designed to get people out on the dance floor, which is exactly what they do in the video depicting a decadent, unmistakably queer black-and-white party filled with gays, trans women, and drag queens.
In fact, footage for was actually filmed at Mercury’s own 39th birthday party in Munich at the famed Old Mrs. Henderson nightclub, a former hot spot for the LGBTQ+ community. Due to its depiction of so-called debauchery and its inclusion of obviously queer figures, the video was banned from playing on The BBC for a number of years.
Though Mercury was never publicly forthcoming about defining his sexuality, one can see how Mr. Bad Guy gave him the opportunity to let his true self shine through—which is to say, it wasn’t a record so concerned with labels as it was with inviting everyone into his world of laissez-faire love and pleasure.
Mr. Bad Guy did receive some critical acclaim, and enjoyed radio play especially in Europe, but it was only a few short months after its release that Queen mounted their legendary, all-time great performance at the Live Aid benefit concert in London, which effectively launched the band into a whole new stratosphere of fame.
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Queen certainly delivered on their promise that “We Will Rock You.”
One imagines that show’s success prompted Mercury to double-down on his work with the band, putting any ambitions to continue a solo career on the back-burner. But at least we have Mr. Bad Guy so that Freddie fanatics and Queen completists have the opportunity to know what raw, unfiltered Mercury sounds like.
And now, to celebrate the album’s 40th anniversary, Universal is reissuing an exclusive pressing of Mr Bad Guy on 180g translucent green vinyl, which features a mix from Justin Shirley-Smith and Joshua J Macrae, Queen’s longtime sound team.
“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,” says Shirley-Smith in a press statement. “And of course, it’s a massive honor to work on anything Freddie did, and we always treat it with the utmost respect.”
Releasing December 5, Mr Bad Guy – 40th Anniversary Special Edition Vinyl Reissue is now available for pre-order via the official FreddieMercury.com site.
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