06-20-1985 – Mr Bad Guy – Rolling Stone (Issue 450)

by Tim Holmes

After the apocalypse, when the last rock & roll call is read up yonder, Saint Peter’s eyebrows will surely arch when honorable mention is finally made of the achievements of Freddie Mercury. Mercury, the only rock star with the panache to name himself after the Roman god of commerce and thievery, the man who compressed the whole rockopera concept into “Bohemian Rhapsody,” five-plus minutes of shrill doggerel and frantic bombast – and received the British Phonographic Society’s 1975 award for the best single of the previous twenty-five years for doing it – is probably the most critically unacceptable star in the major firmament. But that hasn’t stopped Freddie and Queen, the most anomalous of the megagroups, from selling over 80 million albums and singles worldwide.

On Mr. Bad Guy, Freddie Mercury’s first solo album, he puts his shamelessly angelic soprano to work on a group of swooping numbers that he describes as “love songs, things to do with sadness and torture and pain, but at the same time they’re frivolous and tongue in cheek.”

Cheek and overbite being Freddie’s operative mode, his trademark braggadocio and choirboy ebullience serve him well. The chutzpah of the title track is exaggerated by Mercury’s gleeful confession that he’s one mean mutha, after which he announces that “My Love Is Dangerous.” He’s not too proud to come forward as “Your Kind of Lover,” or too modest to admit he is capable of producing a “Man-Made Paradise.”

The tracks run the gamut from slick and exuberant Eurodisco to slick and exuberant ballads and existential musings (“There Must Be More to Life Than This”). The record, coproduced and engineered by longtime Queen producer Mack, is meticulously gimmick-heavy, though lighthearted.

Mr. Bad Guy is unlikely to win Freddie many new converts, but Queen fans will eat it up.