The disastrous flop of Freddie Mercury’s solo album
In 1985, Freddie Mercury became one of the most famous men in the world, where on July 13th, at exactly 18:41, Queen shuddered with the cheers of 70,000 fans coursing through their veins like an avalanche raining down from the heavens, and the rest was history.
Sometimes, when we look back at history, some proven facts don’t quite fit in with the narrative we’ve grown up believing, like how Martin Luther King and Anne Frank existed at the same time, or that only three months before giving what is widely accepted as the best performance of all time, how could Freddie Mercury have released such an atrocious solo album?
On April 29th, Mercury released Mr Bad Guy, where he threw out the rock and brought in dance and disco, and there’s a solid reason why he only ever released one solo album across his career: It wasn’t very bloody good.
Mercury finished the recording of all 11 songs while Queen were on a hiatus from recording, with the troubled star once explaining that he “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”. Still, it’d take him two years to pull the material together, as he was so creatively drained from his larger-than-life Queen persona.
The proof is in the pudding: On ‘I Was Born To Love You’, Mercury sounds like he could be subbed in for an over-eager voice actor in a promotional video for the aerobics class at the centre of The Substance. In ‘Foolin’ Around’, his band sounds like they’ve learnt what an instrument is two days before and are trying their very best to learn the right scales during studio time; little variation and over-repetition make for very stale disco.
In ‘Your Kind of Lover’, Mercury looks toward his other half to provide his life with meaning, as his vocals strain around the toxic conceit as he begs, “Add a little bit of meaning to my life / I wanna little bit of feeling / A little bit of sunshine to my life”.
It’s a good way to look at the project, where it’s hard to find either meaning or feeling. The songs come just as they are, happy-go-lucky, springy sonic skips with no backbone, and if this was Mercury, he was no more than a cardboard cut-out, soggy from being forgotten and left to wilt in the rain.
If one thing might’ve zapped some life into the dead thing, it could’ve been a collaboration with the King of Pop, Michael Jackson. For a short while, this was on the cards, with Mercury detailing three potential collaborative singles, but time was the enemy, and the pair of A-listers could never find a moment to connect and finish the tracks (at least, according to Mercury…but other sources say that the ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ singer felt uncomfortable with Jackson’s pet llama in the studio and pulled the offer).
Llamas aside, it goes without saying that the album sold poorly. It peaked at sixth in the UK album chart, which might deceptively give off the stink of success, but the guy was Freddie Mercury. It sold two million copies globally, but considering 1.9 billion people watched him tear the stage up at Live Aid, the number is absolutely woeful, and thank god, it’s not tarnished his legacy.
