The reason Freddie Mercury was jealous of Elton John: “I’m a greedy bitch”
When Freddie Mercury created Mr Bad Guy in the mid-1980s, he realised he was “a man of extremes”.
At this point in time, Mercury had become slightly disillusioned with Queen, wanting more than anything to spread his wings and explore something that wasn’t just solely focused on the core principles of rock ‘n’ roll. As he later said, “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.”
With Reinhold Mack, Mercury was able to create material that hinged more heavily on dance and disco, with messages and themes that weren’t anything other than what Mercury had experienced at the time. People might have thought that his solo record would go in a different direction and pander to specific audiences or commercial tropes, but ultimately, Mercury wasn’t influenced by anything other than what he wanted to do, and it was as simple as that.
As such, part of this new venture meant getting involved with almost every aspect, from vocal performances to the instruments and arrangements. This hands-on approach also meant that the record was filled with a diverse display of genres and styles, each taking on different moods and atmospheres to reflect all of the emotions that the singer was feeling at the time.
Mercury only really learned of the extent of this after its release. Many of the singer’s best songs in Queen are the ones that are more emotional and intimate, like ‘Love of My Life’ and ‘Somebody to Love’, and this is something that he realised he’d carried over into Mr Bad Guy, too, making him wonder if he might have been one of the more “tragic” figures in music.
“My songs are all under the label ‘emotion’,” Mercury said in 1985. “It’s emotion and feeling. Because I have gone through all that so I’m encompassing. So I’m gathering back research, which is my own and then putting them into songs.”
He went on, “I’d love to write songs about something completely different, but they all seem to end up in a very emotional and tragic way. Maybe I’m a very tragic person. I don’t know why, but there’s an element of humour at the end. I’m a very loving person, you know.”
Many of these personal afflictions can be heard across songs like ‘Made in Heaven’ and ‘There Must Be More To Life Than This’, showing a more open and raw version of Mercury that revealed everything from his personal insecurities to his simpler hopes and needs. While that exposed him to a different kind of vulnerability, the biggest challenge with most of the songs was writing the actual lyrics – something that Mercury struggled with on his own when he didn’t have anyone else to explore ideas with.
However, this mainly stemmed from wanting to take everything on himself, something that Mercury had wanted to do, despite these issues. Or, more accurately, despite it making him grow jealous of other major stars, like Elton John.
“I hate writing lyrics,” he admitted. “I wish somebody else could do it. I wish I had a Bernie Taupin. But I’m not like that. I like to do it all myself, I’m a greedy bitch.”
The project might have been easier had Mercury had a dedicated songwriting partner, but doing things himself also made the record more revealing when it came to learning the man behind the magic. As he said himself, he’s a “man of extremes”, which is the best part of the record when listening to it from start to finish. It’s a glimpse into all the different versions of Mercury, “the whole spectrum”, as he put it, of his life and how he changed every day.
