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Hand-written lyrics for lost Freddie Mercury songs up for auction

A whole host of working lyrics and notes from the sessions which produced Freddie’s 1985 solo album Mr Bad Guy are available to bid on.

Posted by Jamie on (updated .

An auction of Freddie Mercury-related items owned by Reinhold Mack, who co-produced Freddie’s 1985 album Mr Bad Guy, is currently under way. There are a decent number of lots containing hand-written lyrics, some for apparently lost songs, including two notebooks with starting prices of £7,500 and £5,000.

A collage of hand-written lyrics and other documents from an auction of materials related to Freddie Mercury’s 1985 album ‘Mr Bad Guy’. Some lyrics appear to be for previously unknown songs.
A collage of hand-written lyrics and other documents from an auction of materials relating to the recording sessions for Freddie Mercury’s 1985 album Mr Bad Guy. Some lyrics appear to be for songs hitherto unknown to fans, such as ‘Tripping Love’ and ‘I Can’t Sleep at Nights’. (Source images: Propstore Auction)

Lyrics to unknown songs

There are plenty of lyrics that I can’t attribute to existing songs, including a few with a working title at the top of the page. Such named songs include ‘Tripping Love’, ‘I Can’t Sleep at Nights’, ‘Don’t Give Up’ and ‘The River of Lasting Love[?s]’. These could in theory be early versions of other songs. At first glance, it’s tempting to flag ‘Tripping Love’ as an early version of ‘Mr Bad Guy’, as it includes the line ‘I’m walking rainbows in the sky’, similar to ‘Let’s go chasing rainbows in the sky’ from the album’s title track; and the lyrics on the opposing page certainly are for an early or alternative version of ‘Mr Bad Guy’. However, ‘Tripping Love’, underlined at the top of the page, is clearly marked as the song’s title, and the lyrics don’t scan with ‘Mr Bad Guy’ if you sing the familiar melody in your head. Perhaps it’s a track being written in parallel with ‘Mr Bad Guy’ and the lines about rainbows were being tried out in both.

The Solo Collection (2000) was about as comprehensive as it was possible to be in terms of presenting available Freddie-related outtakes and alternative versions, so we have to assume no demos of these mystery tracks are in the official archive. Could some demos exist as home recordings? Mary Austin, Freddie’s longtime close personal friend to whom he left half of his estate, notes in her recent book Freddie Mercury: A Life in Lyrics (2026, HarperCollins) that a number of cassette tapes, ‘the kind Freddie had used to record himself when he was writing’, were found in his piano stool in 2023 while readying his possessions for auction1. No information is given as to what, if anything, is on these cassettes. (There does exist a leaked home demo of unreleased Mr Bad Guy track ‘New York’).

When composing a song, Freddie tended to come up with the music first before focusing on the lyrics later2, so I have to imagine melodies and chords would have existed for these song drafts, even if only in Freddie’s head. It goes without saying that it would be nice to hear any demo recordings he made of them.

Interesting track listings

Two listings of tracks worked on during the sessions for Freddie Mercury’s 1985 album ‘Mr Bad Guy’.
A couple of track listings for Mr Bad Guy. The one on the right resembles an album running order, and has newer track names (‘Let’s Turn It On’ as opposed to ‘Let’s Get It On’, and ‘Fooling Around’ instead of ‘Fooling Around With Me’). (Source images: Propstore Auction)

Also in amongst the items in the collection are a couple of track listings. One (on the right in the image above) is shorter and divided in the middle with a row of ‘X’s, suggesting a two-sided album running order. Besides tracks which ended up on the album or as B-sides, there are demos which appeared in the Freddie Solo Collection box: ‘Money Can’t Buy Happiness’, ‘Gazelle’ and ‘God is Heavy’. ‘You Are The Only One’ is noted in Queen: Complete Works (Georg Purvis, updated edition, 2018, Titan Books) as being from the Kind of Magic sessions (1985–6)3. I guess we can now say the song started life a bit earlier. ‘Whipping Boy’ may be a Queen track started during the Hot Space sessions in 1981–2 (Purvis). ‘Piece of My Heart’ will be what became ‘Let Me Live’ on Queen’s Made In Heaven (released 1995). ‘Killing Time’ may be a Freddie version of Queen drummer Roger Taylor’s solo track of the same name from Strange Frontier (1984). I have nae idea about ‘Press On (Presto)’, ‘New Piano Song’, ‘One Night Stand’, ‘A Desperate Man’, ‘Make it On My Own’ and ‘Flesh is on the Bone’.

‘Killing Time’ is interesting: it appears in both lists, with a tick next to it in the first, and a question mark in the second4. Judging from the track names, the second listing is from a later date, suggesting the track was in the running for inclusion on the album for at least some period of time. Does this mean a complete Freddie solo version exists? I don’t know, but it would be amazing to hear. Freddie did provide backing vocals on Roger’s version (Purvis) – check out the bit from 3:11. If this song was also worked on by Queen during sessions for The Works, it could well turn up on any future Works box set. There was a lot of cross-pollination between Freddie, Roger and Queen at the time, and any interesting outtakes or alternative versions would likely be reserved for a Queen archival project5.

Who plays what on Mr Bad Guy

Three sheets of paper detailing who played what instruments on Freddie Mercury’s ‘Mr Bad Guy’ album.
Details of who played what instruments on Mr Bad Guy. (Source images: Propstore Auction)

Finally, there is a listing of who plays what on the Mr Bad Guy tracks, giving us much more information than the album liner notes do. The three-page document, entitled ‘Musicians’ and dated 14 February 1985 (ten weeks before the album’s release on 29 April), describes who plays what instruments and on which tracks6. Roger Taylor is down as having played drums on ‘Man Made Paradise’, ‘Made in Heaven’ and ‘There Must Be More To Life Than This’, as well as drum fills on ‘Let’s Turn It On’. I don’t believe this has been confirmed before now (Roger mentions in the The Great Pretender documentary (2012) that he played on the album, without specifying in what capacity, only mentioning Freddie asking him to come to Munich to add some backing vocals). The drummer credited in the liner notes, Curt Cress, is listed under ‘Love Me Like There’s No Tomorrow’, ‘Mr Bad Guy’, ‘She Blows Hot and Cold’ and ‘My Love is Dangerous’, as well as for drum fills on ‘Your Kind of Lover’. It’s of course entirely possible that, like Brian May’s contribution to ‘She Blows Hot and Cold’, Roger’s parts were subsequently replaced by the musician who appears in the official credits7.

Random tidbits

  • A random factoid known to the more dedicated of fans is that Freddie was approached to audition for a part in Puccini’s opera La bohème opposite Linda Ronstadt. The offer letter is in the auction and dated 13 July 1984. It notes, in a rather condescending manner: ‘The role of Rodolfo is very difficult vocally. I have enclosed a selection of the score that we will be hearing for the audition. If Mr. Mercury is interested we would like him to sing for the director in early August. Please let us know as soon as possible.’ There are a few notes hand-written on the score in all caps, the tone of which is quite arsey: ‘Sing only these lyrics, not others’; ‘1. Do not sing in another key’; ‘2. Sing high notes in full voice, not falsetto’ (with the ‘not’ double-underlined). Freddie was taken aback at being approached, and wasn’t interested, finding the prospect of singing opera for six or seven nights a week unappealing (‘I’d be bored to death’)8.
  • A printed draft of album credits ends ‘This album is dedicated to all cat lovers[.] Fuck the rest of you cunts..Freddie Mercury’. The eventual dedication was the slightly tamer ‘This album is dedicated to my cat Jerry – also Tom, Oscar and Tiffany, and all the cat lovers across the universe – screw everybody else.’ Another draft has ‘fuck everybody else’ (and can be seen in the collage at the top of this post).

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All said, for a Queen and Freddie geek like myself, this is an interesting cache of documents! Don’t think I can afford to bid on any of them, unfortunately.

Footnotes

  1. I don’t believe they were included in the 2023 Sotheby’s auction (the Sotheby’s website returns nothing if you search the Freddie auction results for ‘cassette’). ↩︎

  2. To quote from Freddie Mercury: a life, in his own words (a quasi-autobiography compiled and edited by Greg Brooks and Simon Lupton, second edition, 2019): ‘My strongest point is melody content. I concentrate on that first, then the song structure, then the words come after. The structure of the melody comes easy to me, it’s the lyrical content that I find difficult. I have to work on that part of it. I sometimes feel that my melodies are so much stronger than my lyrics, that the lyrics bring them down. I hate writing lyrics. I wish somebody else could do it. I wish I had a Bernie Taupin. Mind you, I like to do it all myself. I’m a greedy bitch.’ (Part of this quote is from a 1985 interview with David Wigg.) An example of his typical way of working can be heard in this early home demo of the Queen song ‘Keep Passing the Open Windows’, where he plays an arrangement alone on the piano, while vocalising the melody. ↩︎

  3. A recording leaked online some years ago. ↩︎

  4. Other tracks have a ‘D’ next to them. Does this perhaps mean ‘Done’? ↩︎

  5. As an example, on the Freddie Solo Collection box there were no ‘Man Made Paradise’ outtakes. The song started as a Queen track during the Hot Space sessions, and was later considered for The Works (released 1984) (Purvis). I have always assumed its origin as a Queen track was the reason for its exclusion from the Solo Collection CDs. (An unidentified version of the song appears in the soundtrack of Solo Collection documentary The Untold Story, and it’s possible this is a snippet from a Queen version.) Similarly demonstrating that Queen takes precedence, the boxset contains no demos of ‘Africa by Night’, which started as Freddie solo song post-Mr Bad Guy but ended up as ‘All God’s People’ on Innuendo (released 1991). ↩︎

  6. The named musicians, in order of appearance in the document, are: Reinhold Mack on LinnDrum; Stephan Wissnet on bass, guitar, Fairlight, Kurzweil and ‘Sequ.’ (sequenced?) bass; Freddie on piano, Kurzweil, ‘trig bass’ and Jupiter-8; Curt Cress and Roger Taylor on drums; Jo Burt on fretless bass; Paul Vincent and Brian May on guitar (Brian on ‘She Blows Hot and Cold’ only; replaced by Paul Vincent on the released album); Fred Mandel on piano, Jupiter-8 and guitar; and the Munich Symphonic Orchestra conducted by Rainer Pietsch. ↩︎

  7. The drumming on the three tracks Roger is noted as playing on certainly sounds like Roger (especially on ‘Man Made Paradise’ and ‘There Must Be More To Life Than This’, where you can hear his trademark technique of briefly opening the hi-hat as he hits the snare on the backbeat), but it may have been a case of Freddie directing Curt Cress to play in Roger’s style, just as he got Paul Vincent to play like Brian May on ‘She Blows Hot and Cold’ (according to the notes that accompanied The Solo Collection). ↩︎

  8. Freddie Mercury: a life, in his own words (Brooks and Lupton). ↩︎