Hand-written lyrics for apparently lost Freddie Mercury songs go 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.
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.
Lyrics to unknown songs permalink
There are plenty of lyrics which 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. For example, 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’ has a clear title underlined at the top of the page, and doesn’t seem to scan with ‘Mr Bad Guy’ if you sing the 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 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. Is it possible 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. No information is given as to what, if anything, is on these cassettes. 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’).
When composing a song, Freddie tended to come up with the music first before focusing on the lyrics later1, 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 permalink
Also in amongst the items in the collection are a couple of track listings, which look like long lists from which the final album running order could be chosen. 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)2. I guess we can now date the song 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 (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’ (the last two appear on a track listing that doesn’t appear in the collage which accompanies this blog post).
‘Killing Time’ is interesting: it’s pretty high up the list and has a ‘tick’ next to it. Does this mean a complete 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 project3.
Who plays what on Mr Bad Guy permalink
Finally, there is a fairly detailed listing of who plays what on the Mr Bad Guy tracks. A document entitled ‘Musicians’, and dated 14 February 1985 (only ten weeks before the album’s release on 29 April), notes who plays what instruments and on which tracks. 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 think this has been confirmed before now. 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’.
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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.
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 Freddie plays an arrangement alone on the piano, while vocalising the melody. ↩︎
A recording leaked online some years ago. ↩︎
As an example, on the Freddie Solo Collection box there were no ‘Man Made Paradise’ outtakes. This track is long known to have been worked on during the Works sessions, which I have always assumed was the reason for its exclusion from the Solo Collection CDs. (There is an unidentified version of the song used in the background during the accompanying documentary The Untold Story, and this may well be a snippet from the Queen version.) Similarly, the Freddie box contains no demos of ‘Africa by Night’, which started as a later Freddie solo song but ended up as ‘All God’s People’ on Queen’s Innuendo (1991). ↩︎