By 1978, Queen were back to cutting whatever records they wanted.
They’d hit a slight creative wobble the previous year. Just as The Rolling Stones and The Who toughened their sound for Some Girls and Who Are You at the time, punk’s insurrectionary flashbang pulled the rug from Queen’s unchallenged rock royalty, posing a pang of artistic relevancy as their ornate, chamber pop ambitions turned deathly uncool overnight. Out went A Day at the Races’ symphonic bluster, in came News of the World’s stripped-down arena attack.
Such a creative detour wouldn’t last long, however. While borrowing new wave synths for much of the 1980s, Queen rolled their sleeves up and got back to the business of penning musical hall stomp rock and Broadway chant-along for 1978’s Jazz. Albeit less progressive than their ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ heyday, Queen would eagerly jump back into the realm of cabaret crowd interaction, Jazz offering the canonical ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ as its second single.
It was Jazz’s first single, which raised eyebrows at the time. Backed with the double A-side ‘Bicycle Race’, ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ saw guitarist Brian May pen an unabashed appreciation of the female form’s curvier end of the spectrum and little else, racing around a hard rock strutter with a lyrically single-minded pursuit of celebrating giant girls’ arses. Standing as a piece of cheeky fun when first dropped in October 1978, what could have flown by with little fanfare in the charts would ensure real hot water when inspiring Jazz’s memorable insert.
“I am very proud of that song, but as part of the album packaging, we had this nude bicycle race for a photo session, and it all seemed quite innocent and fun at the time,” May reflected to The Times in 2017. “Now I wouldn’t think that was amusing. Attitudes have changed to lots of things.”
As part of ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ marketing campaign, 65 naked women were corralled in South West London to ride rented bikes from Halford Cycles and race around Wimbledon Stadium, video footage used for ‘Bicycle Race’s promo material, and a giant photo still slipped in to Jazz as a sizeable poster to illustrate the lead co-single’s amorous theme.
While turning a few heads in the UK, such artwork caused American distributors more headaches; the poster was forbidden in early US pressings, forcing second issues to include an order form for the nude bike fold-out at the Elektra label’s behest.
Is it sexist? The poster’s no doubt objectifying, reducing the women involved down to their bodies and nothing more for the eager consumption of a hormonal teen male fascination. Yet, while it’d be too charitable to suggest it was intentional, there’s a quaint sex positivity behind ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ admiration for the female body in all its sizes, a far cry from the pressures and hideous physical scrutiny meted out on women in the contemporary, social media age.
Politics was never something Queen keenly waded into, offering a theatrical escape that their apolitical fans clung to, but ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ was the closest the hard rock stalwarts waded into witting controversy in their work, wresting a slice of camp fun both strangely innocent and wincingly archaic all at the same time.
