When Queen released their music video for “Bicycle Race”, the lead single and double A-side alongside “Fat Bottomed Girls” from Jazz, the band and crew certainly found a way to, er, catch the eye of the general public. In true rock ‘n’ roll fashion, Queen found a way to ruffle feathers and shock pearl-clutchers by employing 65 women, all models, to ride bicycles around a racetrack completely nude.
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As is so often the case with racy moves in the rock world, Queen probably lost just as many fans as they gained for the cheeky video. Their monetary budget, however, might have taken a bigger hit than they initially anticipated.
Queen Reportedly Had To Fulfill This Rental Request
The music video for “Bicycle Race”, one of two A-side singles from the band’s seventh studio album, Jazz (1978), featured footage of Queen performing the song on a stage complete with flashy, colorful lights. Additionally, in between shots of Freddie Mercury swinging his mic stand or Brian May shredding a guitar solo, the video featured clips of completely nude women riding bicycles around a train track. Sometimes, the women are sitting in one spot, laughing, pointing to things outside of the frame, or ringing their bicycle bells.
Reportedly, the band rented all 65 bicycles from Halfords. But when the bike shop learned what the band was using the bikes for, Halfords supposedly demanded the crew buy the bikes—or, at the very least, the saddles, where the models sat—outright. Of all the details, this one might be the shadiest. But it’s certainly not an unreasonable question to imagine a bicycle shop making.
The Rock Band Gained New Fans and Lost Some Others
At face value, Queen’s 1978 track “Bicycle Race” seems like a whimsical, carefree, fun excuse to try on different musical ideas. Some parts of the song are dramatic and lilting. Others are aggressive and tight. Rumours have been circulating since the late 70s about the possibility that “Bicycle Race” was about Freddie Mercury’s bisexuality. Given that the edgier part of the song features a back-and-forth between Mercury and the band about black-and-white, dualistic thinking, the theory isn’t totally unfounded.
Even Brian May has suggested that sex was never too far away from any given Queen song. “We lost some of our audience with [the “Bicycle Race” music video]. ‘How could you do it? It doesn’t go with your spiritual side.’ But my answer is that the physical side is as much a part of a person as the spiritual or intellectual side. It’s fun. I’ll make no apologies. All music skirts around sex, sometimes very directly. Ours doesn’t. In our music, sex is either implied or referred to semi-jokingly, but it’s always there,” he recalled in Queen: Uncensored On the Record.
According to drummer Roger Taylor, Mercury’s inspiration for “Bicycle Race” was far more literal. The Tour De France had zoomed by a hotel where Queen was staying in Switzerland, and the sight of the immense sporting event unlocked an idea in Mercury’s mind. “Fred was gazing at it with absolute amazement,” Taylor recalled in a 2011 interview with Absolute Radio. “It was a very big deal, the Tour de France, you know. I think it just sort of triggered something in his imagination.”
Photo by Richard E. Aaron/Redferns
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