Music Legends Queen Special Edition 2019

‘We didn’t particularly want the job of managing ourselves, but
we decided it was the best way of getting precisely what we wanted
and controlling our own destiny.’
Following a sell-out tour of Europe, the band would release
seventh studio outing, ‘Jazz’, in the winter of 1978 to a rather
lukewarm response. Featuring a multitude of different musical
influences, including Arabic, rock, pop, funk, soul and just
about everything apart from jazz itself, the album saw the
band frustrated for the first time in their career, with Mercury,
in particular, noting his disappointment in the final product.
However, the album did include yet another hit, a double A-side
single in ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’/‘Bicycle Race’, which featured a
rather racy inlay and music video, replete with sixty-five naked
ladies riding bikes. Not that that decision didn’t lose Queen their
fair share of fans as well though, as Brian May recalled, ‘We lost
some of our audience with that. “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.’
As a result of the album’s relative failure, the group decided that
a little more work needed to be done on their next release, so they
took a break from their schedule of one or more albums a year to
focus a good eighteen months on ‘The Game’, which didn’t come
out until 1980.
Before ‘The Game’ was released, however, the band were on the
road again, as another European tour followed. As well as this, in
response to the amount of money that live Queen bootleg tapes
were fetching, the band decided to release their first-ever live
album in ‘Live Killers’. Featuring tracks taken from the band’s
‘Jazz’ World Tour, the album went platinum all over the world.
Despite this, the band sparked controversy when they stated on