When Queen staged a nude female bicycle race
From the histrionics of Brian May’s soloing guitar to the sheer bravura of the vested Freddie Mercury, you could never accuse Queen of ever being a retiring band. This bombastic boldness extended to their marketing strategies, too. In fact, for all they might seem very savoury now, thanks to a little Hollywood airbrushing, they were, in fact, hell-raisers of debauchery from time to time.
For their album Jazz, the band threw a launch party that earned the name Saturday Night in Sodom. It began with guests entering and being offered complimentary oral sex, and at various stages throughout, you could look up and witness Freddie Mercury sniffing cocaine off a tray attached to the top of a hermaphrodite dwarf’s head, a live act beheading chickens with a bite performed on stage, 300lb+ Samoan women lounged on banquet tables, in the nude, smoking cigarettes out of various orifices, and it ended with the £200,000 budget considered well-spent.
In short, they knew how to create a marketing storm. The release of their single, ‘Bicycle’, was no different. To promote the track, the band decided it would be a good idea to organise a bike race around Wimbledon, London. However, they weren’t interested in attracting Beryl Burton or Marianne Vos; instead, they invited 65 female professional models to take part.
They then made the request that these folks race in the nude. It is from that notable detail that an added expense was incurred: apparently, when the company Queen hired the bicycles from heard about the intended use, they refused to return the deposit until all the seats had either been replaced or professionally cleaned (although this tale has never been substantiated).
The band filmed this daring dash around Wimbledon and airbrushed out any private parts to create a just-about PG music video. And snaps from the day’s events were used for posters. They may or may not have helped to shift a few more copies of the 1978 single. Was there any point to it beyond flogging the track?
Well, considering the song contains such thoughtful lyrics as “You say bark, I say bite / You say shark, I say hey man / Jaws was never my scene / And I don’t like Star Wars,” there must surely have been some deep metaphor lingering beneath the seeming tomfoolery? While that meaning may remain a mystery forevermore, the marketing certainly worked with the track eventually going Platinum in the US.
