Jazz

Jazz, Queen's seventh album, was their first recorded outside Britain: at Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland, and Super Bear Studios near Nice, France, between July and October 1978. Having produced the previous two albums themselves, they brought back Roy Thomas Baker as co-producer, for what proved their last work together. Its 13 songs, written by all four members, range widely after the stripped-back News of the World. Freddie Mercury's Arabic-flavoured "Mustapha" opens, followed by Brian May's "Fat Bottomed Girls" and "Jealousy", where Mercury's piano meets May's acoustic guitar made to sound like a sitar. Mercury wrote "Bicycle Race" after the Tour de France passed through Nice during the sessions. The thunder closing May's "Dead on Time" was taped by May on a portable recorder during a storm that cut the power in Montreux; the credits read "Thunderbolt courtesy of God". John Deacon wrote the heavy "If You Can't Beat Them" and the holiday romance "In Only Seven Days"; May added the New Orleans-flavoured "Dreamers Ball" and sings his own "Leaving Home Ain't Easy". Roger Taylor's "Fun It" was Queen's first track with electronic drums, and his "More of That Jazz", on which he sings and plays percussion, bass and guitars, closes the album with a coda stitched from fragments of the other songs. The sleeve was Taylor's idea, based on a design he had seen painted on the Berlin Wall months earlier. British copies came with a poster of naked women racing bicycles at Wimbledon Stadium in London; in America Elektra enclosed a coupon for it instead. The double A-side single "Bicycle Race" / "Fat Bottomed Girls", out on 13 October 1978, reached No. 11 in the UK. EMI released the album in Britain on 10 November 1978; it reached No. 2 there and No. 6 on the Billboard chart, and the RIAA certified it gold and platinum together on 28 November. "Don't Stop Me Now" followed in Britain on 26 January 1979, reached No. 9 and has often been used in Japanese TV commercials. The album itself came out in Japan in November 1978 and reached No. 5 there.