Queen released Jazz in the UK on November 10, 1978. Their seventh studio album was their first recorded outside Britain, with Roy Thomas Baker returning as co-producer. It put “Fat Bottomed Girls,” “Bicycle Race” and “Don’t Stop Me Now” on the same record, but those songs took very different routes through the studio. On the last of them, Freddie Mercury wanted the piano to lead.
The sessions took Queen to Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland, and Super Bear Studios near Nice, France, between July and October 1978. Baker had been absent from A Day at the Races and News of the World. His return reunited the group with a producer who had helped shape their early records, though Jazz became their final album together. The change of surroundings accompanied a record that gave all four writers room to follow different ideas.
One of those ideas came from watching cyclists. In the book accompanying Queen’s 2015 Studio Collection, Roger Taylor recalled Mercury staring in amazement as the Tour de France passed. Taylor thought the sight had prompted “Bicycle Race,” and remembered the band seeing a useful visual connection between it and Brian May’s “Fat Bottomed Girls.” The two songs appeared together as a double A-side single in October, ahead of the album. Their pairing presented two distinct approaches: Mercury’s shifting arrangement and bicycle-bell interlude alongside May’s heavy blues riff.
The album kept changing direction beyond that single. May also wrote the gentle swing of “Dreamer’s Ball,” while John Deacon contributed both the harder “If You Can’t Beat Them” and the quieter “In Only Seven Days.” Taylor’s “Fun It” explored a disco rhythm with electronic percussion from his Syndrum. Deacon also played acoustic and electric guitar on his quieter contribution, which later backed “Don’t Stop Me Now” on the UK single.
Mercury drew a particularly clear boundary on “Don’t Stop Me Now.” In a Total Guitar interview published by Guitar World in 2024, May recalled recording extensive rhythm guitar before Mercury insisted that the track remain centered on piano. May summed up the singer’s intention as “Powerhouse piano, powerhouse vocal, and that’s it.” He was disappointed, but Mercury did want a solo, asking the guitarist to take over from the voice for that passage.
May treated the solo as a second melody. He remembered hearing it in his head before picking up the guitar, then translating a line he could sing into his playing. Mercury’s instructions gave him a brief, distinct role in a recording driven by piano and voice.
“Don’t Stop Me Now” followed the album as a UK single on January 26, 1979. The choices made during its recording also became part of the album’s later reissue history: the 2011 deluxe edition of Jazz included a version of the song with long-lost guitars, giving listeners another arrangement to compare with the original.
Queen returned to that question of guitar presence for the Bohemian Rhapsody soundtrack in 2018. Its revisited version of “Don’t Stop Me Now” featured newly recorded May guitar parts, bringing the recording closer to the arrangement the band was using onstage.
