The Big Lad in the Windmill is the debut album by British progressive pop/rock band It Bites.

[2] Although marketed as a 1980s pop album, The Big Lad in the Windmill features an unusual mix of musical styles including pop, hard rock, Prince-style funk, power balladry and progressive rock, often all within the same song.

The album also showcased the band's musical virtuosity, featuring multiple changes of dynamics and tempo plus prominent guitar and keyboard solos.

Paul Stump, in his 1997 History of Progressive Rock, called The Big Lad in the Windmill "stunning", citing its mix of "satirically clichéd cock-rock posturings ... with punkish timbral abrasiveness and a harmonic arsenal which recalled the great days of 1960s epic pop more graphically and wrenchingly than any of the 'subversive' new-poppers ever did."

He made special note of how "Wanna Shout" repeatedly reintroduces a Prince-style riff with dramatic jerks in the tempo, making the tune danceable in an ingeniously perverse way.