Queen Revisit 'Flash Gordon' For The Greatest

Bruce Henne | 08-02-2021

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(hennemusic) Queen revisit their work on the "Flash Gordon" soundtrack on the latest episode of the weekly video series The Greatest. The UK band's first venture into soundtrack work for the 1980 sci-fi film - which was to star Sam J. Jones, Melody Anderson, Ornella Muti, Max von Sydow and Topol - coincided with sessions for their eight studio record, "The Game."

"It was an interesting offer really from (producer) Dino De Laurentiis," explains Roger Taylor, "and Joe Smith, head of Elektra Records, engineered the whole thing really. And, it was interesting actually, because the film was a big hit in Europe and UK, and flopped completely in America."

"But it became a cult video thing later on," adds Brian May. "I feel pretty proud of the Flash thing because really this was the first time that a rock soundtrack had actually been put to a movie which wasn't about rock music. There was a lot of resistance to it, a lot of people said it wouldn't work, including Dino. When he first heard it he went "oh, it's not going to work for my film", the idea of the rock music being in there. But he pretty soon became accustomed to the idea, and he loved it in the end."

As "The Game" album started to take up more of the band's time, the guitarist took on the responsibility of getting the soundtrack done. "It actually was sort of Brian's thing really, and it really did forge quite a lot," Taylor recalls. "I mean you never heard heavy rock - a lot of it was quite heavy - music on a film, and so this battle sequence is really quite groundbreaking. And now you can't see a movie without soundtrack albums coming at you and heavy music. So I think we were quite well ahead of the game there."

The title track, "Flash", would be the only single released from the project; it was a Top 20 track in several countries while reaching No. 42 on the US Billboard Hot 100. Watch the episode here.

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