Queen Lookback At Highlander For The Greatest

Bruce Henne | 10-24-2021

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(hennemusic) Queen revisit their work on the "Highlander" soundtrack on the latest episode of the weekly video series The Greatest. Following the success of their first soundtrack album, "Flash Gordon", Queen were offered a variety of film projects but nothing captured their interest until 1986 when director Russell Mulcahy made a tentative approach with his new fantasy movie project, "Highlander", to see if the band could be tempted...

"When it came to doing 'Highlander', I thought to myself, the film needs not only a big orchestration score, but it needs a big rock score," recalls Mulcahy. "I had twenty minutes of the film cut together, and I brought them in, and I didn't know how they were going to react. I only wanted them to do one song in the film. They saw the footage and they said 'we'll do five songs'."

Queen would eventually end up writing and performing six new songs for the film as well as providing additional music. "It was nowhere near finished by then, we just thought 'that's really great, we could do some good stuff on that," says Roger Taylor. "And that inspired Brian to write 'Who Wants To Live Forever', and then I wrote 'A Kind Of Magic' off that, nicking the line from the film. And that was quite a nice experience."

Unlike "Flash", Queen decided not to release a soundtrack album, but instead paired their six tracks which appeared in "Highlander" with other songs, such as "One Vision", "Friends Will Be Friends", and "Pain Is So Close To Pleasure" to create a full Queen album, 1986's "A Kind Of Magic", their first to be released since their acclaimed Live Aid performance.

Over subsequent years, Queen songs have featured on and enhanced a number of films - but the next time the band would provide a full soundtrack just over thirty years later, would be for a movie they'd be making themselves: "Bohemian Rhapsody." Watch the episode here.

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