There Can Be Only One...Queen Soundtrack to Highlander!

Queen was one of my first favorite bands, together with The Beach Boys, for pretty much the same reasons: Massive choruses that couldn't be denied with words simple enough that you could sing along, even when English wasn't your first language. Queen also fell out of my music rotation completely at times for that reason. The choruses are massive, but so is everything else, except, you know, subtlety. So, getting older discoverering more subtle musical expression, I often left Queen behind, but never for good. Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. 

Our latest One Buck Records came together as a byproduct from my work on my musical tribute to David Lynch, In Dreams I Walk With You - A Musical Journey Through Lynch Land. Being in the mood for some film music I picked up the soundtrack for Highlander - and that got things going. Soundtrack to Highlander you say, but there never was an official soundtrack to that film, I hear you say. And you're right, there never was. All soundtracks are unofficial grey market (at best) releases, often combining Mark Kamen's orchestral score with the handful of Queen's song that graced the soundtrack, not aways with the greatest flow. But despite such a promise in the end title credits, there never was a soundtrack album proper. Instead Queen reworked the songs and then put the tracks on 1986's A Kind Of Magic. 

That cartoon cover is goofy as hell...and captures every Queen member absolutely perfectly

I can not swear it, but I'd imagine that A Kind Of Magic was among the first ten albums that were mine. For better or worse, a building block of my music collection. It's also entirely possible that I asked for the album which I presume was a birthday gift, because I had seen Highlander. Seeing that movie when you are a kid is a trip - I remember watching it, secretly, in the dark, and being completely baffled by it. This was probably one of the first nights home alone - which meant having the TV for myself. My parents weren't much of genre film watchers. My dad was a fan of Westerns, so I inherited that love from watching Westerns with him, but anything fantasy, sci-fi or (gasp!) horror was usually off the table. (So obviously I secretly developed a love for those genres, especially the last two). I profited from having the TV for myself by watching Highlander, but not having much background in fantasy and its tropes, the constant cross-cutting between eras and admittedly bumpy narrative left me impressed, but confused. There was, however, one aspect to the film that imediately caught my attention: the music from Queen. 

When re-checking the film, specifically the Queen sequences (I was tempted to rewatch the movie, but remembered that I was kind of disenchanted during my last rewatch, and the sequences I did rewatch looking for the Queen soundtrack did look cheesy as hell) I realized that the music plays a relatively minor part in the movie, much smaller than I remembered. "Who Wants To Live Forever" plays out for a good bit, but title song "Princes Of The Universe" and "Gimme The Prize" are merely getting a  minute or so of screentime, "One Year Of Love" runs as background music in a bar scene and "A Kind Of Magic runs over the end titles. Ironically it's the one song not germane to the Highlander soundtrack that might be the most prominent behind "Forever" in the film itself. Being short of another rocker for the scene where the weird special forces guy stalks the immortals (a scene that left me completely baffled, again), Queen repurposed the last single from The Works, "Hammer To Fall". 

Find the odd man out

That song isn't on the One Buck album of the day, but all other mentioned are of course. Now, you can't fault Queen for not bringing out a Highlander soundtrack album, especially after their legendary gig at Live Aid raised their public profile considerably: instead of bringing out a soundtrack to a film few people finally saw they reused almost all Highlander tracks for a new studio album.  That album is, as one can imagine, not a very coherent listen, but more of a dog's breakfast, the highlights of which were for me always were the title track and the the 'mini Highlander album ' that is the original vinyl side b. And of course they had the right instinct in reworking "A Kind Of MAgic", the song that sounds the most different in its original Highlander version. Smelling a hit, they made the song faster and snappier (literally!), adding the finger snaps and backing vocals that really made the song work and the Highlander version, consequently, to look like a first draft.

So, Highlander - Motion Picture Soundtrack imagines what an album that Queen brought out in 1986 as a soundtrack would and could have sounded like. One issue of course was that the band didn't quite have enough music for an album. Not counting "Hammer To Fall", which I also decided not to use, they had six songs from the Highlander score. Variations of "Princes" and "Forever", titled "Kurgan's Theme" and "Heather's Theme", respectively, fill up the album, as does a variation on the Taylor-penned synth & percussion track that's the sort-of theme music for Kurgan drives like a madman through New York ("Wild Ride"). A variation of that track, outfitted with (ill-fitting love) lyrics for A Kind of Magic as "Don't Lose Your Head" was brought out as a b-side under the equally odd title "A Dozen Red Roses For My Darling". I fused that instrumental, here titled "City Streets", with the snatch of "(Theme From) New York, New York", as it plays in the movie. Said snatch was never officially released by the group and was taken directly from the movie. 

"Gimme The Prize", one of the heaviest songs the band ever recorded (and a track roundly despised by Deacon and Mercury for its heavy metal leanings) loses the cartoonish movie dialogue and sound effects of the Magic version, an ultra-curious choice considering the album wasn't marketed as a soundtrack. I imagine it was to fill out the spaces in a relatively simple, melodically barren song, but they overdid it. The uncluttered version here is a lot clearer than the muddled Magic counterpart. 

Still, even with those track additions, the album would run short. So, in an uncharacteristic display of magnanimousness, Queen cede a track to score composer Michael Kamen, with whom they had collaborated on the orchestration for "Who Wants To Live Forever". They are asking him to produce a sort of 'medley' of score highlights, which Kamen promptly does in creating the "Highlander Suite". In real life, it was of course ol' OGB who did the deed. Soundtracks, especially various artist type collection, would often throw a bone to the score composers by including a track or two, so there would at least be some representation and royalties coming their way. So, Queen decide here to do the same, ending the soundtrack in a suitably dramatic and operatic fahion, which one imagines Freddie Mercury especially would have appreciated.  

So, do like me and dive in the past, somewhat fittingly considering the movie concerned, and get back to some very solid work of Queen from the mid-80's. Nostalgia probably has a good part in my appreciation, but some of these songs still work like gangbusters today. Here they were, born to be kings, the were the princes of the universe...