A Kind of Magic
| A Kind of Magic | ||||
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| Studio album by Queen | ||||
| Released | 2 June 1986 | |||
| Recorded | September 1985 – April 1986 at Musicland Studios, Munich, Germany, Mountain Studios, Montreux, Switzerland and Townhouse Studios, London, England | |||
| Genre | Rock | |||
| Length | 53:36 (EMI CD) 50:31 (Hollywood CD) 40:58 (LP and cassette version) |
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| Singles from A Kind of Magic | ||||
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| Allmusic |   |
| Chicago Tribune | |
| Encyclopedia of Popular Music | |
| Kerrang! | |
| The Rolling Stone Album Guide | |
A Kind of Magic is the twelfth studio album by the British rock band Queen, released on 2 June 1986 by EMI Records in the United Kingdom and by Capitol Records in the United States. It was their first studio album to be recorded digitally, and is based on the soundtrack to the film Highlander, the first in a series directed by Russell Mulcahy. A Kind of Magic was Queen's first album to be released since they had been acclaimed for their performance at the 1985 Live Aid concert. It was an immediate hit in the UK, going straight to number one and selling 100,000 copies in its first week. It remained in the UK charts for 63 weeks, selling about six million copies worldwide (600,000 in the UK alone). The album spawned four hit singles: the album's title track "A Kind of Magic", "One Vision", "Friends Will Be Friends", and "Who Wants to Live Forever", which features an orchestra conducted by Michael Kamen, while the last track, "Princes of the Universe", is the theme song to Highlander.
Although Queen would release another two albums with Freddie Mercury (excluding posthumous releases), A Kind of Magic would turn out to be the band's last album promoted with a concert tour, because of Mercury's diagnosis with AIDS the following year, which subsequently caused his death in 1991. For the first time in their career, the band allowed themselves to be filmed while they were in the recording studio. The video for "One Vision" shows them in various stages of writing and recording the song.
The album enjoys the status of an unofficial soundtrack for the 1986 film Highlander (for which no official soundtrack album was released). The title, "A Kind of Magic", derived from one of the lines Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert) says to describe his immortality. Six out of nine songs on the album appeared in the film, although in different versions. The three songs that did not appear in Highlander are "Pain Is So Close to Pleasure", "Friends Will Be Friends" and "One Vision" (which was featured a year earlier in the film Iron Eagle). Conversely, a recording of "Theme from New York, New York" made specifically for a scene in Highlander does not appear on A Kind of Magic, and in fact has never been released in album form to date. According to a statement by Brian May on the Greatest Video Hits 2 DVD (2003), at least at that point, he had the intention to work on a proper Highlander soundtrack in the future. In one scene, a snippet of "Hammer to Fall" plays on a radio, a song from the previously released The Works album.
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