A Kind of Magic by Queen
A Kind of Magic is the twelfth album by British rock band Queen, released in 1986. It was the band's 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. Although Queen would release another three albums with Freddie Mercury (including the posthumous Made in Heaven), A Kind of Magic would turn out to be the band's last ever album promoted with a concert tour, because of Mercury's diagnosis with AIDS the following year and his eventual death from AIDS in 1991. For the first time in their career, the band allowed filming of them while they were in the recording studio. The video for "One Vision" shows them in various stages of writing and recording the song. A Kind of Magic reached #1 in the UK, selling 100,000 copies in its first week, and remained in the UK charts for 63 weeks. The album spawned three hit singles: the album's title track "A Kind of Magic", "One Vision" and "Friends Will Be Friends". The sixth track on the album, "Who Wants to Live Forever", features an orchestra conducted by Michael Kamen, while the last track, "Princes of the Universe", is the theme song to Highlander. Critical reaction to the album was mixed, but it has, in recent years, been cited by music publications and fans as one of Queen's best records of the 1980s. The 1994 edition of the Guinness All Time Top 1000 Albums listed A Kind of Magic #171 in the all-time greatest rock and pop albums, and in 2007, Classic Rock ranked it the 28th greatest soundtrack album of all time. Estimates of the albums sales currently stand at fourteen million copies.
Queen’s shift to playing all-stadium tours in the mid-1980s wasn’t just a business decision. It was an artistic one. Rock ’n’ roll had once been a weird, rebellious youth culture; now, it was the sound of pro sports, political rallies, ad campaigns and general communal uplift—a transition no band navigated more seamlessly, or profitably, as Queen. Like an infrastructure architect, or a product designer for a new-and-improved dishwasher, Queen were working on a scale of millions now, and making the music to match. At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, there remains something astonishing about a performance as huge but as stripped-down as the group’s Live Aid set from 1985, with paper Pepsi cups littering the top of Freddie Mercury’s piano, and no special effects or prerecorded assistance to be found. As far as pure rock spectacle goes, it’s pretty much the beginning of the end. Released in 1986, <i>A Kind of Magic</i> also marks an end point of sorts for Queen—one of their final albums before the band retired from the road. Whether intentional or not, <i>A Kind of Magic</i> feels fittingly introspective at times—and hopeful. While <i>News of the World</i> gave us “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions”, <i>A Kind of Magic</i> offers even broader visions, whether Mercury is arguing for “One dream, one soul/One prize, one goal” (“A Kind of Magic”) or “One flesh, one bone, one true religion” (“One Vision”). Elsewhere on the album, there are anthems about legacy (“Who Wants to Live Forever”), loyalty (“Friends Will Be Friends”) and unity (“Princes of the Universe”)—all of them heavy enough to inspire, while pop enough for anyone in the world to understand. Compared to the rap and metal working its way through the cultural bloodstream of the mid-1980s, <i>A Kind of Magic</i> sounded like a relic. Yet commercially, Queen had never been bigger, as evidenced by a gargantuan tour the band undertook following the album’s release. The sound was always there—they were just waiting for the seating capacity to catch up.
