A Kind Of Magic

A Kind of Magic is a 1986 album by English rock band Queen. It was the band’s twelfth studio album and their first to be recorded digitally, and is based on the soundtrack to the film Highlander, the first in a series directed by Russell Mulcahy. Though the album stalled at #46 in the United States, it rocketed to #1 in the United Kingdom, remaining in the charts for sixty-three weeks and spawning 3 hit singles. The single “A Kind of Magic” only reached #42 in the US despite being featured in Highlander. The album eventually went Gold in the US in 2002. It is Queen’s first album with a title track, and every album released thereafter also contained one. Although Queen would release another three albums with Freddie Mercury (including one posthumous one), A Kind of Magic would turn out to be the band’s last ever album promoted with a concert tour, due to Freddie Mercury’s affliction with AIDS. For the first time in their career, the band allowed cameras to film them while they were in the 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 standalone soundtrack was ever released), as six out of nine songs on the album appeared in it, albeit 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).