Queen’s relationship with visual media extends across film, video, record packaging and live performance. The different forms invite analysis both individually and through their interactions.
The band developed a recognizable visual language across singles, LP sleeves, music videos and stage costumes. These images shaped the dramatic effect of their performances and contributed to how audiences understood the music.
A concert is not a live rendition of our album. It’s a theatrical event
Freddie Mercury
Cinema brought images, sound and performance into sustained collaboration. Film music consequently offers a useful context for examining how Queen’s compositions entered wider visual narratives.
Queen’s film projects involved collaboration with directors, composers, designers and promotional artists. Their work illustrates how music and visual design can contribute to a coherent dramatic world while retaining their distinct forms of expression.
This article considers several aspects of those relationships:
- Relationship with movies: the soundtracks for Flash Gordon and Highlander
- Relationship with videogames: the soundtrack of The eYe
- Relationship with the musical: the development of the show We Will Rock You
Flash Gordon (1980)
Flash Gordon began as an adventure comic strip by Alex Raymond, first published on 7 January 1934 in competition with Buck Rogers. Its principal characters include Flash Gordon, Dale Arden and Dr. Hans Zarkov.
In the opening story, the planet Mongo threatens Earth. Zarkov constructs a spacecraft and takes Flash and Dale with him; after they prevent the collision, the three confront Mongo’s ruler, Ming the Merciless. Later episodes expanded the cast and the imagined worlds through which the protagonists travelled.
Raymond began to draw Flash in the Sunday paper in his typical hyperrealistic way, full of dynamism, with an eye for details. His first drawings consisted of thick, greasy lines, long strokes, blackened and curved planes. Later on, he changed his style toward superb preciseness, which bestowed the glory of one of the greatest comic strip artists in history upon him.
Zvonimir Tošić – http://comics.cro.net/e-flash.html
He paid exceptional attention to the human form, which always dominated the frame, leaving an impression of extraordinary vitality, glorifying the beauty and grace of movements of the body, of intercourse between a man and a woman. Raymond was an incurable romantic and aesthete. He was also fond of experimenting. He developed and introduced the “feathering” technique (defining or softening a contour with a series of fine lines). He introduced square text baloons as well, followed by no-baloon dialogues…
Flash Gordon became one of the most influential American adventure strips. Its adaptation for film, television and animation demonstrates the durability of Raymond’s characters across media and audiences.
The strip’s costumed heroes contributed to the visual vocabulary of early superhero comics, and its influence can also be traced in later science fiction, including George Lucas’s Star Wars.
Film and television adaptations generally return to the early Mongo adventures, although they adjust characters and settings to the conventions of each medium. These changes preserve recognizable elements of the original while offering different interpretations.
Mike Hodges’s 1980 film is among the best-known adaptations. It recasts Flash’s appearance and heroism within a more playful, ambiguous aesthetic, inviting comparison with Raymond’s original strip:
The various technological updates (in 1980 but also in the 2007 TV series) suggest that Raymond’s art is evocative precisely because it falls short of realism. The role of technical limitations should therefore not be overstated, and recent digital blockbusters have demonstrated the difficulty of capturing comic book imagery, even when this imagery is not tied to an idiosyncratic style.
Nicolas Labarre – Two Flashes. Entertainment, Adaptation: Flash Gordon as comic strip and serial
Directed by Mike Hodges, the 1980 film stars Sam J. Jones, Melody Anderson, Ornella Muti, Max von Sydow and Topol, with Timothy Dalton, Mariangela Melato, Brian Blessed and Peter Wyngarde in supporting roles. Flash, now a quarterback, joins Dale Arden and Hans Zarkov in helping Mongo’s rival factions resist Ming’s plan to destroy Earth.
The film retains the early strip’s central conflict while adapting details to a different medium and moment. Flash’s occupation, for example, changes from polo player to American football player.
Flash Gordon is a mid-air skirmish of corny old-fashioned retrofuturism and knowing postmodernism, even as its veneer of homespun innocence keeps being subverted by the corrupting powers of kink. Every spacecraft here is absurdly phallic (at one point, Flash literally penetrates Ming with one), Ming’s daughter Princess Aura is a sexualised seductress with a lover in every port, the elaborate costumes come with the tang of fetishism, and Ming’s metal-masked, Vader-like head of secret police Klytus (Peter Wyngarde) – an all-new character – wields whips and chains like a gimpy BDSM dungeon master.
Shot in glorious Technicolor, Flash Gordon presents space not as a dark vacuum, but as a psychedelic vista of chemical swirls and polychromatic clouds. Hodges’ comic book caper is all cheeky, cheesy fun, with moustache-twirling bad guys, strong-jawed heroes, and every line dripping in self-conscious absurdity (not to mention innuendo).
ANTON BITEL – https://lwlies.com/articles/flash-gordon-joyous-comic-book-adaptation/
Several directors considered a Flash Gordon film during the 1970s. Federico Fellini acquired an option through producer Dino De Laurentiis but did not make a film. George Lucas also sought the rights; unable to obtain them, he developed Star Wars instead.
De Laurentiis discussed the project with Sergio Leone, who considered the script insufficiently faithful to Raymond’s strip. Mike Hodges ultimately directed the film at Shepperton Studios in the United Kingdom after Nicolas Roeg left the project.
Flash Gordon is like a fairy tale set in a discothèque in the clouds… There are no hidden themes in this comedy fantasy; everything is on the luscious surface.
Pauline Kael, The New Yorker, May 1, 1981
Queen composed the soundtrack for the 1980 Flash Gordon film, combining synthesizers with orchestral writing. Its large-scale dramatic conception has affinities with opera; the use of electronic instruments alongside orchestral textures also anticipates aspects of Mercury’s later solo album “BARCELONA”.
The score’s recurring leitmotiv associates musical ideas with characters and situations, a technique often linked to Wagnerian music drama. The film also includes a guitar arrangement of the bridal chorus from Lohengrin.
At least three principal character motifs appear: Flash’s theme, Ming’s theme and Vultan’s theme. The Love theme and Battle theme recur at different points in the narrative. Such thematic recurrence was already familiar in film scoring, notably through John Williams’s music for the Star Wars films.
The motifs in Flash Gordon are readily identifiable, helping the viewer associate music with characters. Mercury’s brief Ming’s Theme, for example, incorporates chromatic notes that contribute to the villain’s characterization:
Football Fight closes a phrase with an ascending scale, contrasting with the descending chromatic movement associated with Ming:
Mercury’s The Kiss is a short, predominantly high-register passage of less than two minutes. Its vocal writing anticipates qualities later heard in Exercises In Free Love.
Rather than articulate clear words, the voice offers brief, breath-like sounds as Flash is revived by Princess Aura’s kiss:
Queen’s Flash Gordon soundtrack has been viewed as a surprising anomaly within the band’s discography by fans and critics alike, […] and the choice to release a soundtrack album seems like an odd one. The band was coming off “THE GAME”, a quadruple platinum smash. […] A Mad Peck comic strip for the rock magazine Creem summed up the commercial and artistic dilemma. The comic depicts Abbott and Costello (for no apparent reason) discussing the album.
Phil Sutcliffe – Queen. The ultimate illustrated history of the crown kings of rock
Queen’s growing use of synthesizers, introduced on “THE GAME” earlier in 1980, helped define the film’s sound. Electronic timbres had already become associated with science-fiction cinema, where they could suggest unfamiliar environments and technologies.
An early example is the theremin in Bernard Herrmann’s score for Robert Wise’s The day the Earth stood still (1951); see this first example. Bebe and Louis Barron created the entirely electronic soundtrack for Fred M. Wilcox’s Forbidden planet (1956). Such scores established electronic sound as a way to evoke the extraterrestrial.
Queen’s score is largely instrumental, alongside orchestral music by Howard Blake. Although Blake had only ten days to prepare his contribution, much of it was omitted from the final edit in favour of Queen’s material. The overall soundtrack received a BAFTA nomination; Blake’s complete orchestral score has not been issued.
Two complete songs with lyrics, Flash and The Hero, frame the film at its opening and closing credits. Raymond’s drawings appear prominently in the opening sequence. Each member of Queen contributed music to the soundtrack, a collaborative approach also evident in the later Highlander project.
As the story develops, music increasingly supports its dramatic action. Sound and image work together to shape the viewer’s response.
Cream studio designed the original LP sleeve, emphasizing the film’s title against a yellow background. Queen’s name appears in smaller type, giving the film’s identity priority over that of the band. The studio later worked on the cover of Greatest Hits.
The sleeve’s bold graphic design recalls a comic-book cover. Its reverse reproduces the film’s final image of Flash, creating a visual frame around the recorded score and linking the LP to the story’s illustrated origins.
The complete soundtrack tracklist follows:
Flash’s Theme [Brian May]
In the Space Capsule (The Love Theme) [Roger Taylor]
Ming’s Theme (In the Court of Ming the Merciless) [Freddie Mercury]
The Ring (Hypnotic Seduction of Dale) [Freddie Mercury]
Football Fight [Freddie Mercury]
In the Death Cell (Love Theme Reprise) [Roger Taylor]
Execution of Flash [John Deacon]
The Kiss (Aura Resurrects Flash) [Freddie Mercury, Howard Blake]
Arboria (Planet of the Tree Men) [John Deacon]
Escape from the Swamp [Roger Taylor]
Flash to the Rescue [Brian May]
Vultan’s Theme (Attack of the Hawk Men) [Freddie Mercury]
Battle Theme [Brian May]
The Wedding March [arr. Brian May]
Marriage of Dale and Ming (…And Flash Approaching) [Brian May, Roger Taylor]
Crash Dive on Mingo City [Brian May]
Flash’s Theme Reprise (Victory Celebrations) [Brian May]
The Hero [Brian May]
The film’s elaborate costumes were designed by Danilo Donati, whose work included films by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Federico Fellini. Raymond’s strip and earlier serial adaptations supplied visual precedents, but Donati developed more ornate and detailed designs.
The Flash OST (original soundtrack) is a bizarre and hypnotic work when considered in isolation, well worthy of stoner devotion reserved for the likes of “Piper At The Gates Of Dawn” or the cool, modern appreciation of Morricone. It bleeds atmosphere and poise, but is not adverse to hilarity, even becoming hysterical at some points. A fine blend that is never too self-conscious or over-complicated. But married to the images that Mike Hodges provides, the work becomes an accomplished, slick and instinctive whole. Beginning with the main musical themes and continuing through similarities to operatic convention, it is a cohesive whole.
Daniel Ross – https://thequietus.com
Brian May and Mack produced the Flash Gordon soundtrack, released on 8 December 1980, the date of the film’s world premiere. The project differed from Queen’s earlier albums, which had credited all four members as producers. It was an early example of a major feature film scored predominantly by a rock band, following precedents such as The Who’s “TOMMY” (1975).
We’d been offered a few [soundtracks], but most of them were where the film is written around music, and that’s been done to death – it’s the cliché of ‘movie star appears in movie about movie star’ but this one [Flash Gordon] was different in that it was a proper film and ha a real story which wasn’t based around music, and we should be writing a film score in the way anyone else writes a film score – we were writing to a discipline for the first time ever.
Brian May
The film’s initial reception and commercial performance varied by market. It later acquired a cult following among science-fiction and fantasy audiences, for whom Queen’s soundtrack remains an important part of its appeal.
I’m VERY proud of our music for the Battle Sequence… it’s all very fresh on my mind… it was totally thrown together in the old-fashioned way… playing TO PICTURE – and there was a moment when, left carrying the can… because Queen was actually busy making another album at the same time… I got on a roll with the Hawkmen and their rescue attack… I could still ‘sing’ you that whole sequence… to me it’s totally a song. I’ll add a couple of interesting (perhaps) facts. This was the first time that we, as a band, recorded with synthesisers (previously we always had the declaration on our album sleeves “No Synthesisers”). And I believe that this really is the first time that a proper score, to something other than a story about musicians, was ever applied to a film by a rock band. It’s very common now, but I remember having a conversation with the amazing producer of this film, Dino de Laurentiis, early in the relationship… wherein he said… “The score of my movie cannot be rock music… it has never been done” And I said… “but it COULD be done”.
Brian May – https://brianmay.com
The promotional video for Flash was filmed at Anvil Studios, London, in November 1980 under the direction of Don Norman. It shows Queen performing before a screen of film excerpts, joining the musicians’ image to the cinematic narrative. May plays an Oberheim OB-X synthesizer, drawing attention to the electronic instrument used in the score.
Mercury promoted the film by wearing a Flash Gordon T-shirt on stage. Queen performed Flash, The Hero and The Battle Theme live, while many shorter cues remained more closely tied to the scenes for which they had been composed.
Many European seven-inch editions of Flash used a blue or lilac background rather than the LP’s yellow design. The relative consistency across markets is notable within a discography whose national single sleeves often varied substantially before greater international standardization in the mid-1980s.
Other markets, including the United States and Japan, retained the yellow background and made the band’s name more prominent than on the LP:
A South African promotional edition served as an invitation to the local premiere. It had no picture sleeve but displayed the Flash Gordon logo on its label:
Later CD singles used yellow or red backgrounds. In 2002 the German production team Vanguard created remixes of Flash for dance and club audiences.
For the film’s fortieth anniversary in 2020, Queen issued 1,980 copies of the soundtrack as a yellow picture disc that recalls the original design:
The film’s international promotion employed several fantasy and poster artists whose work conveyed its visual world. Philip Castle produced a pre-production image of the Battle for The Ajax, later issued as a foil-print teaser:
Lawrence Noble designed an advance theatrical image subsequently used on merchandise, including the Flash Gordon book cover, before Richard Amsel adapted it for the final United States poster.
Early promotional materials, including the programme for the premiere on 10 December 1980, show a black background and a different version of the Flash Gordon logo. The final campaign adopted the vivid yellow field and lightning-bolt design.
Posters and other promotional objects recombined the film’s characters and colours across national markets, frequently placing Flash and Ming in prominent positions.
The Italian illustrator Renato Casaro created artwork for European and Japanese releases. His work, which also included collaborations with Sergio Leone, Francis Ford Coppola and Franco Zeffirelli, brought together the strip’s fantasy imagery and the film’s actors.
Casaro’s early-1980s style made extensive use of airbrush, vivid colours and closely observed detail. Related techniques appear in his later work for the Rambo films. His posters presented the film’s imagined world to audiences before they entered the cinema.
Queen’s name was often printed in relatively small type on the film posters, which foregrounded the characters and story. Artwork for some national posters and promotional objects, including movie programs, was produced by Richard Amsel in a style related to Casaro’s visual conception.
Advertisements for the soundtrack, by contrast, made Queen’s name more prominent while retaining the film’s characteristic colours and final logo:
Later promotional and commemorative objects continued to use the red-and-yellow identity and final logo. Pinball machines produced in 1981 are among the examples:
Sirius Software developed a 1983 Flash Gordon game for the Atari 2600 , published by 20th Century Fox Games. Its packaging drew on the film posters rather than establishing a separate visual language.
Highlander (1986)
Six years after Flash Gordon , Queen contributed music to another fantasy film, Highlander. This project centred on complete songs rather than a predominantly instrumental score. The narrative and its characters shaped the writing, while collaboration with director Russell Mulcahy continued into videos such as Princes of the Universe.
Directed by Russell Mulcahy from a story by Gregory Widen, Highlander stars Christopher Lambert, Roxanne Hart, Clancy Brown and Sean Connery. Its interwoven historical and contemporary stories follow immortal warriors. Connor MacLeod’s experience of loss, attachment and hope provided material that Queen’s songs could address.
Marillion declined an invitation to record the soundtrack while touring; David Bowie, Sting and Duran Duran were also considered. Queen ultimately contributed songs alongside Michael Kamen’s orchestral score, performed by the National Philharmonic Orchestra.
Kamen’s orchestral writing and Queen’s songs share thematic material, creating connections across the score. Their collaboration integrated the band’s music with the film’s dramatic structure.
Unlike the mostly instrumental Flash Gordon soundtrack, Highlander features full-length songs with lyrics at several points in the narrative. Their placement suggests characters’ emotions and marks significant dramatic turns.
Songs including A Kind Of Magic, Princes Of The Universe and Don’t Lose Your Head evoke the film’s world; Who Wants To Live Forever, One Year Of Love and Gimme The Prize accompany particular emotional or dramatic situations.
May worked particularly closely with Kamen on the National Philharmonic Orchestra’s arrangements, although other members wrote songs for the film. Mulcahy later recalled how the collaboration began:
I was at a point in my career when I could call in a few favours. Queen had done a great score for Flash Gordon, so we gave them a 20-minute reel of different scenes and they went: “Wow!” We’d only expected them to do one song, but they wanted to write one each. Freddie Mercury did “Princes of the Universe”, Brian May did “Who Wants to Live Forever”, Roger Taylor did “It’s A Kind Of Magic”.
The 1986 album “A KIND OF MAGIC” collected songs associated with the film; its title comes from a line of dialogue. Some album versions differ from the film recordings. Hammer To Fall, heard in the film, instead comes from Queen’s earlier album “THE WORKS” (1984).
The album tracklist also includes songs absent from the film: One Vision, Pain Is So Close To Pleasure and Friends Will Be Friends:
One Vision [Queen]
A Kind of Magic [Roger Taylor]
One Year of Love [John Deacon]
Pain Is So Close to Pleasure [Freddie Mercury, John Deacon]
Friends Will Be Friends [Freddie Mercury, John Deacon]
Who Wants to Live Forever [Brian May]
Gimme the Prize [Brian May]
Don’t Lose Your Head [Roger Taylor]
Princes of the Universe [Freddie Mercury]
May conceived Who Wants To Live Forever after viewing a short sequence during pre-production. The song and orchestral variations recur across the film, linking the band’s writing with Kamen’s score.
The film version, in which Mercury sings both verses, has not been issued in that form; on the album, May sings one verse.
Kamen’s orchestration for the song combines three electric guitars and two Yamaha DX7 keyboards programmed for organ-like sounds with strings, French horns, trumpets and trombones. The arrangement exemplifies the project’s combination of rock and orchestral resources:
Queen’s songs take the preposterous, bloated concept and elevate it into ever-more-preposterous, ever-more-bloated grandeur. Connor watches his lover age in their craggy Highland home and buries her as Freddie Mercury operatically blasts the heather with the stentorian operatic anguish of “Who Wants to Live Forever” – bolstered by string arrangements from soundtrack collaborator Michael Kamen. The proggy, heavy “Princes of the Universe” gives even the text of the opening credits a surging drama. “Here we are, born to be kings/We’re the princes of the universe!” The chords continue into the opening scene, where Connor sits in contemporary Madison Square Garden, watching hairy, bear-chested, spandex-clad wrestlers wriggle their fingers and hips flirtatiously before they bash together in sweaty struggle.
Noah Berlatsky – https://www.syfy.com
The five Kamen cues – “The Highlander Theme”, “Rachel’s Surprise / Who Wants To Live Forever”, “The Quickening”, “Swordfight at 34th Street”, and “Under the Garden / The Prize” – show a composer who is clearly still honing his craft. Despite the performance of the National Philharmonic Orchestra, much of the Highlander score feels very raw, as though Kamen was trying too hard to impress his employers with a vast array of flourishes, changes of tempo and style, and densely orchestrated action sequences. This is something that Kamen was guilty of quite a bit during the early years of his career […] and some may find his writing here lacks the smoothness and clarity of some of his later works. Despite this, there is still a great deal in Highlander to recommend. Kamen’s main Highlander theme is memorable – a two-note fanfare, echoed by a six note response in the horns – and it plays throughout much of the score. It’s a quintessential Kamen motif, with chord progressions and rhythmic ideas that those who have followed his career will recognize, and it gives MacLeod a noble, heroic identity. Kamen allows the theme to pass around his orchestra freely, from strings to brasses, and he augments his ensemble with electronics, a female solo vocalist, and even some region-specific instrumentalists, including bagpipes and a mandora, a type of medieval mandolin or lute.
Jonathan Broxton – https://moviemusicuk.us/2016/03/10/highlander-michael-kamen/
Highlander earned more than $12 million worldwide against a reported $19 million production budget and initially received mixed reviews. It later developed a cult audience and generated sequels and television adaptations. Princes Of The Universe became the television series’ title theme, while the line “There can be only one” entered popular culture.
Roger Chiasson, an animator whose work included Disney films, designed the “A KIND OF MAGIC” LP sleeve. Its caricatures of the four band members incorporate visual details that evoke the title. Related imagery recurs in the promotional video for A Kind Of Magic, connecting the album’s visual materials.
The relationship between Highlander and Queen also appears on seven- and twelve-inch singles. Several sleeves depict the film’s characters rather than the musicians.
These covers make the songs’ connection to the film explicit. Across different markets, the imagery could function as a bridge between a record and the cinematic narrative from which it emerged.
Concert tickets from the period also adopted elements of the “A KIND OF MAGIC” design, including its distinctive lettering:
Mulcahy directed the video for Princes Of The Universe, filmed on 14 February 1986 at Elstree Studios on a rooftop set used for Highlander. Queen’s performance is intercut with film scenes. Christopher Lambert appears as Connor MacLeod and stages a swordfight with Mercury, who uses a microphone stand as his weapon. May plays a Washburn RR11V rather than his usual Red Special.
The film, songs and videos thus share images and ideas. Their circulation across media helps establish a coherent visual and musical identity for the project.
Brian Bysouth designed the principal film poster and contributed to its visual identity. In an interview, he described the commission:
It was an enjoyable job and, fortunately, when asked to do a design for that type of film I was usually quick to identify what the key image should be. Phil Howard-Jones, the advertising director at EMI, who I did the work for, liked it very much and eventually he kindly returned it to me.
The final posters place the sword-bearing protagonist at the centre and identify Queen as contributors to the soundtrack.
Unlike the varied international designs for Flash Gordon, most Highlander posters retained a similar composition. A United States version used a black-and-white close-up of Lambert. The title logo and illustrative treatment remained important to the film’s visual identity.
Flash Gordon and Highlander: the Comparison
The following table compares the two films, their different musical approaches and the participation of each Queen member in writing for them.
| Flash Gordon (1980) | Highlander (1986) |
| Music is mainly instrumental | Music is made by sung tracks |
| An open orchestral structure can be heard all the time | Song structure is classic |
| Short musical segments repeated as Wagner’s leimotif when the main character (Flash Gordon) takes actions | Long complete songs |
| Only 2 complete songs at the beginning (opening titles) and at the end (credits titles) of the movie | Complete songs along all the movie |
| Additional orchestral arrangements by Howard Blake | Additional orchestral arrangements by Michael Kamen (in collaboration with Brian May) |
| The presence of music increases during the movie following the dramatic path of the story itself: in this case music gives emphasis to what can be seen on the screen | The presence of the music is constant during the movie and the lyrics help to better understand what’s going on |
| Music created by synths is used often as special effect and underlines the movie’s fiction atmosphere | Music is never used as a special effect |
| Wagner’s bridal chorus from opera Lohengrin is played by Brian May on guitar | A cover of New York, New York by Liza Minnelli is sung by Freddie Mercury |
Other Projects
Queen and its individual members contributed to other film and musical projects, but Flash Gordon and Highlander involved unusually close engagement with a film’s production and direction.
Elsewhere, a member might contribute one song, a track might be included alongside work by other artists, or an existing recording might be licensed for a film.
This combination of an orchestral score with separately recorded popular songs became a familiar practice in film soundtracks.
Other projects include:
- Metropolis (1984 – Restored version of the classic 1927 movie). Freddie Mercury wrote the song Love Kills
- Zabou (1986). Freddie Mercury wrote the song Hold On for the movie
- Biggles (1986). John Deacon wrote the song No Turning Back
- Time (1986). Freddie Mercury wrote the song Time for the Dave Clark’s musical
- Night And The City (1992). The soundtrack contains the Freddie Mercury’s cover of the classic song The Great Pretender
- Rise Of The Robots (1994). Although the game boasted May’s soundtrack, only The Dark appeared in the final release. May did in fact record a full soundtrack to the game, but it was postponed by his record company, causing Mirage to proceed without May’s musical contribution, with the exception of short guitar sounds
- The Amazing Spider Man (1995). Brian May wrote the main theme of the audio drama broadcasted by BBC
- Small Soldiers (1998). A remix of the song Another One Bites The Dust was recorded with the rapper Wyclef Jean
- Furia (1999). Brian May wrote the soundtrack for this movie directed by Alexandre Aja
- A Knight’s Tale (2001). Queen collaborated with the songs We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions (newly recorded with Robbie Williams)
The eYe
In 1998 Queen’s music entered the video game The eYe. Familiar recordings were remixed and adapted for an action-adventure format, frequently emphasizing instrumental material over lyrics.
These versions make details of the arrangements more audible without the original vocal parts. The music also interacts with the game’s action and with established Queen imagery, rather than serving solely as background.
Some tracks were reshaped as loops to meet the game’s requirements. Their altered structures show how existing music could be adapted to the temporal and visual demands of an interactive medium.
Electronic Arts released The eYe across five discs: “The Arena Domain”, “The Works Domain”, “The Theatre Domain”, “The Innuendo Domain” and “The Final Domain”. Joshua J. Macrae remixed the music at Roger Taylor’s Surrey studio.
The game imagines a future governed by the all-seeing machine “The eYe”, which suppresses creative expression. Dubroc, an agent who rediscovers a database of rock music, is condemned to fight in the televised Arena against opponents called the Watchers. His subsequent quest to destroy The eYe invokes the dystopian figure of an Orwellian “Big Brother”.
Elements of this setting later reappeared in the Queen musical We Will Rock You, another example of the band’s songs entering a new narrative form.
The music from The eYe has not been issued as a separate official soundtrack. Its five-disc tracklist follows:
Disc 1 – The Arena Domain
Arboria
Made in Heaven (loop)
I Want It All (instrumental, remix)
Dragon Attack (instrumental, remix)
Fight From The Inside (instrumental)
Hang On In There (intro)
In The Lap of the Gods… Revisited (edit, vocals)
Modern Times Rock’n’Roll (instrumental)
More Of That Jazz (instrumental)
We Will Rock You (commentary mix)
Liar (intro)
The Night Comes Down (intro)
Party (instrumental)
Chinese Torture (usual version)
I Want It All (instrumental, remix)
Disc 2 – The Works Domain
Mustapha (intro, vocals)
Mother Love (instrumental)
You Take My Breath Away (instrumental)
One Vision (intro)
Sweet Lady (edit, vocals)
Was It All Worth It (instrumental, edit)
Get Down, Make Love (instrumental, remix)
Heaven For Everyone (instrumental)
Hammer To Fall (instrumental)
Tie Your Mother Down (intro)
One Vision (instrumental, remix)
It’s Late (edit, vocals)
Procession (usual version)
Made in Heaven (instrumental, remix)
Disc 3 – The Theatre Domain
It’s A Beautiful Day (remix)
Don’t Lose Your Head (instrumental)
Princes Of The Universe (instrumental, remix)
A Kind Of Magic (instrumental)
Gimme The Prize (remix, vocals)
Bring Back That Leroy Brown (edit, vocals)
Ha Ha Ha, It’s Magic! (vocal sample)
You Don’t Fool Me (instrumental)
Let Me Entertain You (instrumental, intro)
Khashoggi’s Ship (instrumental)
Forever (usual version)
Don’t Try So Hard (edit, vocals)
Was It All Worth It (intro)
Disc 4 – The Innuendo Domain
Brighton Rock (intro)
I’m Going Slightly Mad (instrumental)
Bijou (instrumental, edit)
Khashoggi’s Ship (instrumental)
The Show Must Go On (instrumental, remix)
The Hitman (instrumental, edit)
Too Much Love Will Kill You (edit, vocals)
I Can’t Live With You (instrumental, remix)
Love Of My Life (harp intro only)
Disc 5 – The Final Domain
Death On Two Legs (intro)
Death On Two Legs (instrumental)
Ride The Wild Wind (instrumental, remix)
Headlong (instrumental)
Breakthru (instrumental)
Hammer To Fall (instrumental)
Gimme The Prize (instrumental, remix)
The Hitman (instrumental, remix)
Don’t Lose Your Head (usual version)
Gimme The Prize (vocals, remix)
Although the game’s graphics now reflect the technology of their period, they establish a world built from Queen-related images and lyrics. A Le Roy Brown poster, for example, recalls Bring Back That Leroy Brown :
Images associated with “INNUENDO”, themselves indebted to the French caricaturist Grandville, appear near the end of the game. Visual material thus moves from nineteenth-century illustration to album art and then to interactive animation.
We Will Rock You: The Musical
We Will Rock You is a jukebox musical with a book by Ben Elton, built around Queen’s songs. Its future setting follows Bohemians struggling to restore freedom of thought, fashion and live music in a society that suppresses instruments, composers and individual expression.
Directed by Christopher Renshaw and choreographed by Arlene Phillips, the original West End production opened at London’s Dominion Theatre on 14 May 2002. Tony Vincent, Hannah Jane Fox, Sharon D. Clarke and Kerry Ellis held principal roles. Initial critical responses were mixed, but the production attracted a sustained audience and marked its tenth anniversary in 2012.
The London production closed on 31 May 2014, with May and Taylor participating in its final performance. International productions subsequently extended the musical’s reach.
According to May, manager Jim Beach had discussed a musical based on Queen’s songs since the mid-1990s. An initial proposal centred on Mercury’s biography. Robert De Niro’s Tribeca Productions expressed interest, although that concept proved difficult to develop.
Ben Elton joined discussions with May and Taylor in 2000 and proposed an original story inspired by Queen’s music. He incorporated songs into the narrative and cited the computer-controlled world of The Matrix (1999) as one influence. The script was completed in 2001.
The musical also draws on aspects of The eYe and characters suggested by Queen’s lyrics: Galileo from Bohemian Rhapsody, Killer Queen from Killer Queen, the Gaga kids from Radio Gaga and Khashoggi from Khashoggi’s ship. Existing songs thereby gain new dramatic roles.
Conclusions
Queen’s work on Flash Gordon and Highlander extended beyond the contribution of a single theme song. Their compositions recur throughout each film and interact with orchestral writing by Howard Blake and Michael Kamen respectively.
Access to scripts, scenes and filmmakers enabled the band to compose in relation to dramatic action. This close coordination gave the music a structural role within the films, rather than treating it as an independent addition.
Across their career, Queen collaborated with visual artists in film, video, games and theatre. These projects helped their music circulate through forms of expression beyond the original recordings.
Queen’s imagery appears on records and across related visual projects. Film, games and theatre each transformed the band’s songs through their own technical and dramatic requirements. Even when a particular technology has aged, as with The eYe, the exchanges among sound, narrative and image remain valuable subjects of study.
© Nicola Bizzo
Links useful for this article:
- https://costumedesignarchive.blogspot.com/2020/12/flash-gordon-1980.html
- https://www.gordonisalive.com
- http://comics.cro.net/e-flash.html
- https://lwlies.com/articles/flash-gordon-joyous-comic-book-adaptation/
- https://flypaper.soundfly.com/discovery/sounds-future-history-primer-synths-sci-fi-movies/
- https://journals.openedition.org/comicalites/249?lang=en#ftn17
- https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/highlander-rules-because-of-queens-rip-roaring-soundtrack
- https://www.filmonpaper.com/posters/highlander-quad-uk
- https://moviemusicuk.us/2016/03/10/highlander-michael-kamen/
Related collections: Related material includes the Flash Gordon seven-inch releases and the study of Queen’s promotional videos.
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