Twenty minutes of rushes, then the Abbey Road strings
Russell Mulcahy showed Queen about twenty minutes of Highlander, still unfinished. He had wanted one song. They left ready to do more. The scene that stayed with Brian May was Connor MacLeod holding Heather while she grew old and died, then carrying her body up the hill. May’s father was dying of cancer. His marriage was coming apart. On the drive home he sang the song to his manager, almost finished, and could not say where it had come from.
The recording sits on A Kind of Magic, not on a Highlander soundtrack album. Queen and David Richards produced that record between September 1985 and April 1986, at Musicland in Munich, Mountain in Montreux and Townhouse in London. May sings the first verse. Mercury takes the rest. Michael Kamen co-arranged the score with May and conducted the National Philharmonic Orchestra. The orchestra was recorded separately at Abbey Road by Eric Tomlinson, who had also recorded the orchestra parts for Flash Gordon. The sleeve does not credit Kamen as conductor. What you hear under the guitars is still that room: strings, horns, harp, a bass drum.
EMI released the single in Britain on 15 September 1986. It peaked at number 24. It was never the chart story of that album. A Kind of Magic, the title song, had already been number 3 in March, and the album had entered the British chart at number 1 in June. Who Wants To Live Forever is the piece that stays with Heather’s death in the film. May has said the pictures and the track locked on the first try, every change of mood. On the Magic tour that summer, Queen played it with the orchestra on tape. Wembley in July 1986 was the last tour with all four of them.
It was almost complete in the car going home. I remember singing it to my manager as he drove me home and he was pretty surprised. He said, “where did that come from?” and I said “I don’t even know where it came from, but I can just hear it in my head.”
(Brian May)
The song is May’s, written about a death in a film and two losses closer to his own house. Mercury sings most of the finished vocal. The single edit trims the album cut. The version that holds is the full one, with the orchestra at the end. Kamen’s film scores, Highlander among them, are the same handwriting. On the Queen record the handwriting is May’s melody, Mercury’s voice after the first verse, and a room of strings at Abbey Road that the sleeve barely names.
People file it with the big Queen ballads. The useful fact is smaller. It was written in a car, after twenty minutes of rushes, because a woman aged and died on screen while the man who loved her did not. The band then hired an orchestra and put it on a rock album that was already going to be number 1 without it.
