---

---

---

---

---

---

---

Freddie on top of Darth Vader
Hallenstadion, Zürich, Switzerland
Sunday 23rd November 1980

Fred, the Steinway and the OBX synth
Soundcheck in Japan
February 1981

Roger, Brian, Freddie and the OBX
Soundcheck before a stadium gig
March 1981

John Deacon, very serious, on bass
Giant Stadium, Rosario, Santa Fe
Friday 6th March 1981

Mercury and Maradona, two Maestros
Amalfitani Stadium, Buenos Aires
Sunday 8th March 1981

Who would get more girls?
Amalfitani Stadium, Buenos Aires
Sunday 8th March 1981

One more pic of Freddie and Diego
Amalfitani Stadium, Buenos Aires
Sunday 8th March 1981

---

---

23/11/1980 - 18/10/1981
35 concerts in 330 days
1 gig each 9 days and 10:17:08.57

For the first and only time ever, Brian May dominated the band in most fields: producing, lyric-writing and performing. The case was a bit similar to Pink Floyd's The Wall although with completely different levels of success. Flash Gordon is indeed Queen's worst-selling album together with the first two ones, and remains virtually ignored by most of the fandom and often even the band members (there's a story about John Deacon listening to it and asking who the artist was).

In a way it's very un-Queen like: most tracks are instrumental (and synth-dominated), there are snippets and dialogues from the film thrown in and the orchestra (arranged and conducted by Howard Blake) often takes a central role as well.

* This is the only album not to feature piano from Freddie (the one on the title track is played by Brian). Mercury played most of the synthesisers, though.

* Flash's Theme, the lead single, topped the charts in Austria and made it to the top ten in the UK, Germany, Belgium, Italy, France and Ireland. With 1,900,000 copies purchased by the public (thus outselling the likes of A Kind of Magic and Under Pressure), , it's the band's ninth biggest hit and the most successful A-Side Brian ever wrote (Rock You was first B- then double-A). However, it was overlooked for the Absolute Greatest compilation.

* While travelling to Japan to support the album, Queen run into the Nottingham Forest football club (which included Trevor Francis and the phenomenal Peter Shilton) and were invited to the Intercontinental Cup match on 11th February against Nacional of Uruguay. The West Bridgford team lost one-nill. Montevideano forward Waldemar Victorino was the MVP and the one who scored the only goal of the match. He would leave the club to join Colombia's Deportivo Cali, which had been managed by former porteño midfielder Carlos Salvador Bilardo, who would be very famous for coaching, years later, the national football team of Argentina that would defeat England in the 1986 World Cup with two famous goals by Diego Maradona (and the English keeper was again Shilton, BTW). The band also met Maradona when they went to Argentina. Sadly, AFAIK, neither Pelé nor Zico showed up at the Morumbi concerts.

* Howard Blake was a last-minute choice by the film producers as the person originally hired to score and conduct the orchestra had been sacked due to allegedly spending too much time in composing. That person, Paul Buckmaster, was well-known (and had been recommended) by the Queen members and has played in and/or arranged several rock classics over the years including Bee Gees' Odessa and Guns 'n' Roses' Prostitute.

* While the album liner notes claim the album sessions took place between October and November 1980 (i.e. after The Game tour in North America), biographies (official and unofficial) suggest the soundtrack was actually recorded at various English, American and European locations during and after the tour. Who knows who's to be believed...

* For a solo played near end of the album (on The Hero track but that bit is actually a reprise of Flash's Theme), Brian had to use a guitar that was lying around in the studio, as his home-made Red Special was in West Germany. It's still unknown what was used (same for amp).

I was brought in in a crisis situation when it was found that the composer nominated by 'Queen' had for some reason been unable to complete 'more than one minute' of a score for the film. I was summoned to a meeting at CTS Wembley by sound recordist John Richards and Brendan Cahill head of music for Universal Studios Hollywood. The RPO had been booked for two weeks and started recording the day before but had nothing else to play. I said it would take at least 4 weeks to write the amount of music required, possibly 90 minutes. After ferocious negotiations with my agent Liz Keys at London Management I began work, but the time gradually whittled down to 10 days and the last 4 days of that I didn't sleep. An added complication was to include various guitar phrases and the song Flash within my large-scale score for 80-piece orchestra. Somehow I finished it and conducted the 3 days of recording sessions, but afterwards I went back to my house in Mortlake and collapsed exhausted. My wife had left the house with the 2 children at the end of my first writing day, bothered by endless phone calls and courier bikes. She returned on the Saturday expecting me to have left for France on the Thursday. In fact I had been asleep for 3 days. She called a doctor who injected me with something to wake me up. He said it was possible I would never have woken up at all, since I was suffering from chronic bronchitis due to total exhaustion! Anyway I recovered and I and everybody else were pleased with the score. Dubbing sessions began and I later discovered that much of my score had been replaced with synthesized music, myself having demonstrated how to handle it. A disappointment.

However, my relations with the members of Queen were always cordial. Brian May came over one day and hummed an idea for an 'overture'. As he did so I jotted it down on some manuscript paper and then played it back on the piano, which really startled him. They all came along to the orchestral recordings and seemed fascinated. I remember Freddie Mercury singing the idea of Ride to Arboria in his high falsetto and I showed him how I could expand it into the orchestral section now on the film, with which he seemed very pleased. Whilst scoring I had cassettes of guitar ideas from Brian, in particular the slow 'falling-chord' sequence. I wrote this out into my score at one point and surrounded it with big orchestral colour. When I came to the recording I had Brian's solo guitar on headphones and conducted the orchestra in synch. around it. Many months later Brian came over and we listened to the finished album.

Howard Blake, Official Website,

We were doing The Game and an American tour at the same time Flash was going on, so it was ridiculous. We put as much time as we could in. We would do a week here and a week there. I spent some time with the arranger and orchestra to try and get some coherence to it all. It was good experince, but next time I hope we have time to really pull the whole thing together as a unit. I played some of the prominent keyboard aynthesizer parts, but I think Freddie played most of them. The main challenge was working for a boss who wasn't yourself. We had the director in there the whole time. The only criterion for whether something was good was whether in helped the movie.

Brian May, Guitar Player, January 1983

It’s a Queen album with a difference but, we wouldn’t have put it out with the name Queen on it if we didn’t think it was musically up to scratch in that sense. So it was music written for a film but with the idea that it will stand up as an album even if you’ve never heard the film. Which is I particularly why wanted bits of the dialogue in it as well rather than just a dry music soundtrack album. I wanted to be able to put the album on and to be able to visualise the whole thing even if you hadn’t seen it, virtually. So hopefully, it tells a story, you know, like those children’s records you buy which I like very much. Where they tell the story and then they have the music and everything. You don’t need anything else it’s just your own little world. You just get carried along by the story.

Brian May, Radio One, 1983

Howard Blake was not the man originally booked to do the orchestral links ... it was Paul Buckmaster who was offered the job first, largely on our recommendation - we had admired his work with Robin Cable and others at Trident Studios when we were starting out, recording our first album in the same building. But it went awry. Paul was a meticulous perfectionist, as far as I can tell, and spent quite a few months writing and arranging before it was realised that he had only done music for a small fraction of the film. I'm sure what he did was amazing, but the producer and his team were outraged, as the delivery deadlines drew near, and sacked him. Howard Blake, in the days before his lovely score for "The Snowman", was not a name, but had a reputation for getting things done. He came in and, as I remember, wrote and recorded everything that was needed in a couple of weeks! Yes, we interacted a little, but not a lot. His main brief was to link up what we had done, extrapolate, and fill in the gaps ... using the themes we had injected as a basis. He did a great job of blending some of those scenes together.

After he'd delivered his stuff, I think he was needed elsewhere, as were the rest of my band! There were still many ends to tie up, and I was more or less the only one around, so I was called in to finish the soundtrack. It was odd. I remember being in Anvil (or was it De Lane Lea), with the film running on the screen, and all the production team sitting there watching me run about playing all the parts which I'd sketched in my head for the battle scene. I'd play a bit of guitar, then go over and play a bit of synth, and bass, and ... using some out-takes of drums that Roger had left us, piecing the sequence together. At the very end there was still no end credits music. So I went into the Town House with Alan Douglas, the engineer, and threw together a long new piece called The Hero, which included a reprise of Flash ... using some of the old take, but constructing the whole thing on a drum machine framework. When the rest of Queen returned for a couple of days they played on the framework I'd made. The Hero was hard on Freddie ... very high and demanding a lot of power in that top register. He said - "Brian, you always write me these songs which f...ing kill my beautiful voice!" But he did a great job, as did Roger and John. It was an incredible rush. We had that day only, and when the chaps had gone home I realised the solo was still in my head and not on tape - and my guitar was in Munich. I picked up some guitar that was lying around in the back of the studio, and we made it drive an amp, also lying around, hard. Somehow, although the strings were about as thick as chair legs, so my fingers got shredded, we whacked it down. And mixed the track ... again, to picture. The length worked out perfectly. The bonus was that I given carte blanche to use everything in the film for this job, and, whereas in the beginning Howard had woven our themes into his work, now I was weaving bits of his score into our work . It was great fun. I never had the chance to ask him, afterwards, if he was OK with me stitching bits of his work into the end titles. The carte blanche thing gave me another idea. I realised that if they would give me all the 'sprocket' reels with Orchestra, Dialogue, and Sound effects, I could effectively make a potted sound version of the whole film for the soundtrack album. And compress it all still further to make a single, which would evoke the whole stor of the film. To my knowledge, nobody ever did that before.

The Wedding March? Well, I always enjoyed turning my guitar into an orchestra. By the way, did you figure out the extra hidden piece that is embedded in my arrangement of the song?

Brian May, Official Website, Wednesday 29th April 2009