A Kind of Magic

A Kind of Magic is the twelfth studio album by the British rock band Queen, released on 3 June 1986 by EMI Records in the UK and by Capitol Records in the US. It was their 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. A Kind of Magic was Queen's first album to be released since they had been acclaimed for their performance at the 1985 Live Aid concert. It was an immediate hit in the UK, going straight to number one and selling 100,000 copies in its first week. It remained in the UK charts for 63 weeks, selling about six million copies worldwide (600,000 in the UK alone). The album spawned four hit singles: the album's title track "A Kind of Magic", "One Vision", "Friends Will Be Friends", and "Who Wants to Live Forever", which features an orchestra conducted by Michael Kamen, while the last track, "Princes of the Universe", is the theme song to Highlander. Although Queen would release another two albums with Freddie Mercury (excluding posthumous releases), A Kind of Magic would turn out to be the band's last album promoted with a concert tour, because of Mercury's diagnosis with AIDS the following year, which subsequently caused his death in 1991. The video for "One Vision" shows them in various stages of writing and recording the song.