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The development and release of Flash Gordon heralded the start of many bands becoming involved in movie soundtracks and turning them into albums. Flash Gordon itself proved to be a popular movie at it’s release and no doubt the collaboration with Queen to write and perform the soundtrack was beneficial to both the movie and music producers. Indeed it would serve Queen well later with their involvement in Highlander which lead to the band releasing ‘It’s a kind of magic’.

The Flash theme itself became an anthemia single and still today is popular as a hairbrush hit with all ages. Queen seemed to use the album as a spring board to experiment with instrumentals but not just any ordinary instrumentals. They combined the tracks with dialogue taken from the movie to produce a storyline running through the tracks in order and in that respect found that much of the audience that watched the movie would buy the album and those that hadn’t seen the movie would buy the soundtrack and then watch the movie.
The album most certainly could not be called a queen classic in terms of the quality of the tracks as in essence they are merely a mixture of instrumentals and nothing more, but the idea of using the tracks to form an album had not been as successful as when this album was released. Yet again Queen had been seen to be stretching boundaries and trying innovative techniques which to this day are used by bands and individuals connected with the world of movies.
Even more impressive is that it was claimed that Queen only had 20 minutes or so of footage to watch before they wrote the tracks and only had around 3 months to complete the album. A very good performance even by their high standards. All in all if you are looking for cleverly crafted high quality tracks then you may be disappointed but if you are looking for something a little different which is fast and packed with fun then this is the album for you to put on, sit back and enjoy. 

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