Some songs take years to finish. Others arrive all at once. Brian May’s “Who Wants to Live Forever” belongs to the second kind. The Queen guitarist wrote almost all of it in the back seat of a car, singing it out loud while his manager drove him home. By the time they arrived, one of the most haunting ballads of the 1980s was very nearly complete.
What set it off was twenty minutes of unfinished film.
Twenty Minutes of Rough Footage
In 1985, director Russell Mulcahy was making a fantasy film called Highlander, starring Christopher Lambert and Sean Connery. He wanted more than a traditional orchestral score. He wanted a rock band, and he wanted Queen.
He did not have a finished movie to show them. He had a rough cut of about twenty minutes, and he was not sure how the band would react.
“I had twenty minutes of the film cut together, and I brought them in.” – Russell Mulcahy
Brian May later admitted that he had not even read the script. He walked in knowing almost nothing about the story. He walked out deeply moved.
The Scene That Started It
Highlander is about Connor MacLeod, a Scottish warrior who discovers he cannot die. The footage Brian May saw included the part of the story that hurts the most. Connor falls in love with a woman named Heather. He is warned that loving a mortal will only bring him grief. He marries her anyway.
Then the years pass. Heather grows old. Connor does not. He stays young while the woman he loves ages and dies in his arms.
For Brian May, that scene landed somewhere personal. He has said it opened a floodgate in him, because he was carrying heavy things of his own at the time. His marriage was falling apart, and he was facing the loss of his father. Both of those losses would become final in 1988, two years after the song came out.
Singing in the Back Seat
On the drive home, the song simply arrived. Brian May sat in the back of the car and sang it out loud, working it through as he went. His manager, who was driving, was surprised. He asked where on earth the song had come from.
“I don’t even know where it came from, but I can just hear it in my head.” – Brian May
Brian May has said the song was almost complete before he got home. He later put it down roughly on a keyboard, without seeing the footage again for a long time.
A Perfect Fit
Here is the part that still amazes people. When the band finally played the song back against the film, it matched the scene almost exactly. The rise and fall of the music lined up with the moments on screen. Brian May called it uncanny, and said that luckily the filmmakers did not have to re-cut anything.
In the movie, the song plays over Connor and Heather’s life together, as she grows old beside him. Roger Taylor later said he loved the song most in that setting, with those long, moving shots of the Highlander and his wife.
From a Car Ride to Abbey Road
The finished recording grew far beyond a keyboard sketch. Queen recorded it with the National Philharmonic Orchestra, with arrangements by Michael Kamen, who was also co-writing the film’s score, working together with Brian May. The orchestra was recorded at Abbey Road Studios in London.
There are two versions most fans know. In the film, Freddie Mercury sings every lead line. On the album A Kind of Magic, released in June 1986, Brian May sings the first verse himself before Freddie Mercury takes over. It became a duet between the man who wrote it and the man who made it soar.
The music video, directed by David Mallet, showed Queen performing with the orchestra, forty choirboys and hundreds of glowing candles. Roger Taylor later joked that he was the only one not dressed for the occasion, showing up in denim.
Released as a single in September 1986, the song reached No. 24 in the U.K. It was not Queen’s biggest chart hit, but it became one of their most lasting.
A Summer on Stage, and What Came After
That summer, Queen took the song on the road during the Magic Tour, including two famous nights at Wembley Stadium in July 1986. Nobody knew it then, but it was the last tour Freddie Mercury would ever play with the band. His final show with Queen came at Knebworth Park on August 9, 1986.
Freddie Mercury was diagnosed with HIV in 1987, a year after he sang the song night after night. He died in 1991. A few months later, Seal sang “Who Wants to Live Forever” at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at Wembley.
Brian May wrote it about an immortal man in a movie. He wrote it while thinking about his own quiet heartbreaks. He could not have known how many people would one day hear Freddie Mercury’s voice on that song and think only of him.
Do you remember the first time you heard “Who Wants to Live Forever”? Was it in the theater, on the radio, or years later?