Drummer Roger Taylor says the band were careful not to release the record as a soundtrack as they wanted it to stand up as a Queen record in its own right. He adds: "I think the idea of a complete soundtrack album puts people off.

"I think they imagine all sorts of orchestral links which don't really do anything, and it's really just background music, which it isn't at all. It's a fully-fledged Queen album."

Bassist John Deacon adds: "We did all the music for the film first and they dubbed it on. When it came to doing the album, we re-arranged a lot of the tracks and made them longer and wrote more lyrics, tried to make them into fully-fledged songs. So they stand up in their own right, without necessarily having to be with the film. You can hear them on the radio and they would sound like songs rather than incidental music."

Frontman Freddie Mercury - who died five years later in 1991, explains how he reworked the album's title track, written by Taylor. Mercury says: "We all have our own ideas of how a song should be. In the case of Roger's track, Magic, he did it in a totally different way which was quite good. But I just felt there was another commercial streak.

"I realised he was going away to LA for a week so I got hold of it and I change it round completely. When he came back I said, 'What do you think?' And he said, 'Oh, I like it.'