Singled Out #3: "Flash's Theme" / "Football Fight" -- Queen

I spun an online letter picker wheel this afternoon and it stopped on the letter Q, so I reached into my Q singles. And, while Quarterflash and Quiet Riot might have been fine choices, I went with Queen’s 1980 single, “Flash’s Theme” from the film Flash Gordon.

I thought this was a decent-sized hit for Queen but it didn’t even crack the U.S. Top 40, peaking at #42. However, it was prominently featured on the original Greatest Hits that Queen released in 1980. For those of us who weren't quite old enough to be buying that many albums when Queen first hit the scene in the mid-’70s, Queen’s Greatest Hits was a convenient way to tie together all those hit Queen songs that culminated in the one-two punch of #1 hits, “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and “Another One Bites the Dust” in 1980.

Those hits might explain why “Flash” wasn’t a bigger smash. Maybe it was a bit too quirky at that moment, when the band was suddenly having huge radio hits.

Or maybe it was the movie dialog that relegated the single to cult status (though it reached #10 in the UK and #3 in Germany). And speaking of that dialog, I have never seen Flash Gordon and I am not willing to admit, with some embarrassment that “Warwick” and “Ajax” were two characters who were dispatched to “bring back his [Flash’s] body”. It has only been in recent years, that I learned that it is “War Rocket Ajax” that will be doing the Flash body retrieval job.

I think it’s the placement of “Flash” on Greatest Hits — between the “We Will Rock You”/”We Are the Champions” medley and “Somebody to Love” on the U.S. edition of the compilation — that has led to the song being much-beloved by those of us who belove it.

I’d love to continue to write about “Flash”, but… “we’ve only got 14 hours to save the Earth!” In the meantime though, here are photos of the front and back covers of the picture sleeve: