MUSIC: Queen and Adam Lambert to rock Dublin

QUEEN and their new front man, Adam Lambert, have announced live shows for 2017 that will see the band return to Europe to showcase a spectacular new stage production and a set list that they promise will provide some surprises.

The band will play their only show in Dublin at 3Arena on Saturday, November 25. The tour then  continues across Europe and the UK until mid-December with the final show at London’s Wembley SSE Arena on December 15.

For their 2017 tour, the band will unveil a brand new show including a specially designed state-of-the-art production.

The choice of performance material will no doubt acknowledge this year’s 40th anniversary of Queen’s biggest-selling studio album to date, ‘News of the World’ from 1977, which yielded the immortal anthems ‘We Will Rock You’ and ‘We Are the Champions’.

Queen drummer and co-founder Roger Taylor insists this tour will look “entirely different to the show we took around before”.

“Production has really changed a lot,” he explained. 

“The things you can do now, you have a much broader palette, the technology has really come along.

“But we don’t use it all. It’s 100 per cent live. We’re planning on doing stuff we either haven’t done before or haven’t done for a long time. We started as an albums band as that’s what we were. The fact that we had hits was just a byproduct.”

Guitarist Brian May confirmed that Queen’s 2017 shows will have a more ambitious musical agenda.

“The general public knows the hits, so you’ve got to cater for that,” he says, “but we can chuck in a few things that people really don’t expect.

“We’ll do quite a bit more of that this time around. There are so many dimensions to Adam, which of course fits with our music. He can get down and do the rock stuff really dirty. So you have all those dimensions, and we can explore that even more.”

Adam Lambert has welcomed the challenge of digging deeper into the band’s canon of classics.

“What people should know, if they came to the shows a couple of years back, is obviously we will still be playing the big hit songs you know and love from Queen, but we thought it would be good to challenge ourselves a bit,” he explains.

“We want to change it up a little bit, change the visuals, change all the technology, and change the set list to some degree.

“We will probably be pulling some other songs out of the Queen catalogue that we haven’t done before, which I am very excited about.”

Queen and Adam Lambert’s magnificent 2017 touring show has been custom tailored for the band by some of the world’s most cutting-edge creative talents.

Responsible for design and production is Ric Lipson from Entertainment Architects Stufish Productions, renowned worldwide for their innovative work with artists such as Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, and U2, as well the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

When Queen and Adam Lambert played their first North American tour in 2014 they were crowned Band of the Year at the 10th annual Classic Rock Roll of Honor awards and Best Live Band of the Year in Ultimate Classic Rock’s readers’ poll.