Queen and Adam Lambert are heading back to Australia and will embark on a five-city arena tour in February and March 2018.
The tour will showcase a spectacular new stage production and a set list which the band hints will provide some surprises.
The band will kick things off in Sydney on 21st February before heading to Brisbane, Adelaide and Melbourne. The tour will finish in Perth on Tuesday 6th March at Perth Arena.
Queen + Adam Lambert toured Australia in 2014 to sold out arena shows, getting rave reviews from fans and critics.
For their 2018 tour, the band will unveil a brand new show including a specially designed state-of-the-art production.
The tour is expected to note 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.
Announcing the tour, Queen drummer and co-founder Roger Taylor insisted the 2018 tour “will look entirely different to the show we took around before. Production has really changed a lot, 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. We don’t play to click track. It’s 100% 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, that’s what we were. The fact that we had hits was just a byproduct.”
Guitarist Brian May confirmed Queen’s 2018 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, and you have all those dimensions, and we can explore that even more.”
Queen formed in London in 1977 and were one of the biggest bands of the 1970’s and 1980’s. He band’s legendary front man Freddie Mercury passed away in 1991.
Four years after his death the band released the album Made in Heaven. In 2004 the band returned to touring with former Free vocalist Paul Rogers out front, Queen and Paul Rogers released an album in 2008. SInce 2012 the band has been teaming up with Adam Lambert.
Lambert said he was looking forward to 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.
“Change it up a little bit, change the visuals, change all the technology, change the set list to some degree. We will probably be pulling some other songs out of the Queen catalogue which we haven’t done before, which I am very excited about.” Lambert said.
Tour Dates
SYDNEY – Wednesday 21 February at Qudos Bank Arena
BRISBANE – Saturday 24 February at Brisbane Entertainment Centre
ADELAIDE – Tuesday 27 February at Adelaide Entertainment Centre
MELBOURNE – Friday 2 March at Rod Laver Arena
PERTH – Tuesday 6 March at Perth Arena
Tickets for the five-city tour go on sale on Friday 23rd June at 10am (local time).
Grab tickets from Ticketek.
Support OUTinPerth
Thanks for reading OUTinPerth. We can only create LGBTIQA+ focused media with your help.
If you can help support our work, please consider assisting us through a one-off contribution to our GoFundMe campaign, or a regular contribution through our Patreon appeal.
