Queen & Adam Lambert have announced details of a massive UK and Ireland arena tour for 2017. Full dates and ticket details are below.
Lambert, who rose to fame on US talent show American Idol before finding success as a solo artist, has been the touring frontman and replacement of Freddie Mercury with the band since 2011. Now they’re teaming up again – and the band also promise that a few surprises will be in store.
“The general public knows the hits, so you’ve got to cater for that,” said guitarist Brian May, “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.”
Adam Lambert added: “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.”
Drummer Roger Taylor promises that the 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 we had hits was just a bi-product.”
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Check out the band’s full upcoming UK, Ireland and European tour dates below. Tickets will be on sale fro 10am on Friday 21 April and available here.
EUROPE
Wed 1 November – O2 Arena, Prague, Czech Republic
Thu 2 November – Olympiahalle, Munich, Germany
Sat 4 November – Sportarena, Budapest, Hungary
Mon 6 November – Atlas Arena, Lodz, Poland
Wed 8 November – Stadhalle, Vienna, Austria
Fri 10 November – Unipol Arena, Bologna, Italy
Sun 12 November – Amneville Galaxie, Luxembourg
Mon 13 November – Ziggo Dome, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Fri 17 November – Zalgiris Arena, Kaunas, Lithuania
UK & IRELAND
Sat 25 November – 3 Arena, Dublin
Sun 26 November – SSE Arena, Belfast
Tue 28 November – Echo Arena, Liverpool
Thu 30 November – Barclaycard Arena, Birmingham
Fri 1 December – Metro Radio Arena, Newcastle
Sun 3 December – The SSE Hydro, Glasgow
Tue 5 December – Motorpoint Arena, Nottingham
Wed 6 December – First Direct Arena, Leeds
Fri 8 December – Motorpoint Arena, Sheffield
Sat 9 December – Arena, Manchester
Tue 12 December – O2 Arena, London
Fri 15 December – The SSE Arena, Wembley, London
This comes after Brian May recently revealed that the long-awaited Freddie Mercury biopic movie will be coming next year, and the coming months will see the band release a special edition Queen Monopoly board.
Asked about returning to work with Queen, Lambert said: “There is potentially more work with Queen. There is a lot of talk and a lot exciting stuff to discuss next year. I’m not ready to make announcements yet but there’s a lot on the cards.”
And as for those Glastonbury rumours: “Who knows? That would be cool. You want to give them a call?