TEG-DAINTY announced today that Queen + Adam Lambert will embark on a 6-city arena tour of Australia and New Zealand 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.
Queen + Adam Lambert’s tour dates are:
AUCKLAND – Saturday 17 February at Spark Arena
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 six-city tour go on sale on Friday 23rd June at 10am (local time) via Ticketmaster and Ticketek.
Queen + Adam Lambert toured Australasia in 2014 to sold out arena shows and stunning accolades 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 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”.
Paul Dainty, President and CEO of TEG-DAINTY commented “Queen + Adam Lambert’s sold out tour of 2014 was one of the highlights of my career as a concert promoter, to see those iconic songs come to life was incredible. I am very much looking forward to bringing the band back to New Zealand and Australia in 2018 with this brand new show.”
Queen drummer and co-founder Roger Taylor insists 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 confirms 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.”
Adam Lambert welcomes 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. “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.”