It will be seventh time popular Queen tribute band performs in resort
OCEAN CITY – Long-running tribute act Killer Queen is bringing the songs of Queen to the Ocean City Music Pier Monday, June 30.
Killer Queen formed while the members were in college in the early ‘90s, steadily honing their craft and building their following in the years since.
Frontman Patrick Myers takes the role of iconic lead singer Freddie Mercury.
The band will be hitting the stage on the Boardwalk for its seventh time.
“It’s great fun,” Myers said. “It’s a nice venue, super friendly, and the audience is really enthusiastic. So it’s always a pleasure to go back there.”
The show in Ocean City is the third of an extended tour that will stretch through the fall.
“Yeah, we’ve got four weeks at the end of June to the end of July,” Myers said, “and then we’ve got another four weeks after that, from September to mid October, so about eight or nine weeks, 10 weeks-ish, kind of all together. So that’s going to be great. We love going out to America. The audiences are really enthusiastic. People seem to love Queen music. The thing about Queen music we’ve sort of found over the years is it seems to appeal to the whole family. So you get a whole generation turning up, the kids bringing on their parents, particularly after the film Bohemian Rhapsody came out, a lot of kids got into Queen.”
Killer Queen is constantly evolving its show to keep things fresh and fun.
“It changes from year to year in terms of what we’re doing,” Myers explained, “and the songs we put here. And we’ve got a great lighting set, great costumes, a lot of special effects. So we try and give people a concert they’ll remember, and people keep coming back. So that’s great.”
Myers was studying acting in school when he and his friends began playing Queen songs together in the wake of Mercury’s passing.
“It was kind of strange,” he said. “It wasn’t something I planned to do. It sort of happened organically in a weird kind of way. So yeah, it is, I guess, a sort of a combination of acting to an extent. I mean, Freddie, when he was on stage, his onstage persona really was a persona. It was like a character that behaved in a certain way. So I’m sort of trying to get as close as possible to Freddie’s onstage persona. But Freddie was unique. Freddie was a one-off. He remains, I think, the world’s leading front man. I think he’s just extraordinary. So we’re kind of following in his footsteps. But yeah, an acting background and being a musician as well, the combination of those things definitely help.”
Tribute bands as a whole were a novel concept when Killer Queen started out. Now more than 30 years on, Myers has even had the chance to see other Queen acts.
“I always go,” he said. “If there’s anything playing local, I pop along and have a look and see what they’re doing. You know, there’s anything nice there, I think, okay, let’s maybe give that a go and see how that goes down. But generally, when I was starting, there weren’t any other tributes. You know, we were one of the very first tributes on the planet, let alone in England. It was just a completely new thing. So it was easier to get started and build up a big profile. And you know, we ended up playing the same arenas as Queen at some points. So that was great. I think it would be harder to do that now, because there’s just so many tributes out there, but I guess we were lucky in that respect.”
A legendary venue the band has played is Red Rocks in Colorado.
“We’re going back there this tour,” Myers said. “We’ve been there, playing there every year since 2016 apart from a couple of years off during lockdown, during the pandemic. But it’s an amazing place to play. It takes your breath away as a place, because it’s this huge amphitheater with seats that stretch up to the clouds really sort of steeply racked up, and it’s surrounded by these amazing rocks, and it’s also quite high up in the mountains. So when I say it takes your breath away, it does on both levels, physically, to look back and actually, practically, it takes your breath away because the air is quite thin up there. So it’s an amazing place to play. And this time around, in July, it’s the last show of the tour. So we’re looking forward to that. It’s a lovely place to finish the tour.”
Myers explained how he gets into the role of Mercury each night.
“I do about an hour’s worth of vocal preparation before I go on stage, and I do a few vocal sessions throughout the day to sort of gently get my voice in the right shape. And while I’m doing those vocal preparations, I just get into costume and do all the various bits and bobs that you need to do. And by the time that hour’s up, I’m transformed. I don’t look like me anymore. I look like the lead singer of Killer Queen, and it’s a different kind of thing. And with that in mind, I’m kind of ready, really. I find just that hour of vocal exercises, you know, like hair and makeup and stuff, is enough to make me it feels like, I’m ready to go on stage. The thing that helps me most of all is the music itself. The music itself, I find inspirational. It’s exciting music, it’s very dynamic music. They’re really well-written songs. So that, to me, feels like a pathway through the show, and it’s that pathway that helps me sort of get in character, so to speak, and it’s that music and that pathway that gives me the energy that you need to get on stage and give everything you’ve got.”
Myers sees Queen’s fingerprints on music to this day.
“A band like Muse reminds me of Queen a little bit in thow they’ve got a big sound, and it’s sort of crazy,” he said. “They go to different places, really. I see Queen’s influence in little ways all over the place, really. But I don’t think there’s been another band quite like Queen. I think they’re quite unique, really, but they’re influential musically in terms of production and what’s possible and their signature sounds. You hear little bits of that in different acts all over the place, really.”
Queen informs Myers’ own original writing as well.
“During lockdown, I started doing little cameos for people because I was stuck at home,” Myers said, “so I’d be in the Freddie character and writing little mini-songs for them, and then doing a bit of a Queen song and wishing them happy birthday or congratulating them on something. So I was writing little mini-songs for people in the style of Queen, and I found that absolutely wonderful. I thoroughly, thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed that it was such fun just applying all those different things that you’d noticed about Queen songs for fresh compositions of your own. And then I started writing songs on the back of that. I started writing actual songs, not always at the start of Queen, but I sort of fleshed a few out. And so I love sitting at the piano, and I love using Queen as a sort of sketch pad, to sort of bounce it to a new song. So as an inspiration, really, as a toolkit, I think they’re wonderful songwriters. They’re all very different songwriters, but the combination that was something brilliant was wonderful. So yeah, they remain an inspiration to me. And when I sit at the piano, I obviously play Queen songs because I’ll be rehearsing and just practicing certain praisings. But generally, if I’m being creative, I lean on Queen a bit.”
The material demands full-bore energy each night to do it justice.
“I think it’s amazing,” Myers said. “It’s a combination of the crowd and the music. The music I find, as I said before, the music is the energy and the dynamics of the music gives me energy every night. I feel fresh on stage every night. It feels good. Yes, there’s elements of touring that’s certainly exhausting. And if you’re doing a sort of 20 or 30 day tour, you know you’ve got to pace yourself. But that’s more to do with what you do with a day leading up to the show, how you look after your energy while you’re traveling and getting the right amount of sleep and water and all that sort of boring stuff when it comes to actually being on stage. The music and the crowd, that’s all I need, really. I enjoy being on stage with the band. There’s a camaraderie. We’ve been together a long time now, and it’s nice interacting with them and sharing our space together. They’re brilliant musicians in the band. It all combines to make a good show that people seem to enjoy, luckily.”
Bands as ubiquitous as Queen, ironically, often end up with aspects of their career being underrated.
“I think a lot of their songwriting is overlooked because people tend to focus on the well-known song,” Myers said. “There’s some amazing songs, if you delve deep into… well, just look at the albums. They covered so much ground musically, and there were so many different styles of songs that they did so well with such exquisite touch and emotion. So, you know, I think people focus on the hits a lot, but I think there’s so many amazing songs. If you just look a little bit deeper than that, you don’t need to look that far. There’s so many great songs. I’m a big fan of the albums Sheer Heart Attack and New Of The World. They stand out to me as just perfectly realized albums. So, yeah, I think even though they’re celebrated, no one knows how they’re great songwriters. You’d be surprised how many people don’t know the depth of their songwriting. They were extraordinary songwriters, and what they achieved together was brilliant. Unsurpassed, really good.”
Myers sees, and shows, each night how timeless Queen’s music is.
“I think they cover so many musical bases,” he said. “It’s not like they were New Wave, or they were only electro pop, or they were only sort of glam rock, or they were only having that set into it. They skipped through the various stages of music in the 70s and 80s and 90s without actually being chapped by any of it. So there’s that element to it. But I think the other element is they’re really, really, really good songs. You’d never think listening to Killer Queen (the song), that it could be the same band that does Under Pressure a few years later, that it is the same band. You can sort of tell it’s the same band, you’ve got that same Queen feel to it, but they’re such different songs. You know, it’s that variety; they all wrote. I think that was really important. They all brought something to the table. And they all had sort of imperial phases of their writing. Roger Taylor wrote some great songs in the 70s, but his stuff in the 80s became all the singles. He wrote Radio Gaga. He wrote A Kind Of Magic. He wrote One Vision and stuff like that. These Are The Days Of Our Lives, which is a beautiful song, one of my favorite Queen songs.. I think it’s alchemy. You get the right bunch of people at the right time, at the right time in their lives, with the right talent, you combine it and you create something absolutely, very, very, very, very special. And that’s what Queen had. It was very special. So does the Beatles. That was very special. Just what was amazing about Queen – they kept going so long. They didn’t implode. I
“’m sure they felt like it now and again, because if you think our touring schedule is heavy, their touring schedule at their peak was outrageous. I mean, how they had the energy to come back and record straight away? I don’t know. They worked so hard. They took a bit more time off in the 80s, but they worked so hard from about 1973 to 1982 it was relentless, and they produced so much great stuff. I think it’s extraordinary if a band can produce one good album. The amount of brilliant things that Queen produced is just amazing. The fact that they stayed together, and then the last album they released when Freddie was still on the planet, was Innuendo and was some of their career best. Innuendo the song is absolutely brilliant. The Show Must Go On is jaw dropping. Days of Our Lives shimmers with beauty. And even a song that, like I was saying, they don’t know is a song called Don’t Try So Hard on the Innuendo album is absolutely beautiful. It speaks to my heart, that song, so much. Queen songs can be very, very, very moving, as well as great fun, as well as rocking out. They cover a lot of emotional bases. You’ve got to sort of have an appreciation of the whole catalog, really, just sort of just to see how good they were, right?”
– By KYLE McCRANE/For the Sentinel