OCEAN CITY – Long-running tribute act Killer Queen is bringing the songs of Queen to the Music Pier Monday, July 1.
Starting in the early ‘90s in the wake of Freddie Mercury’s passing, Killer Queen has now been touring and playing Queen songs such as “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” “Somebody to Love,” “Another One Bites the Dust” and “Bohemian Rhapsody” about as long as the legendary frontman did.
“It’s been a long career,” said singer Patrick Myers. “I think we were one of the first tributes out there, so we’re kind of the pioneers of the tribute world. But it’s great that all this time later we’re still touring, playing arenas, playing some of the same venues that Queen played in their day, places like Red Rocks that have us back every year.
“It’s brilliant fun, Austin City Limits and those sort of things, and we keep discovering new parts of the world. We’re just getting a new tour of Lithuania; we did a few shows there and we’re back again in November because they were great fun and a lovely place,” he said.
Playing the role of a legendary and talented singer is a daunting task, and one Myers takes seriously.
“I’ve got a routine I do,” he said. “I warm up in the morning a little bit for 20 minutes, I do a half hour or 40 minute workout in the middle of the day before soundcheck, and then I do an hour workout of sort of gentle exercises to build the voice up for the show. There’s a few little tips and tricks I use; you gather a few little things to gird your loins vocally through the years. They’re challenging songs to sing but if you stay healthy and look after yourself, they’re great fun to sing.”
When the group came together they were college kids playing the songs they loved, but they honed their craft until it was stage-ready.
“It was very much a case of putting the work in and improving as often as you can, as much as you can, all the time,” Myers said. “We were very, very young when we started. We were a bit naive; we didn’t realize how difficult it would be and we jumped in at the deep end, basically. It’s something I never take for granted. I’m always thinking about ways of keeping in shape and refining it. So it’s an ongoing task, I think. With any sort of rolling show that goes year to year, you’re constantly making little changes here and there. It’s a challenge but it’s great fun.”
Another major challenge that faces most groups is simply sticking together through the professional and personal obstacles that arise over time.
“I think we give each other a lot of space on the road,” Myers said, “and we come together on the stage and have a good time. We all enjoy doing the show, we all find the shows very rewarding and the songs are dynamite with an audience. So you get so much love back from the audience it kind of re-energizes you every night. We’re dealing with really great songs, just the best, stunningly good songs. So that helps too because you’re dealing with beautiful, fantastically written material.”
Indeed the songs of Queen demand the best of a performer each night. One cannot perform them halfway.
“You’ve got to be on your ‘A’ game to do this,” Myers said. “That’s part of the deal of being a tribute, really. You’re not allowed to have an off night, you’ve got to keep delivering. But you get into that mindset and that’s how it goes. It’s OK, you get used to that vibe. So it’s a challenge, but it’s a glorious challenge because it’s a very rewarding thing to do musically.”
After more than 30 years, Killer Queen continues to grow and reach new fans.
“[It’s] because Queen’s music is so good,” Myers said, “because Queen was so good. There’s no other reason, you know? We try and be good at what we do and sing, and I’ve got really great musicians who back me up. But essentially those songs, and the way Queen presented themselves, their attention to detail, their sense of showmanship and desire to give audiences everything means Queen remained popular the world over, which means we – thankfully – are also popular. So I think all credit to Queen, really, for that.”
Since Mercury’s death in 1991, millions have discovered the band’s timeless music. Myers and the group get to see the cross-generational appeal in person each night.
Queen as a rite of passage
“I think Queen are a real rite-of-passage band for a lot of people,” Myers said. “A lot of people fall in love with Queen and love them their whole life, but it seems to be quite common that you discover them early teens or pre-teens or at the beginning when you first discover what rock ’n’ roll is, whenever your musical journey really begins. They’re often there in the beginning. A lot of parents bring their kids to the show because Queen is their favorite band.”
“They’re not being brought just because their parents like it, it’s the other way around; the parents like it and they find out their kids absolutely adore them. Music kind of exists all at once, now doesn’t it? It doesn’t matter when it was recorded, it’s just ‘is it good?’ …Queen’s got decades of stuff to discover. So they’re a fantastic band and people often say, ‘That was our kid’s first rock n roll concert, thanks for making it so special.’ We get that a lot and really, that – for me – is fuel in the rocket tank to hear that. And you can see the kids in the audience having a brilliant time, just jumping up and down laughing and screaming, just letting themselves go and being a kid, having a great time, totally unselfconscious. And they’re probably seeing adults behave that way for the first time, too. You can see the kid being liberated by it, thinking, ‘This is something special.’
“It’s important that people can get together and just lose themselves and have fun and feel passionate and scream and shout and wave your hands in the air and all those things. So to be the person that turns up and provides that to people is wonderful.”
Myers see himself and the band not as the vehicle that brings these experiences to fans, but in a slightly different light.
“Well, the vehicle is Queen and we’re kind of driving,” he said. “People fall in love with Queen and they love them all their lives, so we get whole generations who get their moms and their dads as I was saying but also sometimes even their parents. Sometimes you get four generations of people; it’s like some Egyptian proverb or something – four legs in the morning, two legs in the day, your average Queen demographic. It’s everybody.”
Myers takes his role quite further than simply learning the songs as he immerses himself in the character of Freddie Mercury for performance.
“It’s very close to my heart,” he said. “That’s all I can say – it’s very close to my heart. It’s been my whole life, really. I discovered Queen, I think, right after Live-Aid I discovered all their music and I thought it was just amazing so it’s had a profound effect on my life. Then also losing Freddie was a deeply shocking thing to have happen. I’d discovered the Beatles before but I didn’t know who John Lennon was when he died. I very much knew who Freddie Mercury was and how extraordinary he was and that felt like a big event, a shock like the universe wasn’t programmed the way it should be if this can happen. I’d just left home as well, so I think that amplified the experience because you feel very isolated. You’re away from your home for the first time with all new friends and suddenly your hero is gone in such a horrible way. So it had quite a seismic effect on me. So in college there was quite a bit of Queen music being played from that point forward. That’s how we started the band, because we were playing it so much we started playing it to each other. There was a battered old piano in the laundry room in the residence hall and we’d say, ‘This is how the end of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ goes,’ and I’d go, ‘Oh no, I thought it went like this,’ ‘No, no, look at this chord here,’ and we gradually taught each other how it went, how these songs went and that’s how it originated.”
From studying drama to posing as Freddie Mercury
“I was studying drama and acting and started trying to pose as Freddie Mercury in the mirror the Christmas after he died. I realized I had mascara all over my beard because my beard didn’t quite patch up properly; it was a young man’s beard. I had a little helping hand with my mum’s mascara and because it was dark I suddenly had a dark mustache and beard like Freddie had in his last years. I started putting the face on and I had a lovely blue shirt that reminded me of Freddie’s shirt in one of his videos. I started saying, ‘Oh that’s just like Freddie, this is great,’ and I had a red tie like Freddie wore and I started doing faces like Freddie. I’d never done it before and I started doing it in the mirror and I thought, ‘Blimey, my face totally changes when I do that,’ and it took me by surprise.
“All of this has taken me by surprise and I thought I had to do something with this. It felt like, ‘You have to do something now,’ and so I formed a tribute band and I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea. I thought it might be a bad idea or regarded as cheesy, and I didn’t want to spend my life doing something cheesy. I wanted to spend my life doing something that was good, so I thought if we’re going to do it we’re going to make it good. We’re going to do it as well as we can so I spent a lot of time working out how to do this. We put it all together and did the show and the first show we did absolutely took my breath away. It was an experience that still resonates with me. It was extraordinary for me and this feels very precious to me. This music means a lot to me and doing this feels a real privilege.”
“Each night you start the band again, it’s like a first gig every night. This audience needs to see you, some of them are seeing you for the first time. Every night feels like a rebirth, really. You’ve got to prove yourself again but you’ve got these amazing songs. They’re such a gift. It’s like delivering Christmas for people. You know what’s under the tree, you know what’s under the wrapping.”
Fifth time in Ocean City
Killer Queen has visited the Music Pier for five summers running now between their larger venues.
“We really like it there,” Myers said. “It’s a lovely venue, everyone is so friendly. Everyone is always in such a good mood. So it’s a real nice stop for us on our tour schedule. Yes, we’re playing big places like Red Rocks and Austin City Limits and different arenas and stuff like that. But the Ocean City Music Pier is always a lovely gig to play and a lovely location and everyone is so friendly at the venue. It’s great.”
The band works hard to always keep the show fresh.
“We try and change the setlist around,” Myers said. “There are certain sections of the show we like to keep mixing up a little bit. We don’t tell people what the songs are in advance because that would defeat the point, really. We like to surprise them. We keep augmenting the show; we try to pack as much production as we can into each venue we play. So some nights that’s huge pyrotechnics, screens, huge bands of light. Whatever size stage we get to play on we pack as much as we can in. We’re always adding to the show in that way and always thinking of new configurations.”
“It constantly evolves because if you do something all the time it has to get moving, really. It does it without you realizing sometimes. Suddenly it’s a completely different show than the same time last year. It’s like a stand-up comic gradually adjusting his set as he moves from one town to another and by the end of the tour it’s something different than the beginning. Parts remain – we’re not going to suddenly not do Bohemian Rhapsody. But there are moments between where we mix it up a bit. That’s always a pleasure to do; it’s always nice to surprise an audience.”
A sense of humor in the lyrics
An often unheralded aspect of Queen’s material is its sense of humor.
The lyrics vacillate between total earnestness and tongue-in-cheek tones.
“That’s something I always loved about them,” Myers said. “There’s so much wit in their songs. People sometimes categorize Queen as sort of bombastic and I can see where you could get that because they have their anthems that they’re amazing at. But there’s so much more to them than that, so much dexterity and wit and inventiveness in the songs. A song like ‘Killer Queen’ is so beautiful and I love that song. I can almost feel how he wrote it. When you look at the chord progression you think he must have been so pleased with that. You can imagine him writing it quite quickly in some respects, but it’s so good you can feel the energy of the song. ‘Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy’ and so many good songs, they’re like an indie band sometimes when you look at some of their album work in the early ‘70s – songs like Long Away, which is a Brian May song that would fit on any indie band’s roster. There’s so many styles of song they did, ‘Stone Cold Crazy’ is like thrash rock. Some bands would take a song like ‘Stone Cold Crazy’ and make it the template of their entire album or their entire work. Queen just did that as a one-off and said, ‘Alright, we’ve done that,’ and moved on. Just create and genre and go, ‘Next.’ There’s such a wonderful mixture of very naked, raw, simply expressed emotion and really subtle shades of humor and emotional shifts. There’s emotional maturity too in songs like ‘Days Of Our Lives,’ which is a Roger (Taylor) song. I fell in love the moment I heard it; Freddie’s voice sounded different, it sounded thinner but it sounded purer. I thought, ‘Gosh, has he quit smoking? What’s going on?’ Sadly he was getting ill and he had stopped smoking. But he had a beautiful and unique quality to his voice at the end of his life. It sort of shimmered, it was very ethereal on that song. It’s a very mature reflection of a band in middle age. They were all mid-40s then and thinking back and assessing life and being in the limelight. Beautiful song, so very articulate, effortless but so beautiful. That’s one of my all time favorites. We have a show in England called Desert Island Discs where you get marooned on an island and you can only choose eight records and that would be one of my records, I think, Days Of Our Lives. Beautiful song.”
Through it all Myers is still able to enjoy the songs like the young kid first discovering Queen.
“Funnily enough I was a huge Beatles fan and I’m still a Beatles fan,” Myers said. “But I often feel these days – sometimes you get fed things a lot on your feed – I got overfed Beatles a lot. I sometimes think I’ve heard their songs enough now. That’s the first time I ever felt that and I felt it this year, I thought, ‘I need a little break from the Beatles.’ I’ve never had that with Queen, which is weird because you’d think it’d be the other way around. You’d think I’d disappear into another band so I could have a break from Queen. But for me, I love rediscovering Queen. If there’s a performance I haven’t seen from Freddie, if there’s a fragment of studio outtakes, if there’s a song that comes up on your feed, I’ll stop and listen to it, even if – especially – it’s Freddie just mucking about I find it brilliant. I love it. He was a very lovable character.”
Killer Queen will bring that energy, along with those brilliant songs, to Ocean City next week.
For tickets visit ocnj.us
– STORY by KYLE McCRANE/For the Sentinel