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“I’m a huge Queen fan,” Adam Lambert said shortly after he completed his run on season eight of American Idol. “Freddie’s the man. He’s the voice. Just the musicianship required to sing that kind of music is really high. It’s very melodic and rangy and dramatic and I appreciate all that.”
Five years later, standing front and center at the iHeartRadio Theatre in Burbank, Lambert said that if you had told him back then that he would be touring as the lead vocalist of Queen, he wouldn’t have believed you for anything — and who would have argued with that?
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To preview their North American summer tour, which begins on Thursday in Chicago, Queen and Lambert performed a 40-minute set for about 650 lucky fans. The event was video streamed on Yahoo Screen, with a live audio stream on Clear Channel stations around the country and iHeartRadio.com.
The presentation started with a brief pre-taped Q&A conducted by longtime Queen fan and Motley Crue man Nikki Sixx. Then Brian May, Roger Taylor and Lambert took the stage and kicked their live set off with “We Will Rock You.” They continued with the band’s two Billboard No. 1 hits, “Another One Bites the Dust” and “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.” Next came the only relatively unknown song of the evening, “Love Kills,” originally a Freddie Mercury solo recording produced by Giorgio Moroder for the soundtrack to the 1984 re-release of the 1927 film Metropolis. Then it was back to the familiar, as the Lambert-fronted Queen tore through “Fat Bottomed Girls,” “Under Pressure,” “We Are the Champions” and “Don’t Stop Me Now.”
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That brought the evening to an end. Anyone who wanted to hear “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the song Lambert performed during his audition for Idol, would have to buy tickets for the tour.
The audience quickly filed out of The Burbank Studios, formerly home to NBC. Once outside, a few fans spotted a familiar figure exiting the theater — Gavin DeGraw, who happily posed for photos with those who asked.
If the spirit of Freddie Mercury was present for the evening, he wasn’t alone. While the young fans in attendance couldn’t have had any idea, Queen and Lambert performed in the same studio that was once home to Johnny Carson for The Tonight Show, Redd Foxx for Sanford and Son and Bob Hope for his NBC specials.
Twitter: @fredbronson
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