Queen and Adam Lambert to rock Dublin with new state-of-the-art show

The tour will showcase a spectacular new stage production and a set list which the band hints will provide some surprises.

The band will play their only show in Dublin at 3Arena on Saturday November 25. The tour continues across Europe and the UK until mid-December with the final show at London’s Wembley SSE Arena on December 15.

Tickets for 3Arena priced from €87 including booking and facility fees will be on sale from 9am Friday 21 April via Ticketmaster.ie, with venue pre-sales earlier from Wednesday at 9am.

VIP Packages will be available from €356 which include on-stage seating.

For their 2017 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”.

Queen drummer and co-founder Roger Taylor insists the 2017 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 2017 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.”

Queen + Adam Lambert’s magnificent 2017 touring show has been custom tailored for the band by some of the world’s most cutting-edge creative talents. Responsible for design and production is Ric Lipson from Entertainment Architects Stufish Productions, renowned worldwide for their innovative work with artists such as Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, and U2, as well the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Making use of over 300 moving lights during the show is the highly acclaimed lighting designer Rob Sinclair, who has illuminated tours for major artists including Adele, Peter Gabriel and Kylie Minogue. The production’s genuinely eye-popping laser elements are the work of ER Productions, behind both the opening and closing ceremonies of the London 2012 Olympics and seen by over 900 million people worldwide. On the musical side, the Queen + Adam Lambert touring band also features Spike Edney on keyboards, Neil Fairclough on bass, and Tyler Warren on percussion.

Since first sharing the stage for the American Idol final in May 2009, Queen + Adam Lambert have proved to be a hugely successful global partnership, having now played more than 90 shows in every corner of the world. In summer 2012 they played their first full live shows across Europe, making their spectacular official debut in front of half a million people in Kiev.