LIVERPOOL, NY – It was one long bus ride to France in the early 1980s when a friend put his cassette headphones on the ears of Patrick Myers to hear the sounds of Queens greatest hits.
“I couldn’t believe it, it was amazing. The song writing was so good, the production sounded so pristine. Everything about it was just so far ahead of what I expected a band to sound like, it was just so good,” Myers said of his first experience hearing the ever popular British rock band.
From there, the rest is history. Myers would go on to lead a tribute band that followed closely in the footsteps of their idols and is now preparing to debut in CNY at Sharkey’s of Liverpool.
Killer Queen formed at London University when Myers and his friends heard the news of Queen’s lead singer, Freddy Mercury’s death.
So, Patrick Myers on vocals joined together with his friends Mike Kruk on drums, Simon Small on guitar, and Brad Waissman on bass guitar to keep Queen’s music and spirit alive by performing as a tribute band on the University campus for their classmates and friends that weren’t able to see Queen perform before Mercury’s death.
Their first big show came when they landed the London University Union main concert performance.
“Suddenly we had this amazing, unrefusable offer to headline the ball in the capital of London in front of a huge crowd of more than 1,000 students as our opening show. We couldn’t say no, we were terrified,” he said. “We thought, let’s just do it.”
With a small budget and growing fears of the chances of failure, they put together their costumes and perfected their music to take the stage and hope for the best.
“It could have been our first gig and our last gig but the amazing thing that happened was, it went amazingly well. It still ranks as one of the best evenings of my life,” Myers said.
Despite having no other shows booked, the manager of the event quickly reached out to Killer Queen for management and put them on the path to an immensely successful musical career that no one expected.
At a time when tribute bands were not often heard of, Killer Queen went on to attract international press and headline shows in arenas that their idols had formerly filled.
The group toured Europe and Russia, won an award for “Worldwide Best Tribute Band” at an award ceremony in Leicester Square hosted by Suggs from Madness, they played the Ahoy Stadium just months before the reformed Queen band performed at the same place and then returned to the same stadium in 2009 only to fill it with satisfied fans.
They represented Queen in a re-staged tribute LiveAid concert held by Sir Bob Geldof to raise funds for the homeless, won Sweden’s Vasteras concert hall award for “Best Concert of the Year 2009,” and celebrated their 20th anniversary by performing a former arena of the original Queen crew, the Brighton Centre.
In 2016, they took the show to America including a stop to rock the Red Rocks Arena in Colorado where they will return as part of their third U.S. Tour in 2018.
“It was like a series of bubbles within bubbles of dreams. You kept thinking ‘wow, it would be a dream to do that’ and then ‘wow, it would really be a dream to do that.’ We kept popping from one bubble of reality to wake up in another bigger bubble and then another slightly bigger bubble. We just kept thinking at some point this was going to stop, we were going to wake up and land on the ground and carry on with the rest of our lives and think ‘wow, what a trip’ but it hasn’t,” Myers said.
25 years later, they’re still finding themselves in new bubbles of dreams achieving success in the footsteps of the idols.
For Killer Queen, it means a commitment to replicating the spirit and performance of Queen as closely as possible.
“Queen fans tend to be out and out rockers who’ve got a really good musical ear,” he said. “And we do too. We come from that same school of people, we are the Queen fans as well. So, we always look for the approval of our audience and when we are told it really felt like a Queen show, that’s absolutely gold to us.”
Killer Queen will bring their rocking resemblance to CNY for a performance at Sharkey’s of Liverpool on July 11 starting at 6p.m. to give their Upstate NY audience everything they would expect from Queen themselves.
“Expect some of the best rock and rolls songs ever,” Myers put it simply. “It’s a party. Queen audiences were as big a part of the event as Queen was and that’s the way we try and work it too. So, if you want to let your hair down and sing your heart out, come and see us. It’s the costumes of Queen, but its the feel of a Queen concert is what we’re trying to do, that’s our mission. It’s like a rock and roll blueprint for a great night out and it’s the best blueprint I’ve ever come across in terms of dynamic, music, energy and just sheer emotion.”
Just like a Hubble telescope, Killer Queen will allow you a look at the past that you may have missed out on. Join us at Sharkey’s on July 11 to rock like it’s 1980.
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