Still relatively new, the Music in the Vineyards project offers the opportunity to enjoy the most famous bands in the beautiful surroundings of individual wineries. This also applies to revivals, which are getting more and more popular. Queenie’s show in Valtice showed why this is so.
Live: Queenie
place: Chateau Valtice
date: August 18, 2023
As Karel Gott sings in the song “Muzika”: “Time flies like crazy, I can’t catch it, neither can you.” The era of bands that the current middle generation grew up on is irretrievably approaching the past. Recently, for example, Ozzy Osbourne has been forced to stop touring, Elton John and Aerosmith are planning to go on their last tour, so it could go on and on. Music fans are thus increasingly debating the meaning of revivals. Of course – there is only one original, with his performance and the songs he invented. However, it has to be damn good to make it worthwhile for someone to continue its legacy. And as with everything, there are good copies and bad imitations. And Queenie definitely belongs to the first variant. If you become a fan of a band, you often look down on their revivals without listening to their work. However, videos with samples of the performance of the formation around frontman Michael Kluch from the several times sold out O2 arena show that here it is a slightly different chapter and it was confirmed in Chateau Valtice. Compared to the original models, Queenie have several advantages – they can play Queen compositions from the albums “The Miracle”, “Innuendo” and “Made In Heaven”, which the original band could not play live, in addition, they mix in their performance, or as they call concert theater admixtures from solo projects of group members. So in Valtice, a more rock-oriented “Living On My Own” sounded, or in the middle of the song “Now I’m Here”, a fragment from May’s beautiful instrumental “Last Horizon”. Although it started quite traditionally like on Queen’s last tour in 1986 with the smash “One Vision”, then the performance took a different turn. At the beginning, Klucha may have been thrown a little by almost falling on the stage, but he soon got over it and was singing fantastically well from “Under Pressure” at the latest. In the original keys, he also sang all the high parts that Mercury tactfully avoided at performances. “Somebody To Love” did not sound the same without the chorus as, for example, in the interpretation of George Michael from the 1992 tribute concert, but that was a complete detail.“;$(this).parent().parent().html(tmpo);return false;”>
The band otherwise stepped precisely and offered a balanced cross-section of Queen’s work. He then interspersed it with his own single “Let Me”, which is already available on digital services. The basic set ended with the anthemic “The Show Must Go On”. The encore then lasted perhaps another half hour, so the total footage of the set reached somewhere around two hours. Connoisseurs hummed according to one of the polls the most popular song of English drivers “Don’t Stop Me Now”, romantic and in a way fatal for Mercury “Too Much Love Will Kill You”, until the show reached the final treble of hits “We Will Rock You “, “Friends Will Be Friends” and “We Are The Champions”. The very well-filled Chateau Valtice environment was quickly won over by the musicians. It is nice that the band still emphasizes the desire to be as faithful a copy of the original as possible, so the guitarist’s instruments seem to have fallen out of Brian May’s Red Special, the drummer had a blond hair, the bassist a t-shirt à la John Deacon, but of course the most faithful copy was the singer Michael Kluch. All the movements, gestures, curls, patting on the ass, hands clenched into fists and, of course, fantastic singing gave at least a partial indication of what it might have looked like almost forty years ago at the performance of the legendary British group. At the end, there was also a traditional royal crown and ermine to make the illusion perfect. This line-up reminded me of The Backwards from Košice, who in turn play the work of the Beatles and are also almost perfect. And such revivals should continue to be able to push the creation of their originals into the ears of future generations.
2023-08-20 16:21:00
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