10-17-2002 – Blabbermouth – QUEEN On Hollywood Boulevard

Legendary rock group QUEEN — John Deacon, Brian May, Roger Taylor and the late Freddie Mercury — will be honored with their own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Friday, October 18th. The star will recognize the unparalleled achievements of the band which dominated three generations of music history and follows an active campaign by the band’s US fans.

The star has become one of the world’s most coveted and sought-after honors, recognizing a lifelong contribution of both public and peer appreciation. Receiving this, QUEEN join the BEATLES to become one of only a handful of non-US bands to earn a place on the world’s most famous sidewalk. The 2,207th star on Hollywood Boulevard, QUEEN’s star will be unveiled at 6356 Hollywood Boulevard on Friday October 18th, at 11:30 a.m. Johnny Grant, honorary mayor of Hollywood and chairman of the Walk of Fame Committee, will preside over the event, and Leron Gubler, president/CEO of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, will speak on behalf of the organization. QUEEN will be represented by Brian May and Roger Taylor.

Throughout the 70s, QUEEN ruled in the US, reaching number one in the singles chart with “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and “Another One Bites The Dust”, the latter becoming one of the biggest-selling singles in American history. The band had no less than five Top Ten albums, and played to massive stadium audiences almost non-stop between 1974-1982. The legacy of the band lives on at sports stadiums across the country, where “We Are The Champions” and “We Will Rock You” have become anthems to countless teams, and in 1992 when “Bohemian Rhapsody” — the UK’s best single of the past 50 years (Guinness World Records) was featured in the film Wayne’s World a whole new generation discovered QUEEN, remaining loyal fans since.

Presently in the US, QUEEN are again setting chart records. The band’s recently released Hollywood Records Queen Platinum Collection deluxe triple-disc set has just hit the Billboard Top 100 at No. 48, making it the highest charting multi-release album in history.

In the UK, the Platinum Collection has now achieved double platinum status and has remained in the Top 30 for 27 weeks. This week will see the release both in the UK and US of the band’s first DVD, Queen Greatest Video Hits 1, a double-disc set containing re-mastered and re-engineered versions of 22 of the band’s videos, now heard for the first time in 5.1 digital surround sound.

The band’s musical, We Will Rock You, which opened in London’s West End in May, remains the UK’s biggest selling show. The QUEEN/Ben Elton show has now been seen by over 500,000 theatergoers and taken more than $20 million at the box office. The show has drawn standing ovations every performance since the opening, and its producers this week announced an extension of the present run through to January 2004.

In a further tribute to the band’s extraordinary influence and musical agility, next month will see the premiere — both live performance and on CD — of The Queen Symphony, a new work from British composer and conductor Tolga Kashif. The Queen Symphony is a six-movement piece which explores the themes of a number of QUEEN’s songs, drawing on and developing the band¹s own wide-ranging musical tastes.

Says Brian May of the symphony: “Imagine a composer of the imagination and daring of Tchaikovsky, a Holst, or a Mussorgsky. Imagine him let loose with the entire QUEEN catalogue of melodies, atmospheres and textures and a vast orchestra and choir. Then you will be close to imagining where this work begins. This is something monumental and quite outrageous.”

The Queen Symphony will receive its world premiere in a live performance by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at London’s Royal Festival Hall on Wednesday November 6th. The recording is released on CD by EMI Classics on November 4.

Says composer and conductor Tolga Kashif: “I think QUEEN’s music will always be remembered because it’s become part of the human consciousness. You only need to hear two notes. But it’s these indigenous, universal melodies, I think, that will always stay with people. And the fact that there have been so many projects based on QUEEN’s music is, in itself, a verification that the music of QUEEN is here to stay.”

The Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony will be followed Friday night by a special Fan Club party at which regular QUEEN guest musicians Chris Thompson and Spike Edney will perform with special guests.