Fan-filmed video footage of Geoff Tate‘s performance aboard this year’s Monsters Of Rock cruise can be seen below. The show saw Tate playing many of QUEENSRŸCHE‘s biggest songs, including early classic “Queen Of The Reich”, which originally appeared on the band’s debut EP.
Tate had previously expressed his reluctance to perform “Queen Of The Reich” at his live concerts, telling Rock Show Critique in a 2012 interview: “It’s funny, actually — a lot of people don’t know about that song. A lot of people don’t care about that song. It’s an early song that was written and it shows. It’s funny the reaction you get, because it’s a lot of blank stares. In fact, it’s the same stare you get when you play a new song that nobody’s heard before. People just aren’t that familiar with it. Given there are a few hardcore fans that might know that song, or like that song, and know what it is, but the majority of the people there don’t. So it’s not really a song that I enjoy singing, strictly because, lyrically, it’s pretty adolescent. It was the first song written thirty-some-odd years ago and obviously I cannot relate to it anymore. I think, for performance, it’s always best for the performer to really believe in the material they’re singing or playing. If you don’t believe in it, it’s really difficult to get behind a song, do it well and do it at a level that comes across with any kind of believability. For me, I honestly can’t relate to the whole dungeons-and-dragons lyrical content of that song; it’s really cartoonish and juvenile to me.”
Tate‘s current tour is celebrating the 30th anniversary of QUEENSRŸCHE‘s “Empire” and “Rage For Order” albums.
1986’s “Rage For Order” introduced a much more polished look and sound for QUEENSRŸCHE. The album featured keyboards as prominently as guitars, and the group adopted an image more closely associated with glam rock or glam metal than with heavy metal (of which glam metal was a subgenre). A video was filmed for the song “Gonna Get Close to You”, originally recorded in 1984 by DALBELLO.
Released in 1990, “Empire” included the hit ballad “Silent Lucidity”, which reached No. 9 on the Billboard singles chart, helped propel “Empire” to No. 7 on the album chart and earned two Grammy Award nominations.
Prior to the launch of the trek in early 2020, Tate told MisplacedStraws.com that he would take the “Empire 30th Anniversary Tour” to “as many countries as I can and playing the album in its entirety, which I’ve never done before. So that’ll be real fun. In fact, I think there’s some songs on that album that I’ve never, ever played live before, so it’ll be a treat — for me, as well, I think, for the audience too,” the former QUEENSRŸCHE singer said. “I’m really looking forward to that.”
Tate told Eonmusic that one song from “Empire” that was rarely performed live is “Anybody Listening?” “When QUEENSRŸCHE was together, we never really put that song in our set,” he said. “We just had a hard time playing it, for some reason; it just never jelled or felt right. And I’d really like to play that song again, and play it right.”
In April 2014, Tate and QUEENSRŸCHE announced that a settlement had been reached after a nearly two-year legal battle where the singer sued over the rights to the QUEENSRŸCHE name after being fired in 2012. Original QUEENSRŸCHE members Michael Wilton (guitar), Scott Rockenfield (drums) and Eddie Jackson (bass) responded with a countersuit. The settlement included an agreement that Wilton, Rockenfield and Jackson would continue as QUEENSRŸCHE, while Tate would have the sole right to perform the albums “Operation: Mindcrime” and “Operation: Mindcrime II” in their entirety live.
Tate was replaced in QUEENSRŸCHE by former CRIMSON GLORY singer Todd La Torre.
Geoff recently celebrated the 30th anniversary of “Operation: Mindcrime” on European and U.S. tours.
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