QUEEN legend Roger Taylor will play York Barbican on October 5 as the only Yorkshire show of his “modest” 14-date Outsider tour this autumn.
In a “surprise announcement” today, rock drummer Taylor, 71, confirmed he would be on the road from October 2 to 22.
“This is my modest tour,” he says. “I just want it to be lots of fun, very good musically, and I want everybody to enjoy it. I’m really looking forward to it. Will I be playing Queen songs too? Absolutely!”
Taylor’s solo travels will combine new material from his October 1 lockdown album, Outsider, with solo material down the years and an “enthusiastic foray” into the Queen back catalogue.
Prompted by the pandemic pressing the pause button on Queen + Adam Lambert’s UK and European tour until 2022, Taylor has decided to give his first live performances outside Queen in more than two decades.
This autumn’s intimate concerts will “showcase his distinctive percussive, vocal and songwriting talents that have been integral to Queen’s live and recorded output since 1970”.
Taylor penned such Queen favourites as A Kind of Magic, Radio Ga Ga, I’m In Love With My Car, Sheer Heart Attack and These Are the Days of Our Lives, complemented by five albums under the name of Roger Meddows Taylor: Fun In Space, 1981; Strange Frontier, 1984; Happiness, 1994; Electric Fire, 1998, and Fun On Earth, 2013.
He also made three albums with the band The Cross, releasing Shove It in 1988, Mad, Bad And Dangerous To Know in 1990 and Blue Rock in 1991.
Over the past decade, Taylor has recorded the occasional solo number, reflecting on his worldview and observations in such songs Journey’s End, Gangsters Are Running and, last year, the aptly named Isolation, written in response to the first lockdown.
Now comes Outsider, the multi-instrumentalist’s first studio set of new material since 2013’s Fun On Earth, much of it penned and recorded during lockdown in a reflective mood. Conveying a sense of seclusion and concern over the passing of time, tellingly he dedicates the album to “all the outsiders, those who feel left on the sidelines”.
Giving the inside track on recording Outsider in the wake of Isolation, Taylor says: “I’ve had a bit of a creative spurt and suddenly found myself with an album, which was lovely. It was a surprise! I just found myself in the studio and they came out one after the other. It was a pleasure really.”
Under lockdown conditions, a highly personal project evolved, wherein Outsider’s instrumentation was performed almost entirely by Taylor, with his largely restrained vocals matching the predominantly contemplative ambience, although he did cut loose for a burst of hard-riffing blues-rock and an adrenaline-fuelled re-tread of a classic 1965 novelty song. Wait and see which one, when Outsider surfaces on October 1 on Universal.
Tickets go on pre-sale from 10am on June 8 at shop.emi.com/rogertaylor/.
