Adam Lambert Unleashes His Inner Freddie Mercury For Incredible Performance Of Bohemian Rhapsody
Mar 30, 2020 by apost team
In front of 300,000 fans, American Idol star Adam Lambert joined Queen Live to sing Bohemian Rhapsody in Kiev. The concert, an AIDS benefit show, kicked off Lambert and Queen Live’s abbreviated European tour back in the summer of 2012.
While you might remember him as American Idol’s season eight runner-up, Adam Lambert has made a name for himself as one of the country’s most successful vocalists. It’s no wonder then that the 38-year-old singer caught the legendary British rock band’s attention as early as in 2009, which began what has become a longtime, fruitful musical relationship.
“A musician friend of mine in America was like, ‘You’ve gotta check out this guy on Idol,” Queen drummer Roger Taylor told Rolling Stone in 2014. “So we Googled him. His voice was phenomenal. He had this sort of slight Elvis look going on. I just thought, ‘Wow, what a voice! Those octaves!'”
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Lambert’s impressive performances on the show were so good in fact that they got Taylor and Queen guitarist Brian May to fly out to Los Angeles to join the American Idol star for the show’s season finale, according to Rolling Stone. Nonetheless, Lambert ended up losing to Kris Allen despite back up from the rock and roll greats. But luckily, that didn’t mean an end to Lambert and Queen’s musical collaboration.
Shortly after American Idol, Lambert was preoccupied with the American Idol tour as well as the singer’s first studio album, For Your Entertainment, which came out in 2009. But in 2011, he and the band reunited to play three songs at the MTV Europe Awards, which sparked some more conversation around future collaborations. The talks eventually culminated in the performance in Kiev and the 2012 Euro tour, which Lambert described as “beautiful” in a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone.
“It is surreal. I feel honored. I feel inspired by it. It’s also one of those things where you’re going to sink or swim, especially when we were onstage for for the first time in the Ukraine in front of 300,000 people,” Lambert told Rolling Stone. “I was like, ‘Well, it’s now or never. You gotta run with it.’ It’s similar to be in camera with Idol. You go for it.”
If Lambert’s mini tour with the band was akin to an audition, he seems to have passed with flying colors given that the band has toured multiple times together since they first took the stage together as part of Queen Live in 2012. In fact, since Lambert and Queen’s tour in 2014, the American Idol singer and the band have been on the road together every year, according to Rolling Stone. Lambert’s new role as touring singer in the band comes after former vocalist Paul Roger’s departure back in 2009.
Of course, there’s no replacing the late, great Freddie Mercury. But Lambert has shown that while he might not be Freddie Mercury, the American singer does justice to Mercury’s historic musical legacy — and for that, we can be grateful. But to really understand Lambert’s talent as a singer, make sure to turn up the volume and watch the entire 2012 Bohemian Rhapsody performance.
Are you a Queen fan? What did you think of Lambert's rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody? Let us know and make sure to pass this on to your musical friends and family members.