Recently, Metro had the chance to ask Queen drummer Roger Taylor if he’d seen the clips of Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre performing with a representation of the late Tupac Shakur at Coachella.
“I’ve heard a lot about those clips,” he says. “I have not seen them, but I know the guys and I know the technology involved.”
You can probably guess where we’re going with this, Metro wonders. “I can, I think,” counters Taylor, whose most famous collaborator, Freddie Mercury, died in 1991. So would Taylor and Queen’s still active guitarist Brian May be open to the idea of playing with a hologram?
“I would not like to perform with a hologram of Freddie,” he says definitively. “Brian and [I] looked at the possibility of putting a hologram in our show in London, ‘We Will Rock You.'”
Ultimately the pair decided not to use a hologram for that production or for their latest endeavor. Instead Taylor and May are putting their efforts into the very human Queen Extravaganza, a group which includes two guitarists, a bassist, a drummer and four vocalists, all found through a three-month online audition search. One of the main singers, Marc Martel, has particularly moved Taylor. “I was sitting down writing something, facing away from the stage yesterday and Mark was singing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ and I had chills down my spine,” he says. “It was as if Freddie was in the room.”
That, along with the fact that Martel has an uncanny physical resemblance to Freddie Mercury sounds like enough reason not to have a projected image of the late singer on the stage. “It just doesn’t sit too well with me,” says Taylor. “I don’t want to appear with a hologram of my dear friend.”
