Queen Archives - ShaneMcDonald.ie

My Next Adventures with Celebrating Queen

by Shane McDonald | Sep 19, 2022 | Personal, Travel

My Adventures with Celebrating Queen, the US based Queen Tribute Band, continues this September and October. There are two more concerts in the coming 5 weeks and I am looking forward to meeting up with the Celebrating Queen band to fulfil these dates. The following are the Celebrating Queen tour dates in the next few weeks, detailing where the Celebrating Queen band are going to be performing.

Headlining the Murphy Maize Days Festival near Dallas, Texas on Saturday 24th September

The first event is a nice date headlinging the 13th annual Murphy Maize Days Festival. This is sort of a Carnival … or Cornival, sort of a harvest festival which is being held in Murphy Texas. The area of Murphy is within the greater Dallas metro area and is located between Plano and Wylie. If you are reading this and you are in the area, then please join us as this Maize Days Festival is a totally FREE festival, open to all. If you are going to be attending the Murphy Maize Days festival near Dallas, then please leave a comment below and I hope to see you there.

If you are coming then I have some important location details. It is being held in Murphy Central which is at 550 N. Murphy Road Murphy, TX 75094. You can join the festivities from 12 midday to 9:45pm. Our Queen Tribute band, goes on stage around 8pm so don’t miss 90 minutes of the very best Queen hits ! There will also be other live music all day, great food from local restaurants and caterers, drinks, a variety of Dallas based market vendors, a wonderful kids zone, and much more! Also, after our performance there will be a fireworks display.

If you are interested, then I would urge you to visit the official Maize Days Festival website for more information. The website has information on how to get there, parking, vendors and much more – visit https://maizedays.com/schedule/ for full details.

Headlining the Miami-Dade Parks’ “Love-In” at Greynolds Park, Miami, Florida, 16th October

I’m only back in Waterford for 15 days and I will be flying off again, this time heading to the sunny shores of Miami, Florida to perform at the Greynolds Park “Love-in”. This music festival has a lot of music history associated with it (or atleast the venue does) and according to my research The Grateful Dead apparently played in this park at a similar music festival on April 14th, 1968. The Greynolds Park Love-in music festival is a real excuse to step back in time to the ‘60s, ’70s and ‘80s. It is a whole day of great food, fun attractions, delicious food and of course great music with the many live concerts on the day … and that of course includes ourselves with Celebrating Queen. I’m thrilled to be headlining at the Love-In this year and it’s the first time I’ve ever had 2 headlinging events in the same year. The closest thing I ever had to this was playing on of the smaller stages at Glastonbury 2015.

If you are attending the Love-in at Greynolds Park Miami, or the Murphy Maize Days Festival above please leave a comment below. Perhaps I might see you at one my Next Performances with Celebrating Queen.

If you want to find out more about Celebrating Queen please visit https://celebrartingqueen.com. You can also Follow Celebrating Queen on Social Media if you want to keep up to date with the latest news from the band.My Adventures with Celebrating Queen will continue in 2023 but I’m not sure what concerts are on the books as yet but I will keep you posted.

Shane’s Queen Site gets a major revamp and site move

by Shane McDonald | Nov 29, 2016 | Personal

After a few month’s redevelopment, Shane’s Queen Site is now resident on shanemcdonald.ie having moved from the old queen.shanemcdonald.org address.

My Queen website started life on tinet one of the pre-eircom web hosting solutions dating back to 1998. At that time it was a 2 page site and very basic. Over the next 6 years, it grew and I eventually hosted it on my shanemcdonald.org server with the Queen subdomain. By 2008, the queen site was getting about 500 hits per day and was growing. I even got the attention of one of the Queen roadies, Peter Since, who asked me to review his book. I had a very enjoyable few weeks emailing Peter about his experiences with Freddie and Queen.

Since 2011 the site had not been as regularly updated as I would have wished. Also with the advent of the Google mobile friendly SEO penalties, the traffic on the site was decreasing. So earlier this year I made the decision to review the content on shanemcdonald.org and move everything to a distinctly Irish .ie domain. First, the blog and main site (which you are currently reading) and next the Queen site which migrated fully last Saturday evening at 11pm.

What’s on Shane’s Queen Site?

The Queen website started life as a home for the chords and tab which I transcribed by hand. I found that many of the books you bought were incorrect or used very general chords – listing an F where an Fsus4 was the actual chord etc. Since then the site has included discographies, books and book reviews, information about the band, polls, and a few other areas of interest to any Queen fan. I intend to update a few sections before the end of the year and I may add a few new sections in 2017 including a ‘Learn to Play Queen’ section where I will upload videos of how to play certain Queen songs….

If you want to take a look, the address is https://www.shanesqueensite.com/

Enjoy !

Queen Live at Wembley – 30 Years Ago Today

by Shane McDonald | Jul 12, 2016 | In The News

On this day 30 years ago, 12th July 1986, Queen took to the stage at Wembley Stadium. I feel is probably their best performance. The concert, part of the Magic Tour, was recorded and the album was released on 26 May 1992, with a DVD released in June 2003.

I first saw this Queen concert in 1989 when The Tube, an ITV program, broadcast sections of the show late one Sunday evening. I had a copy of this ‘Queen live at Wembley‘ concert on VHS for many years and I played it to death.

It is certainly one of my favourite live concerts and I regularly put it on and with my piano and guitar turned to 11 (spinal tap reference), I jam away to it. The first 2 tracks kick the concert off with a bang, ‘One Vision’ and ‘Tie Your Mother Down’. Other excellent tracks in the performance include Queen hits like ‘A Kind of Magic’, ‘I Want to Break Free’, ‘Love of My Life’ (with the audience joining in) and a poignant ‘Who Wants to Live Forever’ where Freddie says “we’re gonna stay together until we fucking well die, I’m sure of it.” Apparently, the band knew of his illness at that stage.

If you haven’t seen the concert it is certainly worth taking a look at, as Queen pumps out hit after hit.

Queen: Live at Wembley – Set List

“One Vision” – 5:50
“Tie Your Mother Down” – 3:52
“In the Lap of the Gods… Revisited” – 2:44
“Seven Seas of Rhye” – 1:19
“Tear It Up” – 2:12
“A Kind of Magic” – 8:41
“Under Pressure” – 3:41
“Another One Bites the Dust” – 4:54
“Who Wants to Live Forever” – 5:16
“I Want to Break Free” – 3:34
“Impromptu” – 2:55
“Brighton Rock Solo” – 9:11
“Now I’m Here” – 6:19
“Love of My Life” – 4:47
“Is This the World We Created…?” – 2:59
“(You’re So Square) Baby, I Don’t Care” – 1:34
“Hello Mary Lou (Goodbye Heart)” – 1:24
“Tutti Frutti” ( – 3:23[4]
“Gimme Some Lovin'” – 0:55
“Bohemian Rhapsody” – 5:50
“Hammer to Fall” – 5:36
“Crazy Little Thing Called Love” – 6:27
“Big Spender” – 1:07
“Radio Ga Ga” – 5:57
“We Will Rock You” – 2:46
“Friends Will Be Friends” – 2:08
“We Are the Champions” – 4:05
“God Save the Queen” – 1:27

If you are interested in reading more about this amazing Queen concert at Wembley Stadium in 1986 please the relevant page on my Queen Site.
Link: Queen live at Wembley and if you wish to try to play one of the songs from their set at Wembley then you might try the Bohemian Rhapsody Chords.