Jukebox The Ghost’s ‘HalloQueen’ Gets Fans In The Spirit, Creates Touring Opportunity

Sachyn Mital – Jukebox The Ghost
HalloQueen

While artists often make strategic decisions to keep touring fresh and demand high year to year – mixing up headline appearances vs. headline tours, underplay residencies vs. arenas, or playing full classic albums rather than new material – one band has found another way to keep it fresh: doing a mini-tour as a whole different band.

“They don’t just cover Queen songs, they really do embody Queen,” says Seth Kallen of This Fiction Management, who manages Washington, D.C.-based power-pop trio Jukebox The Ghost. In its fifth “HalloQueen” mini-tour the band has seen its biggest response yet, with six dates and around 6,000 tickets sold to venues including Webster Hall in New York, Union Transfer in Philadelphia and a Halloween-night finale at the 9:30 Club in the band’s home market.

“They dress up, Ben shaves his beard so it’s just a mustache, he puts on an English accent. Everyone laughing the whole time. It’s just total goofy fun,” Kallen says.

The band, consisting of singer/pianist Ben Thornewill, guitarist/vocalist Tommy Siegel and drummer Jesse Kristin, had always done a few Queen covers, with Kallen being reminded of the legendary British rockers when he first met Jukebox The Ghost some 15 years ago. Five years ago as kind of a joke, they suggested doing a whole marathon Queen show around Halloween, and the response was big enough to start doing the same thing in one city every year. Now, over the last two years the concept has gone on tour.

“It’s the most fun we have all year and it works as this anomaly of touring because it doesn’t matter if we are on cycle or off cycle — the shows sell tickets,” the band’s Ben Thornewill told Pollstar via email.

The band’s agent, Erik Selz from Paradigm, adds, “Our HalloQueen experiment started in 2015 with a pair of 500-seat clubs, and has grown to a half dozen 750-2k cap rooms over the past three weekends (leading into Halloween). It is always a gift when an artist develops a robust touring concept which can live outside of the framework of a traditional album / tour cycle.”

It helps that the band’s Halloween tribute subject happens to be one beloved by all and somehow always in the public consciousness.

“The interesting thing was the weekend the tour was happening last year was the same weekend the ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ film came out,” Kallen says. “Now, a full year has passed with this newfound love for the music of Queen and we’ve been right there to capture it.”

Sachyn Mital – Jukebox The Ghost
HalloQueen

The special-occasion shows also give fans something extra to get excited about, to the point the band can hit the same market multiple times and not dry up demand, such as in New York where seemingly half the fans dressed up mobbing the stage eager to win a costume contest.

“It’s hard to stand out first of all,” Kallen says, adding that the subject matter in this case is not easy to pull off, either. “It’s hard to get peoples’ attention. There’s so much media out there and so can be so obsessed with a band you don’t’ even know they’re in your city. It’s good to come up with interesting twists in the live experience that really stand out to people.

“We’ve really applied the jam-band mentality in a lot of ways. You’ve gotta give it to a band like Phish that always gives something different, and that’s why a fan will see them 10 nights in a row at Madison Square Garden.”

Kallen adds that they’re already getting holds for next year’s HalloQueen shows, and will likely do New York again as well as some cities they didn’t make it to this time.

“It’s been my dream to one day turn this into a festival where maybe six or seven bands will cover other bands,” says Kallen, who as manager for X Ambassadors has put on the Cayuga Sound festival in its the band’s home market of Ithaca, N.Y. “I think it would be a really fun concept.”

In the meantime, there’s three HalloQueen covers (“Somebody To Love,” “Under Pressure” and “Don’t’ Stop Me Now”) released on all the streaming platforms to enjoy.