Queen and Adam Lambert set Houston date

Image 1 of / 9 Caption Close Queen and Adam Lambert set Houston date 1 / 9 Back to Gallery

The greatest rock 'n' roll mashup of TV singing contestant and guitar riff slinging astrophysicist heads back on the road as Queen have lined up a summer tour with Adam Lambert at the helm.

The tour concludes Aug. 5 in Houston at the Toyota Center, undoubtedly to give Queen guitarist Brian Man some extra time to putter around at NASA after the show. May, with his PhD in astrophysics, has served as a "science team collaborator" with NASA on its New Horizons Pluto mission.

But that's more about interplanetary rocks. The tour keeps alive the heavenly sound of Queen, who made 13 albums of rock 'n' roll with operatic bombast between 1973 and 1991. Frontman Freddie Mercury died that year, and life hasn't been the same since. One posthumous album was released, but Mercury, with his larger-than-life voice, left a rather large unitard to fill. So Queen was largely dormant until Adam Lambert passed through "American Idol" in 2009.

There's no replacing Mercury, but that shouldn't rob the world of the sound of May's guitar. And Lambert has filled in admirably for a few reunions since then.

So one can sit at home with some Queen albums and play them loud. Or one can hear Brian May send coded messages to the cosmos with his guitar in person.

The on sale date is Feb. 10 through the venue's site and the promoter's site. A presale also exists for Queen and Lambert fan clubs, with tickets on sale there on Jan. 31.