QUEEN Tribute

Amazing! That had been five marvelous weeks. We wanted to prepare an exhibition from fans for fans and exact those came along plenty to visit the smart German city, Wesel. Especially at the weekends the gallery in the "Centrum" was high frequented. Altogether, nearly 9.700 visitors came by to see more than 3.500 items on 640 square metres about QUEEN and Freddie Mercury. If we take a look into our guest books, it seams that no-one was disappointed, because of the positive comments. At this point we like to say thank you for all of your nice messages and wishes!

The visitors of

came along from all over Germany, Switzerland, Austria and of cause the Netherlands. Two people came over directly from Egypt to visit the exhibition.

Two organizations should be donated orginally, the AIDS-Hilfe Duisburg Kreis Wesel association and the BBMDA (British Bone Marrow Donor Appeal). But unfortunately the British organization, who supports leukemia victims, finished their work during the last days of

. That's why the KYA-Team decided to give all the receipts to the AIDS association. So in the end there were 18.000 Deutschmarks left for the AIDS-Help.

Twenty collectors lent their special items for five weeks to

. There was the first ever reproduction of the "Red Special" guitar from Brian May. The so called "BHM 1" (for Brian Harold May), was built by Guild with license in 1986 and is existing only 316 times worldwide. Only three copies are around in Germany and the one the exhibition had shown was played by the master him self. There was a 84 cm high puppet handmade from porcelain, we'd shown in "Feddie's Corner". It was a real fantastic image of the charismatic QUEEN lead vocalist.

Another great item was the garden wall of Mercury's estate in London as a 4 meters wide poster. It showed the inscriptions the fans left after Mercury's death between 1991 and 1993. You can still order small copies of the poster from the company Farbkreis GmbH. You could seen clothes, Brian May once worn, or a party shirt, Freddie Mercury worn in 1989 during a private party for new years eve. This shirt was first ever presented to the public in the exhibition

In addition there were all the music items seen, QUEEN and Freddie Mercury published during more than 20 years: rare colored vinyl's, modern CD's, computer games, screensaver, playing cards, Frisbees, songbooks, cups and lots more - a never ending list.

The French artists Camille and Jef Simonet enriched the exhibition with to visits. On 26. of August and on 30. of September 2001 they sold the QUEEN comic for charity and signed the books individually. You can reach the Simonets over their new website: The Queen Comic World

We like to say thank you to the mayor of Wesel, Jörn Schroh, who been the patron of the exhibition!

During the period of the exhibition, we had some great support events: on 30. of September we had the grand finish of

with the concert of the Germany cover band MAYQUEEN, who played the famous QUEEN songs. The AIDS foundation gave some talks, we also had guided tours and on Mercury's birthday, the 5. of September there had been the multimedia talk "The Mercury Auditorium" by the KYA-Team.

Often visitors asked us about the next QUEEN exhibition and if it is possible to go on tour with

. To both questions we had to refuse, because

was a private project in 100 percent. The team worked for free and we could only continue with a big financial budget. Please understand!

At last we say thank you to all the fans who made the success of

come to real!


Hans-Joachim Zache	Sylvester Thiel	Birgit Paff