If you have every wondered what it would be like to perform underground for an audience comprising a film crew and the remains of six million people, take it from someone who has done it before, it is pretty weird.
Troy Van Leeuwen did just that when he and Queens Of The Stone Age took to the Catacombs of Paris, in July 2024, to perform a stripped-down set of Queens classics.
Speaking to Premier Guitar, Van Leeuwen admitted that nothing have prepared him to what awaited him under the streets of Paris’s 14th arrondissement.
“I have to say it was the most bizarre musical experience I think I’ve had,” says Van Leeuwen. “You don’t know what it is going to sound like until you are in there. We knew it was going to be mostly acoustic, so for me, personally, I had to [rethink it].”
Van Leeuwen was offering Premier Guitar a guided tour of his rig for the Age Of Nero Tour, and there was, literally, a lot to process. His complement of Echopark and Fender electric guitars were being served by a well-stocked pedalboard.
But the Catacombs show, which was shot for the concert film and EP, Alive In The Catacombs, was not an occasion for tube amps and octave-fuzz. This is a claustrophobic space, and QOTSA also had to find a space in the mix for a strings section.
“The first guitar I ever got was a cat-gut classical guitar, so I was playing one of those, and I had to really go back to being that kid,” says Van Leeuwen. “The neck was super-wide, so I felt a little bit vulnerable in there... with the bones of six million people watching you.”
“But yeah, it was a bizarrely vulnerable experience, ‘cos you are trying to play within that space but it is smaller than you think. And so I wasn’t trying to be too overpowering, so there was a lot of delicate interplay between me and the strings, and the band. It was bizarre.”
When we think of the QOTSA sound, we think of the white heat of their electric sound, tones designed on fuzz pedals such as the Univox Super-Fuzz – a vintage fuzz that’s so hard to replace that Van Leeuwen admits he no longer takes on the road.
When MusicRadar spoke to Van Leeuwen in December 2023, Van Leeuwen said he had swapped out the Super-Fuzz for an EQD clone.
Well, to be honest, if it doesn’t work on an acoustic guitar and a voice then it’s probably not a good song
“There was a plethora of fuzz pedals that we are always messing around with,” he said. “It just depends because sometimes you are using an old [Univox] Super-Fuzz and you can’t take that stuff on the road because every old Super-Fuzz, they’re all different, and so there’s a certain one that sounds really good so you use that in the studio and then you try to find something [for the road].”
“I don’t care if this is a secret or not but I use this pedal called a Fuzz Master General by EarthQuaker Devices, and that basically is a Univox Super-Fuzz clone, and that is the best-sounding one so live I use that.
“It feels good enough, and it feels close enough to the Super-Fuzz that I like, and so I don’t have to take my Super-Fuzz on the road and run the risk of losing it somewhere! [Laughs] Or it breaking. This thing, it’s new, and it does the thing, it does the job.”
Contrary to all the hugger-mugger online about around the guitar amps and effects Queens Of The Stone Age have used and abused in the past, Van Leeuwen is an open book. The only reason he didn’t walk through every pedal on his ‘board on this rig tour was that there were so many of them. But you see them all. This is the motherlode of QOTSA intell.
But there was none of this gear in the Catacombs, where tracks such as Paper Machete and I Never Came were presented as we have never heard them before.
This, says, Van Leeuwen was a process of reverse engineering the songs to make them fit the setting – returning them to their original state.
“Well, to be honest, if it doesn’t work on an acoustic guitar and a voice then it’s probably not a good song. That’s fortunately where we start most of our songs that way, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch to do that instrumentally,” he says “Strings are going to do most of the guitar stuff. What I figured out was that we do orchestrate a lot of guitars, and so it sounds more legit when some strings are doing it.
“That gave me the opportunity to lay back and just strum a little bit, which is the first thing you gotta learn on guitar, rhythm. Get in the pocket.”
The Catacombs Tour kicks off on October 2 at the Chicago Theatre. QOTSA will be playing a string of festival dates across Europe this summer.
See Queens Of The Stone Age for full dates and ticket details. Alive In The Catacombs is streaming now, priced from £5 to rent, £10 to buy.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.