Local Glam Rockers Queue Up To Play Reunion Show

In the mid-90’s, the local glam/rock/punk band Queue Up was a force on the local music scene and beyond. Its snotty single, “I Hate You Mr. Einstein,” received international airplay and the band had a slot on Lollapalooza when it rolled into town for a Blossom stop.

After a great run, the group would officially end in 1997.

Nearly 30 years on, Queue Up has decided to reform for a special show that takes place at 8 p.m. on Saturday, June 28, at the Bop Stop. Local rockers Vanity Crash will open. The group will also release a remastered version of its debut album, Possession, and it will issue a DVD of the concert for the Vampire Kiss CD release. The band has even written three new songs.

“[Guitarist] Dennis [Van Crash] and I have been working together since 1991,” says singer Ali Garrigan over coffee at Cafe Ah Roma in Berea. “We collaborate so brilliantly together. He’s just brilliant. When we originally broke up the band in 1997, I was having some serious health issues. But we left on really good terms. And I had dragged him into the theater world. He had started writing music for soundtracks and shows.”

The two worked together on a local production of the musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch and on Titus: A Grand and Gory Rock Musical, which played at Cleveland Public Theatre in 2014.

“We have gotten back together in various incarnations,” says Garrigan. “We got back together as a duo and would go back out with backing tracks. We have never been on bad terms. Recently, I started sitting in with [Crash’s band] Vanity Crash and on a David Bowie night they hosted. He asked me, ‘Would you want to do a full-on Queue up reunion?’ I said, ‘I would love it.’ We created three new songs and put them in the new lineup. We were originally going to do it a year and half ago, and my husband and I both got Covid and wound up in the hospital. We had to put the brakes on. Once we got better, we realized it still needed to happen.”

The band first formed in the early ’90s when Garrigan answered a newspaper ad from a band looking for a singer.

“I was in the original Cleveland punk and Goth scenes,” says Garrigan. “When I first answered the ad, I had been in punk bands and was full-on into the Goth scene. I had a quasi Mohawk at the time. I was dressed in black. They had been a New Wave band. I walked in, and I had just released a cassette with another band that had just broken up. I didn’t have a song to sing, but I had the tape. They listened to it and called me the next day. I was a Goth punk princess from hell. I like to say that I brought them down from the stratosphere, and they brought me up from hell, and we met in the middle and made this amazing Gothic industrial sound, and it worked.”

The band put out three full-lengths total and a limited vinyl pressing of two songs. “I Hate You Mr. Einstein” even became a hit overseas.

“We were huge in Japan, and we got played in England, France and Germany,” she says. “We didn’t tour overseas because of the finances, but we did tour the states and did the local stage at Lollapalooza. It was packed. It was one of the larger audiences we ever played to.”

Garrigan says she’s excited to play the new songs at the upcoming reunion show, which will feature a louder, more aggressive version of the band.

“Everyone gets along so beautifully,” she says. “There is no strife. There was never, ever a bad breakup. It was always just something that kept us from playing. It’s always been an open collaboration.”

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