You are invited: Dune Rats South Africa 2014.

Last year a friend asked me to design a poster for an Australian band who would be visiting South Africa. The resulting tour saw The Dune Rats initiate South African audiences to their specific brand of chaos in the coolest way. For their return tour this year I was pretty damn amped to draw more sandworms and rippers. Here are the results:

I highly recommend you catch any/ all of these shows if you can!

Durban - RSVP here!

Pretoria - RSVP here!

Joburg - RSVP here!

Cape Town - RSVP here!

UKDB00 - YOU CAN DO BETTER!

As the backstory of my forthcoming UK Do Better tour diary, here's the album that the tour centred around. "You Can Do Better" is Johnny Foreigner's 4th album. Hearing it for the first time I was really stoked on the new direction the band was following. I was also incredibly excited to play these news songs live with the gang.

The album dropped through Alcopop! on the 10th of March. Heaps and heaps and heaps and heaps of people wrote really nice stuff about "You Can Do Better". It was too fast for The NME.

Dune Rats return to Hi5!

Last year, at one of our first Hi5 nights, we hosted an Australian band, playing their first show on Africa soil. The resulting show was pure carnage of the most excellent variety, and the Dune Rats went on to enjoy much more of the same across the rest of their first tour of South Africa.

As I write this, The Rats are floating above the surface of the earth, hurtling towards us at phenomenal speeds. Tomorrow night they'll be making their return to Hi5 and we couldn't possibly be any happier for it. Supporting The Dunies, we have Joburgs own prog-surf dynamos; The Moths, plus DJ sets from Hi5's 3 dads, Nathan Scott Phillips, Plaat Japie & Sassquatch!

RSVP here!

UK do better 01 - the tour in posters.

I mentioned yesterday that I've recently come off a tour, playing bits of the UK with Johnny Foreigner, touring the band's 4th album "You Can Do Better".

As with pervious adventures with the band, this journey stands as one of the best things I've done with my time on this planet of our's. The shows themselves and the spaces in-between were pure magic. Totally ace, smile-inducing, mind-braking, life-affirming stuff. Much like our ghostly 2012 tour of the US (and nothing like our highly blogged about SA 2010 & UK 2011 tours) I didn't post anything about this round of life-changing exploits. This was a dead blog after all.

But, if SMAC is back from the grave, then there's surely little more worthy of reflecting back on than this tour. Without biting off more than I can chew, I'm hoping to assembly a bit of a posthumous tour diary. Luckily we crossed paths with some people that did lovely jobs of photographing, shooting and chatting to us, so with that to link back to, here's hoping I can get through this thing!

To start (something I should have posted before the adventure even kicked off) here's our tour in posters!

Dune Rats 2013 tour video!

Last year South Africa recieved a visit from three dynamos collectively known as Dune Rats. What followed were some really excellent adventures, awesome shows and stellar high jinx.

Anja managed to capture many of these excellent adventures. With the band about to return to Mama Africa, it seemed fitting that we make a small video that captured just how awesome that last tour was and get people stoked for the next one. Shot and edited by Nanna, with bits of animation by your humble narrator, here's our video for The Dune Rats 2013 South African tour!

I'm back!

I'm back!

It's been a (long) while. For the past two weeks I've been wanting to make my return with a post that would have started like this:

"I'm back! Just got home after touring the UK for a month with Jo Fo and boy have I got some stories for you!"

From there I'd make excuses for the fact that I disappeared for as long as I did. Then I'd go on to chat about this last tour with the band and how it's changed the way I'm thinking about all the business this blog has been built around.

But right here, right now, none of that is going to happen, because I've pretty much got to jump into chatting about what comes next. So ja, let's just leave it at this;

I'M BACK!