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2014 ➤ Spandau Ballet’s world tour reunion updates

Posted on 30 Oct 2014 | 2 comments

New Romantics, Blitz Kids, Heaven Club, London, Swinging 80s, Spandau Ballet

Spandau Ballet’s tenth live date: playing Heaven in London 1980. Photographed © by Shapersofthe80s

SCREENINGS OF THEIR SOUL BOYS BIO-PIC

✱ Read Shapersofthe80s’ review of the SBWW film and its UK premiere, plus European screening dates, Oct–Nov 2014

✱ Hello Down Under! Auckland NZ 2 Nov, Melbourne 5 Nov and Sydney 7 Nov for special Q&A screenings of SBWW, plus live performance in Melbourne

✱ Spandau’s first public appearance in NYC since 1983, plus US release of their new single This Is The Love, plus outdoor mini-concert in LA for their TV debut with Jimmy Kimmel 10 Nov… plus live performance on Fox’s Good Day Nov 13… Plus SBWW screening 15 Nov at SVA Theatre, premiere and band talk at Doc NYC

Spandau Ballet, Soul Boys of the Western World, cancellations, rescheduled, US tour, dates

Hadley sings True: Spandau live at London’s Albert Hall, 2014. Photographed © by Shapersofthe80s

➢ SPANDAU’S 2015 LIVE TOUR DATES IN ONE LIST

✱ North America tickets on sale 14 Nov from San Francisco 23 Jan to Red Bank NY 10 Feb and in between LA, Denver, Chicago, Detroit, Toronto, Boston, NYC, Westbury, Washington DC . . . Extra concert added 24 Jan at The Wiltern in Los Angeles . . . Extra concert added 2 Feb in Montreal (on sale 27 Nov).

✱ 17 Jan 2015 update – Shock change to Spandau Ballet’s North America live tour – still launching 23–25 Jan in California but with other US and Canada concert dates rescheduled for April–May. Click through for complete list of world tour dates 2015.

✱ Now on sale: tickets for 13 dates 3–19 March in Spandau Ballet’s live UK tour 2015, kicking off 3 March from Dublin in the land of music, now taking in TWO London dates at O2 Arena 17–18 March, and ending in Brummie Duran-land

✱ First dates on live European tour 2015: Amsterdam 21 March, Luxembourg 22 March, Italy 24–30 March (Assago, Torino, Padova, Firenze, Roma), Germany 16–22 April (Leipzig, Hamburg, Dusseldorf, Berlin, Frankfurt and Munich)

✱ Down under: Auckland, NZ 10 May tickets on sale 20 Nov… Oz on sale Nov 12: Spandau’s Australia concert tour 2015 kicks off in Brisbane 13 May, playing also Sydney, Melbourne and Perth

✱ Weekly: Big Tone’s party show Saturdays 7–9pm GMT on Absolute 80s Radio, on air and online

➢ First US review of the new single This Is the Love at Billboard: “Thirty years after Spandau Ballet’s last U.S. single, the British new-wave quintet brings back everything that made it danceable on This Is the Love, touting a thick sax, Tony Hadley’s syrup-and-silk delivery and poppy drum work. The twist? There’s also a James Bond theme vibe mixed in.” – Andrew Flanagan … 8 Nov Martin Kemp tweets: “Billboard single of the week in the U.S.”

SPANDAU INTERVIEWED IN NEW ZEALAND, 2 NOV

➢ Or, read a transcription of the above interview with New Zealand’s arts website, The 13th Floor – Here’s Tony Hadley on how life was different when he was a teenager: “The 80s was probably the last innocent decade in a kind of weird way, pretty primitive, you know. In Britain we had three TV channels. As a young person, you had music and you had fashion. So everything was pretty tribal and we’ve always been like that in Britain anyway, with the Mods, the Rockers, psychedelia, punk. So you picked your tribe and the kind of music you wanted to be associated with and that was it – it was just a simple time. We’ve now entered into a period where social media and connectivity around the world is unprecedented, incredible. So as a young person, you don’t necessarily need just fashion and just music. It’s a very different world we live in.”

➢ 1980: Read the epic story of Spandau Ballet, the Blitz Kids and the birth of the New Romantics at The Observer

➢ Official Spandau Ballet website

FRONT PAGE

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Posted in Australasia, Europe, Film, London, North America, Pop music, TV

Tagged Blitz club, Blitz Kids, Canada, cancellation, electro, George Hencken, Jimmy Kimmel, movie, New Romantics, New Zealand, premiere, reschedule, reunion, Reviews, Soul Boys of The Western World, Spandau Ballet, Swinging 80s, Tony Hadley, updates, US tour

2011 ➤ Duran’s round-the-world adventure reaches the UK

Posted on 17 May 2011 | Leave a comment

SXSW, interview, John Norris, Duran Duran

Duran interviewed at SXSW in March: Simon Le Bon checks a runaway thought before the audience jumps to the wrong conclusion (SXSW video grab)

❚ UPDATE, JULY 1: Following the postponement of Duran Duran’s European arena tour owing to singer Simon Le Bon’s vocal problems, consult the band’s website for news… DD have rescheduled all eleven UK concerts to run from Nov 30 Brighton to Dec 17 Newcastle.

❚ UPDATE, MAY 29: Duran Duran now offer a fulsome apology for having to cancel their current UK tour dates — not, as sceptics suspected, because of unsold tickets but because of singer Simon Le Bon’s continuing “laryngeal problems”. Their website today reports: “Following a consultation with both a vocal coach and his team of ENT specialists today, Simon Le Bon has been advised that he needs to continue to rest his voice… Devastated by the news that they will not be able to resume the tour as planned on Tuesday, Simon said ‘We’ve been postponing shows with very little notice, in the hope each day that the improvement would have been significant enough for me to sing again without risking any long-term damage’.”

View John and Nick’s special video apology at YouTube . . . Today too, Roger Taylor blogs on the DD website on the horrible irony of Woody Allen’s famous quotation “If you want make God laugh, tell him about your plans” and he makes the promise: “I know that all the shows are very close to being re-scheduled later in the year.” . . . Read Simon Le Bon’s blog at DD’s website on June 1: “I reckon I got 6 semi-tones wiped off the top of my range and … it’s very difficult not to worry about it.”

❏ Here’s a sparky interview with the band just released by the SXSW festival, recorded in March. With former MTV reporter John Norris in the chair, Nick Rhodes says he still sees Duran as an art-school band and John Taylor reflects on the golden era of MTV. Stills from this interview have been posted at Flickr

Duran Duran, L'Uomo Vogue,Pierpaolo Ferrari
❏ This stylish tuxedoed shot by Pierpaolo Ferrari comes from the current “Long Live the 80s” issue of L’Uomo Vogue, with a feature on DD by former Wag club host Chris Sullivan, translated for the Italian edition.

HERE’S A CATCH-UP ON PREVIOUSLY POSTED
DURAN NEWS FROM THE YEAR SO FAR

❏ It was 30 years in March since the 80s supergroup’s debut single Planet Earth peaked at No 12 in the UK chart… This year their 14-track CD of AYNIN spent five weeks on the UK album chart.

❏ View highlights from Duran Duran’s Unstaged online concert March 23 at the Mayan theatre, Los Angeles, in 1080p HD at the band’s Vevo channel on YouTube /DuranDuranVEVO. Click here to find which global regions are licensed to view highlights at YouTube. The four DD Unstaged concert tracks most viewed via Vevo in the first three weeks after the live webcast drew more than 1.5m views — these are All You Need is Now with 700,930 views, then Notorious 298,505, Planet Earth 290,477, and Friends of Mine 274,935 way out ahead of all other tracks, most of which pulled only four-figure audiences.

John Taylor, Nick Rhodes, Duran, Facebook Live, interview, thequietus, SXSW ❏ Rhodes and Taylor give a 30-minute video interview on Billboard.com including live Q&A (right) on March 30, 2011.

❏ Rhodes and Le Bon give a seven-minute video history of DD for ABC News, Jan 2011 — “Rio was the album that made us the biggest band in the world. It made us big in America”

❏ Duran have been blessed by an interview at Quietus, its holiness the online magazine whose touchstone is “reverence” and claims “we’re not afraid of surprising our readers”. Writer Simon Price delivers two surprises. Plus this list of post-80s albums the band think most deserve to be listened to: The Wedding Album (1993) … Pop Trash (2000) … Medazzaland (1997) … Astronaut (2004).

❏ On the current AYNIN tour Duran Duran played North America and Mexico March 16–April 27, just before their 11-date UK tour from Newcastle to Sheffield May 18–June 4. They take in Berlin on May 26 and continue across Europe, Paris to Bergen June 10–Aug 28. [Update — These were the original plans, which were substantially cancelled in May and June.] In between they return to the UK for the V Festival on both Aug 20 and 21.

Duran Duran, All You Need Is Now, video, Nick Egan
♫ View Nick Egan’s Bacofoil video for All You Need Is Now, DD’s comeback single at Yahoo Music — available worldwide on iTunes. A 14-track CD package of the same name was released in March for most of Europe, Australia, Far East and North America with South America following in April.