Wow, has it really been over three years since our last news update?? And what a three years it's been, too. We hope you've all weathered the pandemic OK and are doing well. We're very happy to tell you that there is finally some activity in the Madeira camp!
First, we have a show coming up! Only our second since December of 2019 and the first since September of 2021 (when we played the Makahiki fest in Indianapolis, with Jonpaul Balak filling in for Todd). We will be back to one of our very favorite venues, Tip Top Deluxe in Grand Rapids, MI, on Saturday, November 5th - in just three weeks! This show is connected to the Atomic Tiki Bazaar at Max's South Seas Hideaway the next day, and it'll be an afternoon show, with the doors at Noon, Little Frank at 1 pm, The Moonrays at 2 pm, and us at 4 pm. This is our only planned show at this point, so we hope we get to see quite a few of you there!
Second, in case you missed it - we have a new song out! It is the cover of the Shadows' 1961 hit "The Frightened City", featured on the recently released reissue of the classic 1997 Shadows tribute "An Evening in Nivram" on MuSick Recordings. This digipak CD features 23 tracks, 13 of which are newly recorded by artists such as Danny Amis (Los Straitjackets), Insect Surfers, The Boss Martians, Wave Electric, Draculina, Martin Cilia (The Atlantics), and more. There are also previously unreleased tracks by the Space Cossacks (from '99), and the Troubadours (from '02), featuring Ivan and Dane, as well as a new track (download bonus only) by Lords of Atlantis, also featuring Ivan and Dane with Jeremy DeHart of the Manakooras and Aqualads! The CD comes with extensive, updated liner notes by Ivan (who also wrote the original ones). Finally, in another tie-in to Grand Rapids, MI, our version of "The Frightened City" was recorded at the Goon Lagoon Studios by Tommy Schichtel of the Concussions. You can purchase the CD or the download here:
That's it for now. We hope it won't be another three years before the next update! And we very much hope to see a bunch of you in Grand Rapids on Saturday, November 5th (the Guy Fawkes' Day)!
We received an unexpected but most welcome bit of promotion in advance of our Indy show this Saturday - and from Sam Ash Music, no less! (And yes, we know our name is misspelled in the middle of the comic, but it's too late to change it.)
We hope you've been having a truly wonderful summer! We have some great news! if you've been following us for any length of time you probably know that we are HUGE fans of the legendary '60s Australian surf band The Atlantics, covering one of their songs on each of our albums ("Express to Bagdad" on Sandstorm, "S.O.S. (Stomp on Stomp)" on Carpe Noctem, "Giant" on Tribal Fires and "Coral Island" on Ancient Winds). Ivan and Dane even participated in an Atlantics tribute at the 2014 Surf Guitar 101 Convention AND Ivan co-wrote "The Argonaut" for the Ancient Winds album with their original guitarist Jim Skiathitis!
So, it feels more than a bit surreal as well as deeply exciting to announce that Jim will be joining us to play lead on four of their songs at the Radio Radio Surf Night show in Indy on Saturday, August 31st! This will be Jim's first time ever playing in the US, an historic event! We very much hope you can join us for what is sure to be an unforgettable occasion as well as simply a damn good show, playing also with our long-time friends the AmpFibians from Cincinnati as well as Retro On the Rocks from Indy! We'll also be returning to Lafayette the night before, Friday, August 30th, our first time there in four years! And then three weeks later, bidding farewell to summer, it's on to the Main Event: the huge, iconic Southern Surf StompFest 2019 in Atlanta, GA with who's-who of modern surf music! We hope to see you at one of these shows, and we wish you an enjoyable remainder of the summer!
Happy 15th birthday to us! On April 16th, 2004, Dane, Patrick and Ivan played together for the very first time ever! (We initially had a different bass player, Scott Waddell - Todd joined us about a year later.) It is pretty unbelievable to think it's been that long, but we have accomplished a few things in that time, wouldn't you say? :-D What a truly amazing 15 years it's been - but it wouldn't have been anything without you all! So, as an expression of our deep gratitude, we present a small gift to all of you: the video of our full performance at the 2017 Surf Guitar 101 Convention in Torrance, CA! It was recorded with two cameras and edited by Dave Dripp. He also perfectly synced it to the Mark Linett-produced "Center of the Surf" soundtrack! (Yes, it does also feature the three songs on which we were joined by the mighty John Blair and Jonpaul Balak!!) Thank you ALL for these many years of support and we hope you'll enjoy this little token of our appreciation. (And HUGE thanks to Dave Dripp for doing this for us - we're deeply grateful!!)
Just in time, we received a truly lovely anniversary gift: we were featured in the May 2019 issue of the Vintage Guitar magazine! The full page article titled "Surf Lives!", written by Dan Forte (AKA Teisco Del Rey), has a great review of "Center of the Surf", calling us 'maybe the leading lights of the (surf) revival', our playing 'tight and powerful', our songs 'melodic, rhythmic and well-constructed', and the sound of the CD (as produced by Mark Linett) 'superior' - and are even favorably compared to the surf legends Laika and the Cosmonauts! The article also features a nice review of our brothers-in-surf Frankie & The Pool Boys' latest album "Spin the Bottle", and elsewhere in the issue there is a full page feature by Pete Prown on the new Paul Johnson tribute CD, produced by Mr. Forte and featuring "Lanky Bones" by us. Make sure you pick up a copy for yourselves and support this great magazine as they show some love for our beloved genre!
Click the image below for a larger size:
Finally, we deeply hope you can come help us celebrate our anniversary on Friday, May 31st at our home base of Melody Inn in Indy, with our friends The Concussions (Grand Rapids, MI), The Katatonics (Bloomington, IN), and the Troubadours, America's ONLY Shadows tribute band! We're working on making the show a unique and memorable experience! We're also happy to announce that the Madeira and the Troubadours will also be teaming up with Guitar UP! for their debut album release show at Bell's Eccentric Café in Kalamazoo, MI on the first day of summer - June 21st - as well as our first time in Kalamazoo! Come welcome the summer of 2019 in style! Then consider joining us the day after in Grand Rapids for Tip Top's 8th Anniversary Surf Spectacular! It'll be a veritable surf cornucopia, with also the Concussions (Grand Rapids), 13 Tikis (Chicago), The Cocktail Preachers (Chicago), Guitar UP! (Kalamazoo) and the Troubadours! Annnnddd, last but most certainly NOT least, we're thrilled to announce that we'll be headlining the Southern Surf StompFest in Atlanta on September 21st, featuring who's-who of modern surf music (including Surfer Joe, Insect Surfers, the Mystery Men?, and even Fiend Without a Face, with Brent Hinds of the heavy metal legends Mastodon on lead guitar and vocals!!!)! There are other shows in the works, some also truly exciting, so stay tuned for that! And we do very much hope we will see you at the above three shows.
Enjoy the spring - things are finally looking, up, up, UP! -The Madeira
PS We'll have a brand new Stephen Blickenstaff t-shirt design available at out anniversary show - we thought we'd have a bit of fun with this one, pretty silly but 100% AWESOME, if we may say so! :)
We hope the year is off to a good start for you all, and that you've had a chance to take stock of 2018! It was a very good year for us, with our new live album "Center of the Surf" garnering many highly positive reviews and comments, and the band playing some incredible shows, including The Hukilau in Fort Lauderdale, FL, Asbury Park Summer Festival in Asbury Park, NJ, The Makahiki in Indianapolis, and ending with another wonderful Christmas show at Tip Top Deluxe in Grand Rapids, MI, which has turned into a seasonal tradition by now!
We were also extremely glad to be able to be part of two other great 2018 releases: 1) the amazing "Reverb Nation: Live at the 2017 Surf Guitar 101 Convention" CD, to which we contributed two exclusive tracks, "Caravela" and "Farthest Shore" (go here to order); and 2) the brand new "Stand Up, Stand Up for P.J." tribute CD to the mighty - and mightily wonderful! - Paul Johnson, one of the pioneers of this amazing music that exerts some sort of a unbreakable grip on so many of us! Paul founded (along with Eddie Bertrand) the Belairs, commonly thought to be the first surf band ever, and then went on to play both lead and rhythm guitar with PJ & the Galaxies, the Challengers, the Good Guys, Davie Allan and the Arrows, and a slew of other surf and rock instrumental bands. He shaped this music as much as anybody, both through his highly-influential rhythm guitar playing and even more his super-creative songwriting, which always avoided cliches. He wrote MANY iconic songs, including two that are about as important as it gets in this genre: "Mr. Moto" and "Squad Car", of course. He was a massive influence on bands like the Chantays (whose biggest hit "Pipeline" would clearly not exist without "Mr. Moto") and even the Beach Boys - who at one point in the mid-'60s even asked Paul to join them, but he turned them down, intent on following his own Muse. Probably the most remarkable thing about Paul is that he returned to this music in the '80s and continued to fly its flag as enthusiastically as *anybody* - including always being willing to participate in any surf show in the SoCal area to which he was invited AND lending his support and even imprimatur to younger surf bands! He personally paid attention to them and always was sure to show his gratitude that they were carrying on this special music, despite all the odds. He truly IS a humble giant! And, fittingly, his musical children today span the globe! For all these reasons (and *many* others), we jumped at the chance to contribute a track when the producer of the CD Dan Forte (AKA Teisco Del Rey) invited us, recording PJ's fantastic song "Lanky Bones", best known in the Eddie & the Showmen version, but in our opinion sounding even better with Paul himself playing the lead with both PJ & the Galaxies and the Good Guys/The Challengers! All the proceeds of this very special comp are going to help cover Paul's medical costs as he recovers from bone marrow surgery. To order a copy for yourself, either send a check for $20 (shipping included) to Dan Forte, 211 W. Columbia St., Weatherford, TX 76086 (make it out to "Dan Forte F.B.O. Paul Johnson"), or PayPal $20 to teiscomerch@gmail.com We hope you pick it up and pay tribute to one of the all-time great surf musicians, as well as help out a truly good person who has selflessly given much of himself through the years. (Here we are playing "Lanky Bones" in Patrick's basement soon after recording it: video)
We have a lot more to look forward to in 2019, including our first show of the year, at our home base Melody Inn in Indy, playing a ska/surf show two days after Valentine's Day, so grab your significant other and extend your romantic celebrations by enjoying some superfun live music! 2019 will also mark the band's 15th anniversary and we're working on a couple of special things to commemorate it, so stay tuned! We also have many irons in the fire for shows this year, some of which should be pretty special. So, hope to see you at some point this year - may it be a great one for you, and may the winter come to a quick end!
On October 4th, the long-running Surfabilly Freakout radio show on WEFT in Champaign, IL, devoted its entire hour to "Center of the Surf", interviewing Ivan about the album and playing several tracksfrom it. You can now hear it below as well as on our Press page. In addition, there is a brand new - and pretty great! - article on the current surf music scene written by Steve J. and published on Medium.com. It features extensive quotes by Ivan as well as our surf comrades-in-arms Ferenc Dobronyi (Frankie & the Pool Boys), Lorenzo Valdambrini (Surfer Joe), Frankie Delatorre (the Volcanics), James Bacchi (Tikiyaki 5-0; The Tikiyaki Orchestra) and Nicole Damoff (The Surfrajettes). Check 'em out, we think you'll enjoy them!
We just received a fantastic review of our "Center of the Surf" CD by the long-running UK surf/instro zine Pipeline Instrumental Review!! Big thanks to Alan Taylor!! (Check out the whole thing below.) The Pipeline Editors' Playlist also has "Center of the Surf" tied for 1st place with the reissue of Jon and the Nightriders' ultra-classic 1981 live album "Live At Whisky a Go Go" and Frankie & The Pool Boys' sure-to-soon-be ultra-classic of surf music, "Spin The Bottle"! So happy to be able to share this honor with our good friends Ferenc Dobronyi and John Blair (whose new epic anthology double-CD is also on the list, at number 6 - and who, of course, also played on "Center of the Surf"!), as well as with Double Crown Records, who released ours and Frankie's CDs!
Center of the Surf now (finally!) available on Amazon, iTunes, Spotify and Pandora (as well as CDBaby and Double Crown Records, of course). We ran into some unexpected trouble with the new digital licensing requirements, but it's all now fixed! If you haven't yet picked it up, NOW is the time! You won't be sorry, we guarantee it!
We hope you're having a wonderful summer - and listening to a lot of surf music, the best music for the summer, of course! And we also hope that our new live CD, "Center of the Surf", has been one of your favorites this summer! You may have heard about the manufacturing glitch that forced us to delay the release of the CD by two weeks, until May 8th. That glitch has unfortunately also significantly delayed the availability of the digital downloads of the album, but we're extremely excited to be able to finally announce that those are now available at CDBaby.com, and will very soon also be available on Amazon, iTunes, etc. Sorry about the delay, but still plenty of summer left to enjoy this release if you prefer to download (or stream) rather than buy CDs.
And enjoy it you WILL, if the first two formal reviews of "Center of the Surf" are anything to go by: Storm Surge of Reverb and Progarchy are complimentary to the max! (Check out their summaries towards the top of our home page.)
We're also very happy to announce that the two 'missing' tracks from our Surf Guitar 101 2017 Convention appearance ("Caravela" and "Farthest Shore") WILL be appearing on the "Reverb Nation" compilation, coming out shortly! Here's the announcement by John Blair: "Last year's SG101 Convention, as many of you know, was professionally recorded by THREE-TIME Grammy Award winning producer and engineer, Mark Linett. He mixed and produced 27 tracks by 15 bands that are represented on "Reverb Nation: Live at the 2017 Surf Guitar 101 Convention." The CD will arrive in time for this year's Convention on August 4. This CD presents some of the best contemporary instrumental surf music, with wide distribution by Entree Records, a division of Sierra Records, that hopefully will reach the ears of the non-initiated around the country and world."
Finally, we have some absolutely amazing shows coming up! But first, we should mention that we had the time of our lives at The Hukilau in Fort Lauderdale, FL in early June. It was a (surf!) party for the ages, with a very large and very enthusiastic audience, some of the very best modern surf bands (including Los Straitjackets, the Exotics, The Intoxicators, Black Flamingos, The Martian Denny Orchestra, and more!), and organizers that couldn't have treated us any better! Thank you to ALL at The Hukilau for a truly wonderful experience! And we have more wonderful experiences to come, in particular our first time at one of the greatest surf parties in the world: the Asbury Park Surf Music Festival on Saturday, August 18th!!! We'll be joining an out-of-this-world lineup of Satan's Pilgrims, Surfer Joe, The Coffin Daggers, Frankie & The Pool Boys, The Volcanics The Black Flamingos, Les Agamemnonz, The Sufrajettes, and many more!! Wow is about the only thing to be said in response to THAT! We also just added a show in Philadelphia (at a club with the greatest name EVER - Kung Fu Necktie!) the night before Asbury Park, with Surfer Joe and the Primitve Finks, as a bit of a warm-up. Exactly four weeks after Asbury Park we are very happy to be returning to the "Makahiki - A Night of Tiki" event in Indianapolis, on Saturday, September 15th - now significantly expanded (at the Slovenian National Home) and also featuring the Martian Denny Orchestra and the Dyes! Finally, we'll be returning to Tip Top Deluxe in Grand Rapids with the local heroes the Concussions and America's favorite Shadows-tribute band the Troubadours for a repeat of the truly wonderful show there last December! So, a lot of great stuff to look forward to!
We leave you with another video edited together by Patrick, this one accompanying "Tribal Fury" from "Center of the Surf". Enjoy and have a great rest of your summer - hopefully with "Center of the Surf" as its soundtrack! And hope to see you in Asbury Park, Philadelphia, Indianapolis or Grand Rapids in the next few months!
We are extremely excited to announce the release of "Center of the Surf" (Double Crown Records), our second live album, this one recorded at the 10th Surf Guitar 101 Convention at the Alpine Village in Torrance, CA on August 5th, 2017. It was recorded and mixed by Mark Linett, triple-Grammy-winning producer and audio engineer who has worked with a long list of legendary artists, among them the Beach Boys, Brian Wilson, Frank Zappa, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Paul Simon, Los Lobos, Jane's Addiction, and Los Straitjackets. (See here for the full accounting of his many accomplishments). The tracklist is focused on the songs from our most recent studio album, "Ancient Winds", and we were also joined for the final three tracks of the set by the legendary surf guitarist and surf music historian John Blair (Jon & the Nightriders) on second rhythm guitar, as well as Jonpaul Balak (Insect Surfers, the Tikiyaki Orchestra, Tikiyaki Five-O, DJ at Fiberglass Jungle on Luxuria Music) on second bass guitar, making for an epic six-person line-up and a sound that can only be described as extraordinary in its scope! The cover and the CD package were designed by Stephen Blickenstaff, the well-known artist behind dozens of album covers (and many other artistic endeavors), including most famously "Bad Music for Bad People" by the Cramps.
Check out this brand new video, once again ably edited by Patrick, accompanying the live version of "Leviathan" from the "Center of the Surf" CD: https://youtu.be/UfOm_3UBKCw
The CD will be available for mail-order from Double Crown Records on April 24th, but we will have it available at our two CD-release shows next weekend, at Melody Inn in Indianapolis on Friday, 4/20, and the Player's Pub in Bloomington, IN on Saturday, 4/21 (as well as Southgate Revival in Cincinnati on Saturday, 5/5). We hope you can join us for these all-surf shows - see more details here.
Finally, we're also thrilled to announce that the compilation album of the 2017 Surf Guitar 101 Convention will be released by Sierra Records in July, and it will include two exclusive tracks by us, recorded at the convention but only available on this compilation. All the tracks on the compilation were again recorded and mixed by Mark Linett. Stay tuned for more info about this exciting release.
We hope you pick up and enjoy "Center of the Surf" and that we see you at one of our many upcoming shows in the next six months, whether in Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan, or Florida and New Jersey! Have a wonderful Spring and Summer!
