Wow, another half a year flew by! The Madeira has been keeping busy playing shows in Chicago and Champaign, IL, as well as our first visit down South for two shows in Atlanta in late May (including the too-much-fun Bubbapalooza event held at the famous Star Bar, with the great Dex Romweber Duo also on the bill!). We also played the Indy premiere of the film “Ultimate Wave Tahiti 3D” at the IMAX in mid-June, and they’ve returned the favor by playing the “Carpe Noctem” CD, as well as a short video clip plugging our band, before each showing of the film, so if you go see the movie there this summer, you’ll get to hear us on their amazing sound system accompanied by three-story-high pics of the band! (Brrrr – frightening!!)
When we found the time, we worked on new songs, two of which (Witch Doctor and Green Hell) we have been playing out already, and the third (Cities of Gold) we expect to premiere at our next show at the Melody Inn on Friday, August 13th. We’ve also been working on four other original songs plus two covers, so the next album is coming along very nicely, hopefully to be recorded and released next year.
Two of us have also been busy with other musical projects, Patrick mostly with the Shake Ups (who just returned from an East Coast tour) and Destination: Earth!, but also a brand new band Five Year Mission (stay tuned for more info about them), whereas Ivan reunited with his old surf band the Space Cossacks for their first shows since the year 2000, in Baltimore and Arlington, VA in May. The Cossacks are playing five more shows this summer, including three in California (one of them being the Third Annual Surf Guitar 101 Convention on Saturday, August 7th in Los Alamitos, CA) and two in Indiana and Ohio.
This leads us to the main point of this announcement: we have two VERY special shows coming up in just over two weeks. First will be “The Madeira All-In-The-Family Surf Explosion” show at our beloved Melody Inn on Friday, August 13th (brrr-frightening!!). This will be an once-in-a-lifetime event: the Madeira hosting an evening of surf music with special guests the Space Cossacks (featuring Ivan on lead guitar), Destination: Earth! (featuring Patrick on lead guitar) and the Troubadours (featuring Ivan on the lead guitar and Dane on the drums)!! This has never happened before, and probably never will again! We also have a few special tidbits planned for this show that will hopefully make it utterly unforgettable. The Indianapolis free weekly city paper Nuvo will be running a feature story on the Madeira the week of the show, and we greatly welcome and are very excited about this bit of publicity! The day after this show (so, Saturday, August 14th) the fun will continue in Dayton, OH at the second annual Surf Ohio FesTiki festival! The FesTiki is an all-day, family-friendly celebration of all things Exotica, held at the gorgeous and historic Old River Park – Dayton’s “vintage playground” – a 33-acre park encircled by a 1.5-mile scenic lagoon. There will be seven bands in total between 2 and 11 pm, playing surf, rockabilly and Polynesian music – the Madeira will be playing at 6:30 pm and the Space Cossacks will be headlining at 9 pm. There will also be hula and fire dancers, tiki carvers, retro vendors, a giant sand sculpture, tropical-themed bounce houses, vintage hot rod displays, and a cruise-in for pre-1970s cars, motorcycles and scooters, plus Polynesian-style cuisine and – of course – many coldm fruity drinks! There will be some serious press promoting this event and the organizers expect several thousand people to attend throughout the day! (Check out their website for any other info you may need.)
These two events are sure to be the best time you will have all summer long, so we really hope you can all join us for them! You will NOT regret it!
Finally, we already have some plans for this Fall, including playing in Cleveland for the first time (in October) and returning to Lafayette, IN (in November), so hopefully we’ll also see some of you at these shows. Who knows, we might unveil some more new songs and you wouldn’t want to miss that, right? ;)
We hope you are all enjoying the summer and to see you soon! Best regards,
On August 3rd, 2008, the day after the first SG101 convention, we played the Huntington Beach pier for the Huntington Beach International Surf Museum, along with Pollo Del Mar, the Aquasonics, Norm Cowell and the Surf Rockers, The Relix, and the Surftones. Tim “HBKahuna” Ferrill was kind enough to digitally record our entire set and give us the tape to do as we wish. We posted two videos from this show on YouTube about a year ago (Burning Mirage and Transatlantic Orbit), and now finally the rest of them are here. You can see the entire show in its original order by going to this playlist.
This was the setlist: SANDSTORM! CORDOBA EL CALIPH BURNINGMIRAGE UNDERCURRENTS THEVICTOR CRESCENTMOON TRANSATLANTICORBIT THESARACEN TANGAROA SURFFIDELIS ROGUEWAVE INTRUDER
(We replaced the older videos for Burning Mirage and Transatlantic Orbit, since Todd was able to upload them in much higher quality now.)
It was a really good show for us, as well as being an amazing day. (It’s especially nice to remember the beautiful weather and the perfect location as the heavy winds are scattering the snow and ice outside…) We hope you’ll enjoy it.
It’s hard to believe it’s been six months since the last news update! Wow, time flies….
First of all, we had an AMAZING time in Italy, especially playing the phenomenal Surfer Joe festival! So many great memories… (For some photos and reports go here and here) Massive thanks to Lorenzo Valdambrini for inviting us and taking extremely good care of us. We all very much hope we will be able to go back sooner rather than later!
And let’s not forget the Champaign show in May, which definitely ranks in our top five all-time-best shows – if not even at the very top! What a blast that was! Thanks to Jet Sterling and the entire Champaign crew for making this a very, very special show. (For some photos and reports go here)
You can see some great videos from both of these shows on our Videos page.
Second, there is great news to report: Patrick is back in Indy! After two and a half years in SoCal, he’s found his way back to his home state, and we’re absolutely thrilled to have him back! Look for many more shows in the IN/OH/IL/MI area in ’10 – as well as more activity by everyone’s favorite outer space surfers Destination: Earth!
Finally, we have one last show for ’09 – it’s again at our home away from home, the historic Melody Inn in Indy, on Friday, November 27th (the day after Thanksgiving), with the fantastic Leisure Kings and our friend Frankie Camaro. Come jump around, work up a sweat and get rid of some of those calories from the day before!
Hope to see you in just over three weeks – and a lot more in 2010!
We are extremely happy to announce the Madeira’s summer Italian tour! Through the unceasing efforts of Lorenzo Valdambrini, head of Surfer Joe Music (his surf music promotion organization), we will be playing seven shows in northern Italy between July 26th and August 1st. Here are the dates (with cities and clubs/events):
26 Jul – Livorno – Surfer Joe Summer Fest 27 Jul – La Spezia – La Skaletta 28 Jul – Trieste – Ausonia 29 Jul – San Marino – American Graffiti 30 Jul – Viareggio – Corsaro Rosso 31 Jul – Livorno – Effetto Venezia 1 Aug – Rosignano – Vespa Meeting
Our first show will be the headlining gig on the third and final night of the amazing Surfer Joe festival, featuring over the course of a weekend some of the very best surf bands in the world today, among them Pollo Del Mar, Los Twang! Marvels, the Kilaueas, Los Coronas, the Bradipos IV, Rev Hank of Urban Surf Kings, Lorenzo’s own band the Wadadli Riders, and at least another dozen others! Wow!
We’re extremely grateful to Lorenzo for working so hard to make this happen and offering us to play this incredible festival. He is probably the hardest working man in surf music today, putting his all into making surf music more visible and more accessible. A truly remarkable guy!
We have one more US show (possibly our final for the year) prior to our Italian trek: Saturday, May 30th in Champaign, IL with our dear friends, the always-fantastic Cocktail Preachers! (Incidentally, we’ll also be celebrating our fifth anniversary at this show, our first show having been on June 5th, 2004. Five years – wow, time flies when you’re having fun!) So, hope to see some US surf fans in Champaign in just over two weeks, and some Italian and Euro surf fans in Italy in July and August!
We mentioned last summer that we will be appearing in a major new documentary on the history of surf music called Sound of the Surf. The film is still in production, and should be out this summer. As a preview, the producer Thomas Duncan has released this promo clip of the Madeira performing our song “Crescent Moon,” shot last August in Orange County, CA:
(You can also see it on Video page of our official site or at the top of our MySpace site) The HQ version should appear in a short while. (Note that the movie itself will be in HD, but space and time constraints forbid the HD version of the above video from being available at this time.)
Expect similiar videos in the next few months from Slacktone, the Surfaris, Laika & the Cosmonauts, Meshugga Beach Party, the Barbwires, the Bitch Boys, the Eliminators and Eddie Bertrand. If you subscribe to the above YouTube channel you will be notified as Tom releases all those clips. Enjoy!
We’d also like to remind everyone about our Indy show on Friday, April 10th (with Destination: Earth! and Frankie Camaro’s Atomic Bombay) as well as announce a show in Champaign, IL on Saturday, May 30th (with the Cocktail Preachers!). Please see our Gigs page for more details. These will be our only local shows until the Fall as we’ll be doing a European tour this Summer! More on that in the next news update….
Enjoy the Spring and hope to see you at one of these two shows! The Madeira
After some extended downtime, we return with great news: UK’s Pipeline Instrumental Review #79 (Spring 2009) declared “Carpe Noctem” one of its two Albums of the Year! (We share the honor with Spanish veterans and long-time Pipeline favorites Los Jets.) In addition, both editors still have “Carpe Noctem” at the top of their current playlists in the new issue. Big thanks to Pipeline editors Alan Taylor and Dave Burke for this wonderful gesture – we are completely stoked!
Also, after a more-than-six-month-break the Madeira will be returning to playing live on Friday, April 10th. And it will be a very special night, as this will also be DESTINATION: EARTH’s 10th ANNIVERSARYREUNION SHOW!! That’s right, D:E! are back, and Patrick, errr, I mean Commander 007 will have a busy and exhausting night! Also partaking in all the fun will be Frankie Camaro’s Atomic Bombay. We hope you can join us for what is sure to be an unforgettable evening!
Stay tuned for some more exciting news coming very soon!
We wanted to share some good news with all of you. Most of you probably know that Pipeline magazine (from England) is probably thee premiere zine in the surf/instro world. Alan Taylor, one of the two editors, in the new issue (#78) has “Carpe Noctem” as the NUMBERONE of his Top Ten favorites of the last six months! He also gives the CD a great review, which you can now read on our website (While there, please check out also the newly translated transcript of The Vault, the Spanish radio show that picked “Carpe Noctem” as their Album of the Week last month.)
What a great way to finish off a truly wonderful year for the Madeira! We thank you very deeply for all your support, and we hope to see as many of you as possible in 2009. We hope to have some good news about that soon – stay tuned.
We wish you very happy holidays, and a great new year!
We are on hiatus until the spring, but you can hear us on the internet. First, the Surf Guitar 101 Podcast #4 features the second part of Ivan and Dane’s interview (conducted in Hermosa Beach on the night of the Surf Guitar 101 convention in early August) – in addition to all sorts of killer surf music (mostly from the sixties this time around). You can download the episode here and check out some comments about it here.
We also found out a few days ago that the song “Carpe Noctem” was selected the Record of the Week on “El Sótano” (“The Cellar”), an hour-long weekly surf/garage/frat show on Spanish National Radio! They also played “Wreak Havoc!” and “SOS (Stomp on Stomp)” and talked about the band (in Spanish, of course!), the Double Crown label and our labelmates the Surfites. Check it out! (If the streamed signal doesn’t work very well, you can download the entire episode by clicking on the green Descargar button.)
Two members of the Madeira have been keeping busy over the past few months with some outside activities that we’d like to tell you about.
Ivan is a guest guitarist on the track “Magyara” by Frankie & the Pool Boys, a new CD masterminded by Ferenc Dobronyi of Pollo Del Mar, now out on Double Crown Records. Ferenc recorded this CD during the recent Pollo Del Mar break with the help of a bunch of friends, including Dusty Watson (Slacktone, Agent Orange, Dick Dale, Jon & the Nightriders), Dave Wronski (Slacktone, Jon & the Nightriders), Shigeo Naka (the Surf Coasters), Danny Snyder (the TomorrowMen, Meshugga Beach Party) and more. It is a simply remarkable album, but don’t take our word for it – check out some of the songs, including “Magyara,” here (And make sure you take a look at the two videos on the site, especially “Ewa on the Beach” which is HIGHLY recommended, both the song AND the video! :) )
Ivan also wrote a lengthy feature for the new Continental zine (issue #15) on Dick Dale. It is an in-depth review of the recent Sundazed reissues of Dale’s sixties’ albums, complete with the historical background on each album. Read a bit more about it and order here.
Patrick has been extremely productive as singer, guitarist and primary songwriter with his other band the Shake Ups, who will be releasing their second CD, “Breathing the Flood”, next week. They’ll be following it up with a bunch of shows in the SoCal area. The Shake Ups play super-catchy power-pop, and you can hear two phenomenal tracks from the new album (and see more about their upcoming live dates) on their myspace site.
We hope you pick up all the above releases and enjoy them – we give them all Eight Thumbs Up (which only requires four hands from the Carpe Noctem cover)!
We very much hope you’re enjoying the summer. We wanted to update you on all the recent and upcoming activities in the Madeira camp.
First of all, our short SoCal tour was an unqualified success!! We played San Diego, Hermosa Beach and Huntington Beach between August 1st and 3rd, and each show was better than the previous one – and together they are probably the highlight of our four years together. You can go here to read some comments posted on the Surf Guitar 101 forum by various witnesses (we compiled the comments about the Madeira only, since the original forum thread is currently up to 15 pages!) . You can also see photos from all three shows here. It was great to see so many old friends, make several new ones and play with MANY amazing surf bands (including Pollo del Mar, Slacktone, the Secret Samurai, and many, many others)! In particular we must thank Ryan Ruiz of the Secret Samurai for going way above and beyond the call of duty helping us set up the San Diego show, make available his band’s practice space AND provide his band’s gear to us; also, Ferenc Dobronyi of Pollo del Mar and Frankie & the Pool Boys for helping with all three shows. We should also recognize the amazing work done by Jeff “Big Tiki Dude” for the Surf Guitar 101 Convention on Saturday at Suzie’s in Hermosa Beach, which was an unforgettable, even legendary, event and one that made our whole trip so much more special! Finally, we would like to thank Linda Miller of the Huntington Beach International Surfing Museum for adding us to the Sunday’s lineup and providing an opportunity to play our probably most memorable show to date (and also lining up some incredible amps, owned by Matt Quilter of the Reventlos, and drums for us). Playing right in front of the Huntington Beach Pier, next to the beach, close to where it all began for surf music, on a perfect day – well, it doesn’t really get any better than that. (Please at the very least take a look at the Huntington Beach photos to get some idea of the weekend we had!) We certainly hope we can do all this again next year.
Second, we are THRILLED to announce that we will be in the upcoming surf music documentary called “Sound of the Surf”. This is a fully professional production with highly active involvement by legendary guitarist and surf music historian John Blair (Jon & the Nightriders). We were recorded performing seven songs in hi-def with multiple cameras and multitrack audio in a controlled studio environment the Monday after our SoCal shows. We also did a lengthy on-camera interview with two of the founders of surf music, Eddie Bertrand (Eddie & the Showmen, the Belairs) and Paul Johnson (the Belairs, the Surfaris), as well as John Blair, to be included in the movie. That was quite surreal and pretty incredible. The movie is scheduled to be released in the Spring or Summer of ’09, so we’ll all have to be patient (the plan right now is to market it heavily, including advertising on network TV, and hopefully a theatrical release before the film comes out on DVD, too). We would like to extend our deep thanks to producer/director Tom Duncan, John Blair and Tim Ferrill for including us in this film, which we expect will drastically raise the profile of the entire genre – and may in fact launch it to heights previously unseen! (Incidentally, one of the more remarkable experiences of our SoCal trip was having Eddie “Squad Car” Bertrand singing our praises – even on camera – and taking a keen interest in making us look good during the video shoot! Absolutely remarkable. One could call it a dream-come-true, but who’d ever dare dream of something so completely fantastical! See some photos from the taping here)
Finally, we are not done yet for the year. We will be headlining “Surf Explosion 2” on Friday, September 19th, in Cincinnati, OH, for which we will be joined by our good friends the Surge (Atlanta, GA) as well as Don’t Fear the Reverb (Cincinnati, OH). The most amazing thing about this show is that it will be held in the historical Memorial Hall which seats 610 people, and it will be vigorously marketed far and wide, including bringing big-name sponsors on board. This will be by far the biggest show we have played yet, and we expect it to be very special. We hope many of you that are not in Cincinnati but within driving distance will consider making the trek to be there – we think you’ll find it worthwhile. The promoters of the show are also aiming to increase the public awareness of modern surf music to the point where they can hold larger surf music events several times a year – and we think you will all agree that this is a VERY worthy goal! (We also hope to play a show in Chicago the following day, Saturday, September 20th, with the Cocktail Preachers and Roger & the Wraybands. We already booked a venue but just a few days ago found out out of the blue that it is closing down permanently, so we are now looking for an alternative location. We hope we can find something – please keep an eye out on our Gigs page for any updates on that.)
That’s it – whew! Lots going on. Thanks for reading this far, and we hope you have been enjoying “Carpe Noctem” for the last couple of months (and if not, you clearly haven’t gotten it yet – so, what are you waiting for?? :). We also hope to see some of you in Cincinnati and maybe in Chicago.
Best regards, Ivan, Patrick, Todd, Dane The Madeira
