More Tour Dates (Summer Sonic, Ruisrock…)

New tour dates pop up every other day now, so we’d rather do these update posts than write about each new addition separately. Our events calendar is always up to date still, as is Mewsite’s tour section. For now. Since our last post a little over a week ago Mew has added two major Summer festivals and two European solo shows.

As was expected, Mew will travel to Finland right after the Roskilde show. The oldest annual rock festival in Nordic region (and second oldest in the world), Ruisrock Festival has always invited the Danes around their album releases and it was also the first Finnish festival to have them perform live twelve years ago (before that they had only played solo shows in Finland). Ruisrock and Roskilde have often walked hand in hand with artist line-ups, but the latter is, of course, the bigger one of the two. These have been the two festivals offering the largest audience for Mew in the past, and there’s a good chance that it will stay that way in 2015 as well. Previously Mew has been seen at Ruisrock in 2003, 2006 and 2009 (our review). Logistically Roskilde has to come first, so Mew will play in the city of Turku either on July 4th or July 5th.

Japanese pride, Summer Sonic is annually held in two cities sharing the bands in both of them. Some artists play in Tokyo on the first day and in Osaka on the second, and vice versa. We don’t yet know in which order Mew will perform this Summer, but confirmation should come in good time for those thinking which city to go to. In 2003, 2005, 2009 and 2013 Mew always played Tokyo first, so maybe the trend continues and the biggest city in the world has them play on August 15th and Osaka (not quite a small town either) gets them on August 16th.

The more independent Mew tours in cities they previously have not, or at least no one noticed them there if they did. Two interesting additions for May European tour recently took place. After the previously announced Berlin show, Mew will not stop touring Europe there, but will travel to Italy. This is interesting because although Italy is a pretty big country population-wise, Mew has been quite a stranger there still. As far as we know Mew has only played in that country once (in Rome, almost nine years ago). On May 27th they will arrive to Milan and it will be their first ever show (at Magazzini Generali) in that city, as the 2006 scheduled gig was suddenly cancelled.

On May 28th Mew will return to Germany for one more show (after Mannheim and Berlin). This time in Munich where Mew has played once before, but that show took place in 2006, so it’s about time. It is unknown if the band will take almost a month-long break after the show at popular venue Strom or if new additions will be made. We will know soon.

Here’s a newly published 22-minute fun interview recorded in Finland two weeks ago. In the end Bo Madsen talks about places where they are planning to tour this year and people over at Mewstralia -website should be happy to hear that he first mentions Australia (and probably tries there to say New Zealand as well). Mew never went to Argentina either and Buenos Aires is mentioned also (for the beaches), so it looks like they’ll explore a lot of new territories this time around. They have no plans for Africa, though. Well, we knew this. During this session they also played another live acoustic version of Witness and the video for that can be found here.