Last year, The Felice Brothers released From Dreams to Dust, which we hailed as their most ambitious, densest and experimental work to date; it may also be their finest hour.
Next month, they will head to Europe as they kick off their European tour in Sweden on June 10th before later heading to the UK and Ireland for no less than 19 dates, taking in Cambridge, Cardiff, Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, and London before then hopping over to Ireland for dates in Belfast, Dublin and Galway.
As many of you may know, The Felice Brothers are based in New York’s Catskill mountains. It’s also where the small town of Woodstock is situated; the name given to the famous 1969 festival that was actually situated sixty miles away. This little community became a key location for the likes of Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Janus Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and lots more. Enough to warrant a book by Barney Hoskyns (Small Town Talk) which examined the history and the community of the area – from the hippie capitalists and freaks to the confused seeking spiritual truth and those following the bucolic dream of dropping out and going back to the land.
Interestingly, the book’s prologue starts in a small theatre in the foothills of Overlook Mountain (a once sacred place to the Algonquin Indians) built around a hundred years ago: “a son of Old Old Woodstock takes to the stage with a micro ensemble of guitarist, cellist and fiddler and says: ‘We’re so happy you’ve joined us in this historic place in the woods. This is a significant mystical zone that we inhabit'”. He is describing Simone Felice (interviewed here), brother of Ian and James Felice and former member of the band. They are sons of a carpenter who came to the Catskills for the 1969 Woodstock festival and never left.
Bob Dylan arrived a few years before in 1965 and lived in the Byrdcliffe art colony and he still owns property in Woodstock to this day. There’s something about those hills and maybe some of that Dylan dust settled on their latest album which our reviewer felt had occasional shades of classic Dylan on tracks such as We Shall Live Again and To-Do List:
An impromptu garden session to promote the tour led to them plucking a tune out of the air and they came up with The Wild Rover…
This is sure to be a great tour…
The Felice Brothers
June 10th: Stockholm, Sweden
June 11th: Oslo, Norway
June 12th: Copenhagen, Denmark
June 14th: Cologne, Germany
June 15th: Utrecht, Netherlands
June 17th: Tunbridge Wells, United Kingdom (Black Deer Festival)
June 18th: Guildford, United Kingdom
June 19th: Winchester, United Kingdom
June 21st: Cambridge, United Kingdom
June 22nd: Cardiff, United Kingdom
June 23rd: Pocklington, United Kingdom
June 24th: New Castle upon Tyne, United Kingdom
June 25th: Inverness, United Kingdom
June 27th: Glasgow, United Kingdom
June 28th: Leeds, United Kingdom
June 29th: Nottingham, United Kingdom
July 1st: Manchester, United Kingdom
July 2nd: London, United Kingdom
July 4th: Birmingham, United Kingdom
July 5th: Bristol, United Kingdom
July 6th: Liverpool, United Kingdom
July 8th: Belfast, United Kingdom
July 9th: Dublin, Ireland
July 11th: Galway, Ireland
Ticket Links here: http://www.thefelicebrothers.com/tour/