News: What is happening in the world of Madrugada and on this page? I try to stay as updated as possible, and I will try to bring you the latest rumours and facts concerning Madrugada. Of course, you will also be able to read all the interesting stuff about what has been updated or changed on this very webpage.

June 10th 2005 - First Autumn European Tour date confirmed
It seems confirmed that Madrugada will perform at Tivoli in Utrecht, The Netherlands on Sunday September 4th 2005. This confirms the band's comments that there would be another full-blown European Tour coming up later this year, so we should be able to expect more confirmed dates to be released in the near future. Thanks to Mohawk for the information.

June 10th 2005 - Tonight's Southside performance streamed online
Madrugada's concert tonight at the Southside Festival in Germany will be streamed live online tonight. It seems like it will be streamed as video, and the band is scheduled to perform between 19:00 and 19:45. You can click here to go to the page where you will find a link to the stream and a schedule for the other performances that will also be streamed, including acts such as Beck, Oasis and Dinosaur Jr.

If you are having problems getting the stream to work properly, please take a look at this thread at the discussion forum. Thanks to DASDING.de and The Girl In The Red Shirt for the information.

June 3rd 2005 - News updates
I got to sit down and talk a bit with the band when they were in Berlin two weeks ago, and Sivert could tell that they are very happy with the recent success they have been enjoying. Especially in Norway they notice that a lot of younger people seem to be discovering their music, with all of their back-catalogue having been on the Top 40 list since the release of "The Deep End." This time around, they will use the success to as a platform for touring as much as possible, something he admitted they have not been very good at in the past. The Norwegian tour is over with, and the European tour is getting wrapped up these days. But there will be little time to rest, with about twenty festival appearances confirmed this Summer. If that was not enough, Sivert could also tell that they are working on booking another European tour for the end of the year and another Norwegian tour in the Winter.

In the near future, the song "Stories From The Streets" will be released as a single. At least in Europe, it may be that another song is picked as a single to be released only Norway (rumours are pointing at "Hold On To You"). The single version will feature Steve Stevens, who has played with Billy Idol amongst others, on flamenco guitar. The new album is still not out in places like Great Britain and America, but there are plans to do something with that. Sivert says he is very satisfied with how the limited edition bonus track "Life In The City" turned out, and that he likes it better than some of the songs that ended up on the actual album. In the UK, the album might be released in a new version, with "Life In The City" as one of the regular album tracks.

A music video for "Stories From The Streets" was recorded in Madrid the week before the European tour started, which turned out to not exactly be an excellent idea. A lot of dry ice was used for the video shoot, which resulted in Sivert getting a bad throat, and the first concert in Sweden getting cancelled and the second one getting cut short. This was not an ideal situation, as this was at the beginning of a big and important tour, but also because the band have not been very popular in Sweden in the past, and this was the first time a lot of interest in the band was being shown in Sweden - the cancelled concert in Stockholm was sold out. They were very sorry to have to let people down, and are hoping to re-schedule the cancelled concert for some time during the Summer.

Additionally, with the video shoot in Madrid and two concerts at the weekend before the European tour kicked off, the band found themselves in a position where they had a new drummer for the tour, Bert Nummelin, but they had had far too little time to rehearse together. So the first couple of concerts on the tour had to serve as practice sessions for the new guy, who was also struggling a bit with getting into the Madrugada-style of drumming, especially the older songs that Jon had added his own special touches to. In Berlin, a few weeks into the tour, things were finally starting to work out very well with the integration of Bert as the drummer. Additionally, light technician Neil McNasty said that he thinks the rest of the band are all performing a lot better than ever before, Robert has developed into a proper rockstar-guitarist, and Frode is also adding a lot of fine details to the band's sounds.

Some background on Bert Nummelin: He is originally from Sweden, and moved to Norway about ten years ago. He started out playing rock when he was younger, then got a jazz education, and when he moved to Oslo he got to know a lot of people from the hip-hop movement, and has been playing with hip-hop bands for some time. He says he is very aware of the fact that there are a lot of dedicated Madrugada fans, who want to hear the songs played a certain way and can be very picky about it, so when he plays Madrugada songs he plays them his own way, but he tries to maintain the original mood of the songs. With some songs he says he just goes with the flow, an example of that is "Got You" which was jammed on at soundcheck once, and then added to the setlist in a drastically different form than when it was released. Here the whole band wanted to do something different, and Bert says he is aware of the existance of the recorded version of the song, but he does not know what that version sounds like.

The Madrugada drummer situation has not been solved, though. For the Summer festival appearances coming up, Erland Dahlen, who played on about half of "The Deep End" and the Norwegian tour, will be back behind the drum kit, and fans and band alike will have to get used to something new, and quickly get up to pace. And towards the end of the Summer festivals, it seems like Bert will have to step in again. The reason Erland could not play on the European tour was because he got a son some time ago, and he has spent time at home. But he is the primary drummer of the band at the moment, something both drummers have an understanding for. But Erland also plays in another band, Exploding Plastics, and will sometimes be occupied with them, which is why Bert will most likely step in at the end of the Summer shows (and also had to do performance at Først & Sist on NRK television as a one-off).

To end this update is a funny tidbit about the band's current rider. The rider is presented to every organizer, and is a list of demands for equipment and additional goods like amounts of drinks and food that the band requires to play a concert. This time around, instead of drinking cheap local beer, the band have been overwhelmed by the amounts of expensive wine from all over the world that they have been presented with, so much that they were driving around with a bus loaded full of unopened bottles. The reason for this was that efore the tour started, Frode went to fancy Kampen Bistro in Oslo, sat down with a pen and a piece of paper, and copied their list of expensive wines onto the band's rider. It was supposed to be a joke, but everywhere except for at Melkweg they have gotten bottles from their exclusive list.

Older News: Most of the older news pages are also being stored and are available from this page. These news pages are no longer updated, so some of the links might be outdated.