The Hives have announced that they will be undertaking The World’s First World Wide Web World Tour, an interactive online experience featuring mid-gig telephone calls, “bright lights” and bespoke audience noise.
“See The Hives in your car, living room, kitchen, hut, yurt, bedroom, bathtub, attic, den! No travel? No shit? No problem!
,” the Swedes says. “And too good to be true you ask? Yes! But in all honesty, weren't The Hives always?”
In a brilliantly tongue-in-cheek statement posted on social media, Howlin' Pelle Almqvist’s band say:
“The Hives present The World’s First World Wide Web World Tour in Jan 2021! First, there was no-knead bread, then came no-wrinkle shirts, and now we witness the birth of the No Travel World Tour!!!
"We will play live shows for specific cities, even if it means we play at 6am or some other totally bullshit time for a rock ‘n’ roller. (We're looking at you, Australia.) All this from a hermetically sealed, virus-safe bunker in Sweden.
"The only thing missing is the most important thing: You, the crowd.
"To address this:
"You will be able to send in audio messages and they will be played for The Hives in the room in real-time. As if you were in the crowd shouting!
"We will be accepting telephone calls!
"You will vote on a selection of songs we include in the set!
"Bright lights, loud noises!
"We will use crowd noise recorded in the very same city we are playing for. The New York show will have real New Yorkians cheering and screaming in the background. The Sydney show will have actual Sydneyans, and Berlin bang-on bonafide Berlinus berlinus, and so forth.
"You won’t want to miss it. No one has ever done it like this before. It’s a historical first and we hope many artists follow.”
The Hives World’s First World Wide Web World Tour will call at:
Jan 21 Berlin, 8pm CET
Jan 22 London, 8pm GMT
Jan 23 New York, 7pm ET
Jan 28 Sydney, 9pm AEDT
Jan 29 São Paulo, 8pm BRT
Jan 30 Stockholm, 8pm CET
The Hives haven’t released a studio album since 2012’s Lex Hives, but back in 2017, Almqvist insisted to this website that the group had a new batch of “awesome songs” and stated “I think it’s some of the best stuff we’ve ever made.”
