Babylon Circus — Album & Tour
Lyon based Babylon Circus is music laced with ska, gypsy, rock, vaudevillian antics, dancehall & reggae. Their first Australian East Coast tour in 2008 saw this 9 piece band sell every show out, with audiences screaming for more.
In March 2010 they will return to launch their new album La Belle Etoile (Cartell Music) and to pass on their infectious energy to the audiences at the main stage of WOMADelaide & WOMAD NZ as well as venues across the country.
A true musical menagerie, 9-piece big band Babylon Circus, have notched up over 900 concerts in 30 countries and built up a worldwide following with their electric live shows and addictive albums.
As befits a band with their name, their exploits include police chases, beatings and imprisonment in Irish jails, bathtub vodka, double concussions and hospitalisation in Russia and Muslim carnival processions in Syria. They have to be seen to be understood.
It started in Lyon, France, during 1995, when singers David Baruchel and Manu Nectoux devised a racy sound mainly fuelled on punk energy and hot with defiant social anthems sung in French and English — sometimes both in the same song. The duo worked with seven partners in crime who are at least as mad about music as they are: Georges on guitar, Olive on keyboards, Dadé on drums, Basile on bass, Rimbaud on accordion and saxophone, Laurent on trumpet and Clément on trombone.
babyloncircus.com.au, cartellmusic.com.au
Tour Dates
- Sydney, The Basement, Fri March 5 & Sat March 20 thebasement.com.au
- WOMADelaide, Sat March 6 – Mon March 8 womadelaide.com.au
- Melbourne, Corner Hotel, Wed March 10 cornerhotel.com
- WOMAD NZ, Fri March 12 & Sun March 14 womad.co.nz
- Brisbane, The Zoo, Thur March 18 thezoo.com.au
- Byron Bay, Great Northern, Fri March 19 thenorthern.com.au
Media Enquiries
Emma Collison Publicity, 02 9362 9700, 0418 584 795, emma@emmacollison.com
Mix Django Reihardt with Jacques Brel, add a little Gogol Bordello and you’ll come close to what Babylon Circus sounds like. Detroit News
Plays like the amped up soundtrack to a Parisian merry-go-round from the future. Global Rhythms
A tremendously entertaining album. Billboard
Even a fractured skull can’t stop this band…
Dancing in the war-torn Middle East, being chased through the streets of Dublin by police and Russian hospitals after drunkenly tumbling down a staircase: Babylon Circus frontman David Baruchel certainly lives up to his French punk-fusion band’s decadent carnival name.
Baruchel promises also to evoke it on stage with the band’s raucous sonic fusion of punk rock, reggae, French folk and gypsy influences — equal parts whimsy and energy.
, Baruchel says.
Brisbane audiences will get to experience this mayhem first-hand when Babylon Circus perform next Thursday, after a slot on Womadelaide bill lured them to Australia.
, Baruchel says.
Babylon Circus continue to broaden their musical horizons with their latest album, La Belle Etoile, moving from punk and reggae roots to an amazing assortment of sounds. Their previous album, Dances of Resistance, had a journalistic feel, inspired by travels that showed a side of life not widely reported in Western media.
They were the only European band to accept an invitation to play at La Fete de la Musique in Damascus, three months after the US invasion of Iraq.
Within minutes they were joined by 200 people, some of whom shut their shops to dance in the streets.
In Dublin, they were illegally offered potato vodka to drink in public, resulting in a confused musician being chased through the streets by the police, who were in turn were pursued by the rest of the band members. La Belle Etoile was also influenced by an accident in which Baruchel fractured his skull and nearly died when he drunkenly tumbled down a staircase after a gig in Moscow.
Baruchel spent the next 12 days in five different Russian hospitals and had an even longer road to recovery.
Patrick McDonald, The Courier Mail