Bigbang heading out on UK tour
December sees live favourites Big Bang heading out on a UK tour supporting Phantom Limb
Bigbang has been dubbed “Norway’s Greatest Live Band” and is major force in the Norwegian music scene. During the past two years, the band has spent time focusing on the American market. Based in California, they criss-crossed the country playing intimate gigs and promoting their North American debut, 2008’s From Acid to Zen. The album was very well received and resulted in great reviews; among others, from Rolling Stone Magazine’s editor David Fricke: “It’s a shotgun buffet, like those early U.S. LPs by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones that combined album tracks and singles from unrelated sessions, and it succeeds the same way: like an instant greatest-hits record.”
Often garnering comparisons to the Allman Brothers, Tom Petty, Lynyrd Skynyrd and REM (in fact, the London daily newspaper The Sun once called them “Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young with balls”), Bigbang doesn’t fall readily into a neat genre or category. Greni (who started out as a skate punk with a love for Husker Du and Dinosaur Jr.) shrugs off comparisons with the exhortation “We’ve read too many books to be a jam band and, we’re too musical for the librarian-glasses crowd, can`t stop loving Rumors, Petty and Stax...and all this on a skateboard! ”
Background
Bigbang was formed when Øystein Greni, a young skateboarder on the verge of turning pro, shattered his knee - and thus his chances at making a career on his board. Greni’s father, Thor, was a soul musician in The Undertaker’s Circus, who toured with the New Yardbirds (a.k.a. Led Zeppelin) in the late ’60s. This classic rock foundation was met head-on with the adolescent Greni's love of punk & alternative rock, forging the band's distinctive sound.
With several full-length albums released in Europe having sold over 500,000 units, Bigbang performs at up to twenty-five European festivals per year, rocking 20,000 seat capacity venues at a time. Their raucous live show is such a hot ticket that the band's 2003 double CD release "Radio Radio TV Sleep" is best-selling live album in Norwegian history. In 2006, Bigbang played the main stage at the Roskilde Festival with The Who, The Flaming Lips and The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and in 2007 toured the UK with The Raconteurs.
Tour dates are found in the section below.
Big Bang on Spotify
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