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Fucked Up have their own SXSW showcase + Haiti, Jay Reatard, updated tour dates & more

by Andrew Frisicano

DOWNLOAD: Fucked Up – Neat Parts (MP3)

Fucked Up

We are coming back Austin, and we welcome all challengers; your Pheonix’s, your xx’s and jj’s, bring us all the TuNeYaRdS and Passion Pits you have, we are ready. We are coming back for TWO (announceable) special shows, and maybe one 3rd Mexican el concierto especial, and without further adieu, here is some of the info:

Fucked Up will not only be playing SXSW this year, they’ll be hosting a showcase of their own. The “Fucked Up saves music” lineup is scheduled for Saturday, March 20th at Red 7 Patio (which, the band writes, will be hosting the Woodsist Records showcase indoors at the same time). If there was doubt after their guest-filled Xmas charity single that Fucked Up could pull together some serious talent, their SXSW bill puts that to rest. Besides their own set, the show will include music from J Mascis, Rival Schools, Titus Andronicus, Katie Stelmanis, and one more artist TBA. Cold Cave were originally listed on the bill, but are not anymore. Titus and Katie both also opened for Fucked Up at their last Brooklyn show. The band’s other “announceable” SXSW show is a TBA Shirts For a Cure benefit on Friday (3/19).

Fucked Up’s current tour dates include a February run with Kurt Vile (which visits the NYC-area on Feb 18th and 19th) and a gig with Leatherface (who are coming to NYC separately) in Toronto. Updated tour dates are below.

Since their Xmas charity single in December, the band has continued in the same philanthropic vein – they recently auctioned off test pressings of their forthcoming collection Couple Tracks: Singles 2002-2009, due January 26th on Matador Records, for Haiti disaster relief. The Ebay bidding closed as $177.50.

The band also offered some thoughtful words about Jay Reatard’s recent passing. That tribute is below…

Jay Reatard tribute from Fucked Up

Just wanted to say a few words about Jay. We were fortunate enough to play a bunch of shows with, and hang out with Jay Reatard, and we were all as shocked as you probably were when we heard the news, probably more so than we would have been able to guess. It hits a bit hard, because Jay and Fucked Up had somewhat of a parallel trajectory – same label, same punk-cum-indie sell-out career move. We played together all over the world, we saw his first show at sxsw 2006. Whereas Fucked Up has always played music, and punk culture in general for kind of a lark, Jay was that livewire that was too serious, too legitimate for this era. He was an archetypal musicial in the classic sense, moving fast, always playing and making music. He caught a lot of shit for the “antics” he’d get up to, the things you’d read about on the internet, but Jay represents that thing in music that everyone wants to deplore, precisely because he was that white hot thing you always wanted to be. It was people like Jay that first brought you to this world in the first place – those exciting and rarefied musicians who hurtled through their lives at a pace you could only keep up with vicariously, or in hindsight. It’s easy to talk about our punk thing, like it’s a museum piece, something that none of us could really be part of, because now we’re too aware, or too well behaved, too beyond it all. Jay was that real piece, that too-bright fragment that was sometimes hard for us to consider, even though it was just as hard to look away.

Besides all that, he made a lot of great songs and we were lucky to have played with him. RIP.

Fucked Up 2010 – Tour Dates
Feb 12 Oberlin, OH The ?Sco (Dionysus Disco) @ Oberlin College #
Feb 13 Chicago, IL Empty Bottle #
Feb 14 Bloomington, IN Video Saloon #
Feb 15 Newport, KY Southgate House #
Feb 16 Baltimore, MD Ottobar #
Feb 17 Philadelphia, PA The Barbary #
Feb 18 Hoboken, NJ Maxwell’s #
Feb 19 Brooklyn, NY Europa
Feb 20 Boston, MA Middle East Downstairs #
Feb 23 St. Catherines, ON L3 Nightclub %
Feb 26 Toronto, ON Opera House #
Mar 17-20 Austin, TX SXSW
# w/ Kurt Vile
% w/Leatherface, Yesterdays Rising, Orphan Choir