Looks like there will be more shows added. Tickets on sale now.

21 October 2012
Newcastle Entertainment Centre, Newcastle, Australia

22 October 2012
Sydney Entertainment Centre, Sydney, Australia

23 October 2012
Sydney Entertainment Centre, Sydney, Australia

26 October 2012
Brisbane Entertainment Centre, Brisbane, Australia

28 October 2012
Rock It Festival, Perth, Australia

30 October 2012
Adelaide Entertainment Centre, Adelaide, Australia

31 October 2012
Sidney Myer Music Bowl, Melbourne, Australia

1 September 2012
Sidney Myer Music Bowl, Melbourne, Australia

www.youtube.com/watch?v=itkFWWKsNz0

Related posts:

1. The Black Keys Tour Dates 2012
2. The Black Keys’ Australia and New Zealand Tour Dates 2011
3. The Black Keys’ Tour Dates 2011

The Black Keys Fan Lounge recently caught up with the man in the suit. He is, of course, none other than Brian ‘BT’ Taranto of Love Police -- an Australian merchandise, design and touring company. Love Police has been the local promoter for the The Black Keys in Australia since the very first tours in 2003.

BT was kind enough to answer a few questions about his presence on stage, a unique quirk to touring in Australia. See below the video.

You’ll see BT in this video (apologies for the quality, it’s only one available showing BT online), doing the announcement right before the band launches into 10 AM Automatic.

How did it come about that you started introducing the band?

I just said to them that I liked the idea that a band was introduced, like the Stones, like Bob Dylan still is etc. They said, go for it. It was the 3rd tour we had done together and we had become quite close.

When there are only two band members, one crew guy and me, there is nothing but getting close. We had to make our own fun.

The version shown in the video is more tame than I remember. I recall you howling a bit more loudly. Did the band egg you on to do it differently each time? Or did it evolve over time?

No, I just made it up as I went along. Sometimes I threw in local references if anything came to mind.

Was it only on the 2005 tour you introduced them?

I pretty much have introduced them almost everytime I have been at a show with them either in Australia or internationally since their first or second tour here [Australia]. Have done it at Bonnaroo, the Fillmore, LA, Austin City Limits, many places around the globe. Not sure what will happen now though. They are a big, big band with a large production, they may have a video or one of Pat’s beloved raelians may take the stage and communicate a message through vibrations.

Was Australia the only place the band used someone to introduce them in this way?

To the best of my knowledge, yes.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJLf944HCBY

Related posts:

1. Interview: Dan Johnson – The Black Keys’ Stage Manager, Guitar Tech, Drum Tech, Keyboard Tech, Custom Guitar Builder / Repairer and more!
2. The Black Keys Cancel New Zealand and Australia Tour 2011
3. Why The Black Keys Should Do An Interview With Me

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZCSGwKOntY

As Zane Lowe pointed out, The Black Keys’ have a long history of live to air performances on BBC Radio. Legendary BBC DJ John Peel was an early supporter and gave the band airtime in 2003. Listen to the Peel Sessions here.

Zane Lowe is the heir apparent to the John Peel legacy. A famed DJ influencer in his own right, Lowe was the first to play Brothers‘ Tighten Up anywhere in 2010 and was given the honour of being the first to play El Camino‘s Run Right Back in 2011.

Related posts:

1. The Black Keys’ John Peel Radio Sessions
2. Listen: ‘Tighten Up’ Off The Black Keys’ New Album ‘Brothers’
3. MP3: The Black Keys’ Radio Recordings 2007-2008

The results for the 2011 poll have just been announced. Lonely Boy was voted the number 2 most popular song of 2011 in Australia.

For past results regarding The Black Keys in this poll see this post. The Black Keys’ previous best result was number 54 in 2004 for 10am Automatic.

It’s a significant result since The Black Keys cancelled their 2011 tour of Australia to concentrate their efforts on recording the new El Camino album, of which Lonely Boy was the first single. The decision to cancel the Australian tour cost the band $100,000 but the time off has created a hit record around the world. Clearly any resentment fans might have felt for the Australian tour cancellation was irrelevant to the result. Arguably, the band have now created a new fan base that wasn’t even aware of The Black Keys prior to the El Camino release.

The number 2 position is all the more significant since Lonely Boy was only released in early December 2011. It was therefore competing with songs that had been publicly available for alot longer. The result will surely fuel additional speculation regarding a tour of Australia in 2012. Current scheduling and comments by the band would suggest, however, that a tour is unlikely until early 2013.

The result shows again how important radio still is to breaking a band and popularising their music. Especially in a country where one radio station is as influential as Triple J is, since it can be listened to anywhere in Australia. In a brief audio interview with Pat Carney prior to the announcement of the number 2 position, he noted the support of Triple J in championing The Black Keys’ music in 2003 which created the band’s largest fanbase in Australia during their early years. The same phenomenon of radio support, of course, propelled Tighten Up to the top of the charts in the USA in 2010.

Interestingly, the artist who had a song at the number 3 in the countdown, Matt Corby, recently did a version of Lonely Boy live to air on Triple J. Pretty impressive it was too.

Related posts:

1. The Black Keys and Triple J Radio Hottest 100
2. El Camino: The Black Keys’ Lonely Boy single released
3. Listen: Dan Auerbach Interview on Triple J Radio

*************

It’s now been more than a month since The Black Keys’ released their new album, El Camino. While everything about the release was relatively self-explanatory, one big unknown remains. What was the point of this so-called ‘Masked’ video?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DM-2p3sUML4

The video shows Dan and Pat having moulds made of their faces to masks.

The video was, of course, released as part of an elaborate Record Store Day promotion for the Lonely Boy/Run Right Back 12″ vinyl release. There was a backwards url placed on the record sleeve that prompted fans to go to a url : www.theblackkeyselcamino.com. The site just had a countdown clock which, when it hit the zero hour, revealed this video.

Even more interesting how come only, to date, 725 or so people have viewed it? Fans seem not to have been interested in it. Or rather it just hasn’t received the publicity it perhaps deserves. Part of the reason the video has so few views is that it is unlisted, so it doesn’t appear on The Black Keys’ YouTube channel if you are looking at the Lonely Boy video, say.

So, what now? What is the point, purpose or meaning behind this video? It doesn’t make sense to develop a campaign around this video for it not to play a further role in the elaborate marketing strategy for this album.

Perhaps it’s part of the ‘making of’ a new video. What do you think? Surely the fans out there are interested to know, or someone knows what the plans are for it. Leave a comment or hit  The Black Keys Fan Lounge up on Twitter with your thoughts.

Related posts:

1. El Camino: The Black Keys’ Lonely Boy single released
2. Video: Watch ‘Tighten Up’ Off The Black Keys’ Album ‘Brothers’
3. The Black Keys’ Record Store Day Surprise 2011

Tchad Blake is one of the most esteemed producer-engineers working in popular music today. His back catalogue of credits reads like a who’s who in the music industry. Hopefully, Tchad might also get an opportunity to record The Black Keys’ rather than just mixing their records one day too. As Tchad explains, he almost did so for the El Camino release.

Dan Auerbach has previously been quoted as saying Tchad Blake, with reference to his work on Brothers, is “a genius with audio, a complete wizard, because we recorded these songs in a really minimal way. There are no more than 11 or 12 tracks on one song. All the drums are on one or two tracks, which is sort of unheard of in the modern-day recording world. Tchad does a lot of mixing where I’m sure he gets, you know, 40 or 50 tracks on one song. So he was really excited about our record, he would call us up and just tell us how much fun it is to mix this stuff because it was so raw.”

The Fan Lounge previously spoke with Tchad in this 2010 interview regarding his mixing of Brothers and Blakroc. It was therefore a joy to speak with Tchad again regarding a quite different mixing job for El Camino. The interview starts below the photo.

Tchad Blake

We should start at the beginning, obviously The Black Keys asked you to mix the El Camino record, after the success of Brothers.

There was a funny metamorphosis. Originally they asked me to record with them in France. Then they asked to have Danger Mouse produce and me engineer in Nashville, then things changed a couple more times and I couldn’t change my schedule quick enough. So they recorded with Danger Mouse and his engineer Ken.

Did the band give you any specific instructions?

Not to begin with. I got through most of the mixes with some minor feedback from the band. Then I went through them all on the phone with Danger Mouse for his changes. Then I had one more go with the band for details. So, we did it in layers – I did my thing, then band, then Danger Mouse and then again with the band doing the final calls on what they wanted. That’s very different from Brothers.

What sort of things were they changing?

Things like too much low end on a bass drum, the guitars panned a little too wide, bring things to the centre a little more. Maybe too much effect on something. Many vocal arrangement things because there’s a lot of background vocals on this one.

When it came to mixing, did they send you the album as a whole on a flash drive like last time?

No, they sent it to me in bits and pieces. I was mixing and they were still recording. I think I got three or four songs at a time sent to me on different DVDs. It was a little different in that regard.

I read that they recorded El Camino over 40 studio days, while Brothers they did in a relatively short amount of time. And with you mixing as songs were finished changes the process considerably.

From what I can gather, they finished a segment of recording that was mostly done, and they decided to redo some songs, there are always problem tunes you keep re-writing lyrics or adding stuff; so it was another layered process, not getting everything finished at once. It was taking a little longer this time and at some point it overlapped with me starting to mix.

You mention layering in a context there. Certainly listening to El Camino vs Brothers there seems to be a lot more orchestration, instrumentation, and layering of tracks. That’s quite distinctive. Would you agree? Is that what you received?

As an album I’d say El Camino has more focus. Brothers had a huge amount of abandon to it, which is a crazy energy thing. How you approach writing, playing, recording and mixing. There’s a feel to that which I really love. That said, there’s plenty of other ways to approach things. One is to be more considered. I can’t say one’s better than the other, just different. I think El Camino is a really good contrast to Brothers, in that it’s a more considered record with the song writing more focused. It’s got more of a thread through it all. Brothers has a broader range of different musical styles whereas this one is contained a little bit more. There’s still a lot of variety, it’s just not as wide.

I recall for Brothers you were given, say, eight tracks to mix as part of each song. Were you given a lot more tracks to mix as part of each song on El Camino?

This was a different approach mostly. [On Brothers] I was asked to take what they had recorded, which they liked already, and augment it, change it, take it to a whole different place. For me that’s a very liberating, fun kind of instruction. [El Camino] came to me much closer to what they wanted the finished record to be so it was more of a balance job. There really wasn’t anything to change too much. They wanted a few things expanded, more dynamic. Also, all drums were recorded on separate tracks, that wasn’t the case on Brothers. This was done much more like a traditional studio record.

The fact that Danger Mouse was there from start to finish in the one studio obviously had an impact on that. He was a co-writer and co-producer, he’s coordinating the process. Would you agree?

He came with his engineering team to continue work with the band. I think that’s a really good thing, to have a close relationship with everybody. Working with the band multiple times helps to get a flow going quickly, which sometimes, you can’t when you have all first timers in the room. Seems like a very comfortable situation. They all knew what they wanted to go for, they were all on the same page.

On some of the tracks there are multiple guitar parts or sounds, which is some they’ve done before, but perhaps not to this extent. I would have thought this was an important consideration in how you mixed the record?

It was a case of using doubles and that type of thing for dynamics. Getting the energy to come up a little bit, without too much of a change. Sometimes you do that because you don’t want to add a new sound, you just want to have the sound that’s there to energize a bit or be bigger. Doubles are often used like that. I also created some doubles cutting things up, moving them around with vocals and guitars.

Compared to their other albums, it’s been remarked that the guitars sound like they have been mixed down. We saw that happening on Brothers. What’s your take on this?

What’s great about these guys is they started with absolutely crazy, fearless abandon in their playing writing and recording. Recording with one or two microphones in the basement of an old factory and jamming them out. Drums, guitar and voice – and that’s it. You could say the guitar was prominent or the drums. There’s not much more of a choice you can make there. As they’ve progressed, they seem to be getting more instrumentation, more melody, more instruments playing melody, more instrumental hooks. On this record, many songs start with an instrumental hook, and have that echo as a solo. It’s a really good vehicle for remembering the hook. So there’s a progression here that’s really great. They’re not stuck with making one record.

When we spoke last time you were mentioning some of the plug-ins you were using. Were there any new ones this time around?

Not much, again, the Decapitator is on there quite a bit. The Devil Lock was new this time around. It’s a SoundToys plug-in that was styled after a compressor I’ve been using since the 80s called the Level Loc made by Shure. SoundToys copied one they had and it’s a very cool plug-in. Sans Amp and the ReFuse Lowender is on this record although we weren’t going for that real low end that we were on some of Brothers. I dusted off from the barn my Hughes SRS box. It’s a stereo widener I use on effects like room sounds and reverbs which I didn’t use last time. Another new plug-in I used a bit was the Kramer MPX. I used that on some of the drums. It’s a tape saturator and also has a cool tape delay feature. So, all in the box save the SRS.

Related posts:

1. Interview: Tchad Blake On Mixing The Black Keys’ Blakroc and Brothers Albums
2. Brothers: The Black Keys New Album out May 18, 2010
3. Where Was The Black Keys’ Album Brothers Recorded?

How The Black Keys’ promoted this album really has been a case study in how best to release an album in the digital age. The end result? 206,000 albums sold in the first week of release in the USA and a number 2 position on the album charts.

Much of the band’s El Camino album release strategy seems to have been pretty much honed during the Brothers album release. Then, as now, the band concentrated on New York media opportunities and the live TV appearances that location offered to give maximum punch to the campaign.

What was interesting this time around was how much more intense and sustained this release campaign for El Camino was.

There wasn’t just a few events, but rather an almost daily release of information. This included:

• email blasts to a fan mailing list
• Twitter and Facebook updates
• viral videos
• tour date releases
• Record Store Day record release
• TV, print and  radio interviews
• video interviews
• album release shows
• livestream broadcasts

It was a cross-media and cross-platform assault on fans, old and new.

All the events seemed designed to generate awareness and a frenzy of sorts, an excitement in fans that would spill over into a commitment to pre-ordering or rushing out in the first week to buy the album. The momentum of those early sales (album and concert) will then create a self-perpetuating momentum of word of mouth and demand.

A few things were more notable with this album release campaign above all others, or were done better than ever:

• The much better use of direct emails to alert fans for pre-sales and events
• The constant insistence for fans to join the said mailing list
• The support of local and independent record stores, whilst at the same time almost exclusively pushing pre-ordering via iTunes and their website
• The way Pat Carney led news releases via his Twitter account
• The fact that the album only leaked a week before the release. In any case the band had their own streaming system set up for some songs, even though they would deny other streaming sites the privilege.
• The general coordination across all media that kept The Black Keys in the music press seemingly day after day, week after week, in one way or another

The album was released into the unusual December 6 slot, something Pat Carney noted in an interview:

There’s a rule you release albums in February-March, then you tour the summer. Then there’s the September-October schedule. Our new album is out on December 6. I asked the label for a list of major rock bands that had released albums in December. In the last 10 years there’s maybe four. But our manager said it’s a shame more bands don’t, ‘cos it would force the industry not to shut down. So we’re going to try it.

Perhaps the attraction of not having to release against other major acts as they did with Brothers in May 2010 was also an attraction. Releasing the album as soon as they practically could after creating it also meant The Black Keys’ built upon, and importantly didn’t lose, the momentum they had created with Brothers. So many thousands of new fans had first heard that album or were introduced to it via the band’s touring even during this 2011 northern summer.

Although the figures are not yet out, it looks like the El Camino album will go to number one in the USA and elsewhere. The band have already sold out Madison Square Garden, New York, and have announced another show and also multiple nights in Alexandra Palace, London. They’ve also booked stadiums in advance for their North American/Canadian tour. It might just be The Black Keys’ are a fantastic band, but their promotion and those supporting them have certainly shown the way as well. No doubt there’s much more to come over the coming months, though most of the work has now been done.

For those who were asleep this past month, here are some of the promotional highlights and how the PR unfolded:

Related posts:

1. El Camino: The Black Keys’ Album Release Concert – New York, Dec 5
2. El Camino: The Black Keys’ New Album Cover, Track Listing, Livestream, Press Release, Fan Reaction
3. New Album: The Black Keys El Camino December 6

Presale concert sales to benefit mental health services, community foundation fund

AKRON, Ohio (Dec. 8, 2011) – Black Keys fans can now get first dibs on premium tour tickets while at the same time supporting mental health in the band’s hometown.

Tickets-for-Charity announced Wednesday that Black Keys guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney selected Community Support Services, an Akron, Ohio-based mental health agency, to receive proceeds from Black Keys concert tickets purchased through the Tickets-For-Charity.com website.

The band has set aside floor and lower-level tickets for the face value plus an additional donation amount. These special charity tickets will be available for each show on the Black Keys’ 2012 North American tour, including appearances in Cleveland, Boston, New York, Cincinnati, Philadelphia and Columbus. Fans can purchase these tickets prior to when public ticket sales begin Friday.

Two-thirds of the donations will support Community Support Services and its Black Keys Alfred McMoore Memorial Endowment Fund at Akron Community Foundation. The agency established this permanent funding source in 2010 to honor former client and outsider artist Alfred McMoore, whose oft-used phrase “black key” was adopted by Auerbach and Carney as the band’s name. The fund was begun with proceeds from the band’s benefit concert that honored McMoore, who suffered from schizophrenia and passed away in September 2009 at age 59.

Terry Dalton, executive director of Community Support Services, said he believes it is important to honor the band and McMoore by funding current programs as well as investing in the agency’s future. The permanent nature of the endowment fund ensures the agency will be around for years to come so it can help clients like McMoore live active and independent lives.

“Hidden beneath the mental illness, many of our clients have terrific talents, (including) artistic abilities,” Dalton said. “Through the Black Keys Alfred McMoore Memorial Endowment Fund, we hope to help clients embrace and cultivate these talents, not just today but for future generations.”

Tickets-for-Charity gives fans the opportunity to purchase premium seats while giving to causes they care about. Tickets for the Cleveland show on March 20 are $159.50.

Pre-sale charity tickets can be bought online at http://www.ticketsforcharity.com/pl/The-Black-Keys-Tickets-2012-Tour-Arctic-Monkeys. To learn more about the Black Keys Alfred McMoore Memorial Endowment Fund, contact Dr. Suzanne Allen, Akron Community Foundation’s vice president of development, at 330-376-8522.

Related posts:

1. The Black Keys Alfred McMoore Memorial Endowment Fund
2. Interview: Artist Todd V Talks About The Film “Outside In: The Life and Art of Alfred McMoore”
3. Alfred McMoore: The Inspiration For The Black Keys Band Name

The Black Keys performing “Gold On The Ceiling” on The Late Show with David Letterman.

Via The Audio Perv

Related posts:

1. Video: The Black Keys On The Letterman And Fallon Shows 2010
2. The Black Keys’ New Live Show 2010
3. A Black Keys Fan On Late Night With Jimmy Fallon

Interview

Lonely Boy live

Related posts:

1. El Camino: The Black Keys’ Lonely Boy single released
2. The Black Keys’ Mystery Promo Video
3. Video: The Black Keys on Saturday Night Live