Gary SteelA reconstituted version of Shayne Carter’s band Dimmer will perform the entire I Believe You Are A Star album for its 20th anniversary in September.
IMPORTANT NOTE: This tour has been postponed due to the Level 4 lockdown until December. See all dates and venues below.
Dimmer’s I Believe You Are A Star, released in 2001, is rightly regarded as a classic and one of the great New Zealand records of the 2000s. Written and nearly entirely performed by Shayne Carter, the album was five years in gestation and Carter’s first album following the demise of his most well known band, Straitjacket Fits.
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Now Carter has convened a seven piece band for a special one-off tour to celebrate the 20th anniversary of this legendary recording. This version of Dimmer will be performing the album in its entirety.
The line up features old Dimmer hands James Duncan (guitar) and Gary Sullivan who drummed on the original record. They’ll be joined by Die! Die! Die! bassist Lachlan Anderson and two up and coming talents, Louisa Nicklin (guitar /vocals) and Neive Strang (vocals/percussion). Long-time Dimmer
engineer and co-producer Nick Roughan (Skeptics, David Kilgour) shifts to the other side of the desk to supply keyboards and live electronics.
Because the record was a studio creation a lot of the material has rarely been performed live. Carter says the big band format will allow, for the first time, a fully realised live representation of the album, whereas, in the past, Dimmer has “played three or four piece guitar band versions of the songs”.
Carter writes: “My main inspiration when writing and recording Star was to make a record entirely different from the rock’n’roll glory of the Straitjacket Fits. I wanted to make a beautiful record that didn’t need to beat its chest or prove that it could ‘rock’. It was influenced by the drift and throb of ambient
music, krautrock, electronica, outsider pop and the dark funk of Sly Stone, James Brown and Funkadelic.
It was also influenced by a totally naive approach to the then relatively new digital recording process.
Attempting to emulate the record live is a mostly new and not inconsiderable musical challenge,but I’m extremely excited by the prospect of a show sonically and spiritually in tune with an album I still consider
my best.”
IMPORTANT NOTE: Due to the August Level 4 lockdown, ALL DIMMER DATES have been postponed until December.
Dimmer I Believe You Are A Star 20th Anniversary Tour
with support from Proteins Of Magic
Thursday 2nd December – Mayfair Theatre, Dunedin
Saturday 11th December – Blue Smoke, Christchurch*
Tuesday 14th December – San Fran, Wellington*
Wednesday 15th December – San Fran, Wellington*
Friday 17th December – Mercury Theatre, Auckland
Saturday 18th December – Mercury Theatre, Auckland
*Tickets available HERE via UTR
Auckland tickets available HERE
Dunedin tickets available HERE
The new Dimmer live lineup includes: Gary Sullivan (JPSE), James Duncan, Nick Roughan (Skeptics), Louisa Nicklin, Neive Strang and Lachlan Anderson (Die Die Die).
