It’s well and truly winter, and that means that the first of the summer music festival announcements is just around the corner. By this time last year we’d already heard from Harvest and just shortly after from Big Day Out, the former announcing a stellar lineup including Beck, Sigur Ros, and Grizzly.
Harvest promoter AJ Maddah had indicated that we should expect a lineup announcement sometime today, but another band has now jumped the gun and revealed their involvement ahead of the actual lineup.
American alt-rockers The Eels have added the dates of this year’s Harvest festival to their website and posted about their involvement on Facebook; adding Harvest to an international world tour on the back of their tenth studio album, Wonderful Glorious.
The dates from The Eels confirmed earlier reports that the festival this year is due to run from 10th – 17th November, following a similar run to that of last year. The details of the lineup have been few and far between, but now we can add The Eels to Neutral Milk Hotel who were also leaked some time ago.
Back in May, Neutral Milk Hotel announced they would be embarking on their first official reunion tour in some 15 years, with Pitchfork revealing Neutral Milk Hotel’s expanded reunion dates – including a three-date stopover in Australia for Harvest 2013.
Given Neutral Milk Hotel is now a lock, another strong contender is indie Scots Franz Ferdinand, who let slip en route to the Chilean leg of Lollapalooza 2013 that they would be heading to Australia for a headline tour this November. Having recently completed a new studio album, the follow-up to 2009′s Tonight: Franz Ferdinand, they debuted new material at Lollapalooza Chile.
Based solely on the busy thumbs of AJ Maddah and his Twitter conversations, other potentials for the third Harvest outing would be reclusive Irish singer-songwriter Damien Rice, who “would be great for Harvest 2013,” while a suggestion that Philly rock band Mewithoutyou would return to our shores prompted Maddah to “invite them to Harvest right away!”
He also told a user he would consider inviting Jack White too, and goth pioneers The Cure were on his personal wishlist for Harvest, although he has since revealed he was unable to secure the Robert Smith fronted band.
