Latest posts.
REDUCED TO THIS… (Acoustic Tour Spring 2017)
_evensmallercopyS.jpg "Djevara (Redux) - acoustic Spring Tour 2017")
Announcing the Djevara (Redux) tour this Spring – a short acoustic European tour mainly to showcase and road-test new tracks for the upcoming “Reduced To This” acoustic album which is currently in progress. Hopefully it’ll be an interesting insight into working-things-out. As you’d expect – it’ll be lo-fi, it’ll be heartfelt, it’ll be real, it’ll be imperfect but it’ll be special. Check site for latest dates.
Writing \”Reduced To This\” acoustic…
BOOKING : Still open for concerts this May/June across Europe - get in touch if you are interested in putting on a show: especially interested in house concerts, intimate bars, art events, solidarity or protests, squats, mini festivals, anything interesting/new/open/crazy…
Email : booking@djevara.co.uk
Photo: Francois Reinke ( https://www.facebook.com/FrancoisR99 )
BACK IN LONDON – Fri 9th Dec! (Birthday Shenanigans)
s has now pretty much become tradition, Anté’s birthday celebrations coincide with Mighty Djevara’s return to London (UK) for a special show at our favourite rebel music bar in the heart of South London / Deptford -The Birds Nest!
Support from noisy punkers Kleine Schweine!
See you there!!
x
THANK YOU!
“DEMOCRACY” TOUR 2016
Thanks to all our wonderful fans and friends who came and shared such amazing nights with us over this tour, including celebrating our 800th live show. You’re the best – thanks so much for all your support and we look forward to seeing you all again on the next adventure…
Djev’
(obo all in “Team Brilliant” and “Team Courageous” – Anté, Geoff, Malc, Joe, Dobrota)
X
Next: show #800
Next: Show #800. Yup, when I step onto the stage at AZ Köln on Tuesday, it’ll be for the 800th time with this band. Not bad for an outfit all of whose members need to maintain serious “day jobs” (of sorts) to pay the bills (and repair the gear). It’s particularly fitting – and *awesome* – that it’s to be in my “adopted” home town, a place tied to so many of the most important people in my life and, at AZ, a place very special to me, and the location of some the most memorable shows we’ve ever played as well as the source of some of my most treasured friends. Now, despite my degree I’m not usually one for numbers defining my life, but some milestones do make one take stock. This is far more relevant to me than just yet another birthday (I had very little to do with that particular event, apart from just surviving it*).
Over a period spanning well over a decade and numerous albums, I’m the only remaining founding member of a band that has seen numerous line-up changes**. Over the same period, we’ve seen most of our contemporaries disappear (though a very select few have conversely become immensely popular eg ASIWYFA, 65DOS, Reeps One…). We’ve continued to toil in the underground, flying low under the radar of whatever is fashionable, with perhaps the identifying thread being a commitment to artistic integrity, a DIY ethic and a promise to give 100% every single time. It is a path which has not resulted in either riches or popularity ( laugh/cry – delete as applicable ), but these were never the reasons I/we did it and it’s the only way it could ever have worked. We’ve played every kind of show imaginable – from mountain-top squats to university auditoriums, huge outdoor festivals to tiny bars in obscure villages, intimate acoustic shows to huge blast-outs lasting (by request!) over three hours. And yes I know, professional bands may have played this many shows in the last three years alone… but I can only say that to me, it feels like I’ve bared my soul on stage (or wherever) nearly 1000 times, It’s a lot, and each time it hurts and bleeds and cleanses and renews. And then again, the next time. Like some insane addiction. But hey… that’s what love is, isn’t it? My mother still thinks I’m crazy. She’s right, of course. So, even if it all ended after tomorrow, it would still be the project which has completely defined my adult life thus far; outside of my family, it has given me all the most important people and opportunities I’ve ever had, as well as demanded the highest personal sacrifices. But while from time to time I may question specific past strategic decisions (and sigh at the inevitable follies and naiveties of youth), I regret nothing about, in fact am really proud of, what we have achieved, the relationships we have formed, the amazing adventures we’ve had and, perhaps most, having what I genuinely believe are some of the best “fans” a band could ever ask for. It’s a cliché, but every artist knows what I’m talking about when I say that they make every sacrifice worth it. Particularly in the last couple of years, where I’m convinced we’ve been performing at our highest and most intense level ever, and I’ve genuinely often been overwhelmed by the feedback of people whose hearts have been open to receive what we’re trying to communicate- and often at a far deeper level than I’d realized would be possible from playing these weird punk rock songs. I’m so grateful to everyone who has been part of this crazy idea and thus made my life what it is today…
So, special thanks and drinks up to my band comrades-in-arms Malc and Geoff, our most favourite roady Flo, the uber-fantastic Dave Hollingworth (Dorje/Tuska) for producing our albums, and all those who are part of the extended Djevara family. So, if you’re able, please come and celebrate and share this night with me, with us – to celebrate our past, our present, and our future – come shout. Come cry. Come dance. Come scream. LIVE = VIVA
https://www.facebook.com/events/673672176140072/
Anté
*which, it turns out, was actually quite a close call. But a story for another time..
**amazingly, 17 people have played as part of the band live at least once since conception!
*** the photo is from the tribute post from my baby brother after we hit 750, which was almost enough to bring a tear to my eyes… 
Don’t Bomb Syria
Don't Bomb Syria
Tonight, I suffered the curious and rare sensation of simultaneously feeling both immense pride and overwhelming shame, as thousands of us stood in the cold outside the UK House Of Parliament to make our protest against the government’s insane plan to join in yet another war. We stood and chanted, with our mothers and oldest friends beside us, we sat and “died”, we listened to impassioned speeches, we cheered and we jeered, we lost our voices and found other new ones, and in the end, as we heard the disastrous but almost inevitable result of the vote, we sat in grave silence for a minute – right there in the street facing Big Ben which we had taken over – in respect for the innocent people who will inevitably die as a direct result of British bombs. People who are breathing like you and me right now, but as early as Friday could be dead. Men. Women. Children. Breathless. Extinguished. The ‘terrorists’ themselves will be safe in their bunkers. And we will not be safer.
As I stood there in this emotional, passionate rally, as I did on Saturday, and have done many times before, two things occurred to me. The first was that it was suddenly graphically, emphatically clear how different the stakes were for us – the ordinary citizens – and for the MPs a few hundred metres away from us on the other side. They were inside a building behind bomb barriers, walls, fences, more walls, more barriers, and at least two rows of armed police. We were out there in the cold in Parliament Square. It was painfully clear that the police were there to protect THEM from US, their supposed employers, people whom they are supposed to represent (yes, it’s genuinely hard not to laugh/cry). Some of them had even had the gall to complain on social media at being “harrassed” by their constituents. As if we’d acted out of place, expecting our MPs to give a fuck about our views. And it dawned on me; of course they don’t care about the consequences; because they will never, ever have to deal with them. More terror for them just means an excuse for more power and more war and more surveillance and makes them feel even more important, whereas for us it means the genuine increased possibility of being blown to pieces or otherwise killed in our cities and streets by psycopathic killers, while we go to concerts or eat in restaurants or party with friends. They laugh at us; Tony Blair launched a war which killed hundreds of thousands on false pretenses, and was rewarded with the title of “Middle East Peace Envoy” and now commands a fee of £330,000 to give speeches. They laugh at us.
The second thing was how remarkably easy it always seems to be to generate support for bombing brown people, even with the poorest, most illogical of arguments. It was remarkable to see the distance between the corporate media – obsessed with beating the drums of war and disgustingly one-sided (especially in their attempted character-assassination of Jeremy Corbyn, for example) – and the fears and rationale of these ordinary, informed people. Here at the protest there was a really remarkable mix of Britons from all walks of life who cared intensely about the consequences of yet another war, both here and abroad. They somehow seemed to have digested the sad, sad lessons of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, all countries that we’ve seen obliterated within the last 14 years with the help of British bombs and are now still in perpetual states of war and chaos. While of course not everyone will agree with our arguments, it really was astonsihing that David Cameron, Prime Minister of the UK, could get away with writing off this whole section of the public as “terrorist sympathisers”. Let’s review: his plan to eliminate terrorism is to bomb a completely destabilised foreign, Muslim country from the sky and then hope a force of “70,000″ moderate fighters takes over and installs democracy. Moderate fighters which may include… er… up to 40,000 members of Al Qaeda. And they voted for this. Wow. And lest we forget, two years ago the government wanted to go to war in Syria ON THE OTHER SIDE – in other words, had they got their way ISIS would definitely be EVEN STRONGER THAN IT IS NOW. Now, of course I don’t believe for a second that the politicians actually believe any of the nonsensical reasons and lies they tell us, but there must be many ordinary people who do actually believe the official line in good faith. They must believe that, despite all evidence to the contrary and the ongoing increasing chaos in EVERY SINGLE OTHER COUNTRY WE’VE GOT INVOLVED IN IN THE MIDDLE-EAST, we will somehow be better off if British bombs start raining down in Raqqa. Since I don’t meet many of these people in real life, I was trying to imagine what a “DO BOMB SYRIA!” march/protest would look like, what kind of people would make it up. I very much doubt that most of them would be interested in – for example – spending even a fraction of the cost of the bombing on helping some of the refugees this action would inevitably generate. And I would love to know if, in their hearts of hearts, they really genuinely believe that the danger from terrorism in UK/Europe will actually decrease as a result of this military action. It’ll literally be a first.
My final words are for the poor ordinary, long-suffering people of Syria. The doctors, the teachers, the students, the mothers, the brothers, the train drivers. The forgotten people. I genuinely grieve. Having suffered under Assad, then the disintegration of civil war, then ISIS… they now have nine different foreign countries bombing them. What utter, utter insanity. Not for the first time, I’m genuinely ashamed of and completely disown the behaviour of our government. Dear Syrians, I want you to know that they definitely do NOT represent all of the people on this island; thousands, in fact millions, of us oppose them. We did everything we could (legally) do to try to stop them. I’m devastated that it was not enough, and as a result many of you have been guaranteed yet more suffering and impoverishment. I genuinely, deeply hope that the next few years prove us all wrong. That by some miracle, thousands of innocent civilians are not slaughtered by UK bombs, that “70,000 moderate troops” swoosh in and restore a wonderful flowering democracy, that all the Islamist groups are vanquished and nothing even worse than ISIS replaces it, that we won’t be standing outside parliament shouting “DON’T BOMB [NEXT COUNTRY ON LIST]” in a couple of years time, and that in five or ten years we’re all sitting in cafés in Paris laughing and saying “Ah, do you remember when there was that thing called terrorism?”. I’m being honest here – I genuinely, genuinely hope we are WRONG. PLEASE LET US BE WRONG. If, very unfortunately, this is not the result, then all I can offer is that I let them know – these warmongers – as strongly and as loudly as I could that all this violence is NOT IN MY NAME.
Peace to you, brothers and sisters in Syria, and know that we will not forget you, we will not give up the fight and we will not stay silent.
As-Salaam-Alaikum
Anté
X
Fight Hate With Love
We had just finished playing a show in The Netherlands when we heard about Paris. I cannot really put into words how it felt; innocent people who had just gone out to celebrate and share live music, just like us, mowed down and killed by vicious psychopathic murderers. We were having a fantastic night with wonderful people; where we even allowed to be happy anymore? By now, you have all read more than you ever need of commentary and opinions. We are just a punk rock band. All I wish to say is that we stand together with the ordinary people, in Paris, in Beirut, in Baghdad, in New York, in Cairo, in Mombassa, all over the world – OUR world – in sympathy with the victims and in utter and complete rejection of the ideologies of hate that prey upon us – whether they come from Islamist lunatics as here, or from fascist monsters like Anders Breivik in Norway, whether they come from men in uniform who launch coups to destroy civic revolutions and kill hundreds as in Egypt, or men in other uniforms who kill un-armed black people with impunity as in America, or whether they claim to head “democratic” governments, wear suits and smile while they launch illegal wars in search of fatuous ‘weapons of mass destruction’, killing literally thousands of times the number of people as died in Paris . And they are not unconnected; never forget: no Blair/Bush War, no ISIS. Yeah, we see it now as we’ve seen it before. And we will continue to fight hate… with love. This is not some “hippy bullshit”; it’s recognition that the only way that we can move forward in a positive direction is with compassion and recognising our common humanity. The alternative is something more like what we saw at the beginning of the last century. Not somewhere we want to go.
SO.
Let us begin our healing now. We shall sing. We shall shout. We shall dance. We shall cry. Oh yes, we shall cry. But most of all…
We shall live.
Peace to you all.
Anté / Djevara
X
DEUTSCHLAND – SHOWS COMING UP THIS WEEK!
DEUTSCHLAND – this week, you’re up! Get loaded and ready to ruckus and roll in AACHEN, COLOGNE (KÖLN), HALLE (SAALE), CHEMNITZ and BERLIN*!
03/11 – acoustic (Redux) : COLOGNE, GERMANY @ Zoo Schanke
04/11 – AACHEN, GERMANY @ The Wild Rover Irish Pub
05/11 – HALLE (SAALE), GERMANY @ VL Ludwigstrasse w/ fuckwinter
06/11 – COLOGNE, GERMANY @ Sonic Ballroom w/ Tanzkommando
07/11 – CHEMNITZ, GERMANY @ Zukunft
14/11 – BERLIN, GERMANY @ Subversiv w/ LAIKA LOST IN SPACE
Please note there’s also an extra special solo acoustic “Djevara (Redux)” show now in Cologne this Wednesday (tomorrow) at Zoo Schänke.
=====
Official FB events:
AACHEN:
https://www.facebook.com/events/136015806749311/
COLOGNE :
acoustic – https://www.facebook.com/events/693720164098609/
loud – https://www.facebook.com/events/1500054153625734/
HALLE (SAALE) : https://www.facebook.com/events/831861463576588/
CHEMNITZ:
https://www.facebook.com/events/907227019330572/
*Berlin is NEXT week
There’s money where your mouth is…
Love Djevara? We’ve created a new “Fan Club” to enable our best supporters to get closer to and more involved with the band; if you want to support us in making our art and spreading our message, enabling us to write, play and exist, you can now you can join the new Fan Club and support the band directly! There’s loads of benefits from joining the “Fan Club” too, which you can read all about on the Fan Club page :
https://djevara.bandcamp.com/fan-club
ps First five people will get an extra bonus “thank you” gift 
Anniversary Show – LONDON 12-06-15
Ahoj! We're celebrating our anniversary! Well actually, several will be celebrated together : 15 years of punk rock across UK, Europe and beyond, evolving over the course from wild-eyed youngsters to DIY veterans. 12 years since guitarist Geoff joined the band. 10 years since release of debut album. 6 years since drummer Malc joined the band. It seems fitting to host the official celebration in a very intimate setting in South London (UK), so we'll be having a special free show at the brand new and extremely cosy venue of "Off The Cuff" in Herne Hill under the railway arches by the station. We'd like to invite all our closest friends, fans, family and supporters to come down as we celebrate many years of uncompromised maximum rock and roll. So here's the deets: DATE : FRIDAY 12 JUNE 2015 VENUE: OFF THE CUFF (HERNE HILL, LONDON) PRICE: FREE / DONATIONS GUESTS: GIANT BURGER BAND, FRANCESCO FONTE FB event: https://www.facebook.com/events/386382028212408/ For those of you not able to join us, we'll also be playing some festivals and a selection of shows across Europe throughout 2015, so keep your eyes on the website (www.djevara.co.uk) or the various social media. And if you haven't already, please check out our new album "VIVA! / PUNK IS NOT A SOUND" which is available now from djevara.bandcamp.com on digital, CD or vinyl double-LP formats. Take care and see you soon, Anté (Bass) x