May 4, 2005

Newport, Wales, hip-hop pranksters Goldie Lookin Chain have confirmed a small series of dates to support their debut CD “Straight Outta Newport.” Record Collection will be releasing the CD on May 10. The band will be kicking off their Stateside dates with a their American network debut on Jimmy Kimmel Live on May 25th.

The band, already massive in Great Britain, is starting to make inroads stateside. In March they became the talk of the SXSW convention playing three packed shows in two days. Entertainment Weekly said the record is full of “strangely irresistible rhymes and dirt-cheap samples.” Blender gave “Straight Outta Newport” three stars saying ” Time magazine put their song “Self Suicide” in their list of “Top 10 songs worth at least 99 cents.”

The dates for the tour are as follows:

5/25 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Troubadour
5/26 – San Francisco, CA @ The Independent
5/29 – Chicago, IL @ The Abbey
5/30 – New York, NY @ Bowery Ballroom

On April Fools’ Day, Sting walked onstage at San Jose State University’s Event Center in California and kicked off his Broken Music Tour by performing the Police classic “Message in a Bottle.” In the next eighty minutes, he and his stripped-down backing trio shocked the crowd by dusting off eleven Police songs, including deep cuts like “Demolition Man” and “Invisible Sun,” which Sting hasn’t performed since he was in the band.

It wasn’t an April Fools’ joke aimed at music fans desperate for a Police reunion — on each night of this twenty-eight-date tour, which mostly hits college campuses, Sting devotes roughly half of his set to the Police, the trio that broke up in 1984 when Sting went solo.

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