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From the “better late then never” department, I wanted to mention this interview from last autumn that Han, Simon and Hannes did for Poppunt Magazine, a free music mag from Flanders aimed at fans as much as the industry and the media itself.

The thing is different from your regular interview as it touches on various steps the band have taken to survive in the music industry. All of which were everything but commonplace when Radical Duke started up in 2002, such as directly selling merchandise through the website or offering up live recordings for purchase directly after the show.

And furthermore, in this interview Simon takes the opportunity to clear up with one long-running misunderstanding. Apparently, it is not exactly true that DAAU have a classical music background as such – at least they say they didn’t have formal classical training. I promise I’ll stop spreading that lie from now on 😉

You can read the full interview online (by way of a Flash viewer, and in Dutch), on the Poppunt site. It’s magazine number 45.

Nothing is too obscure to pop up on youtube after a while. Here’s proof! Now, some eleven years after the fact, some recordings of a live performance of DAAU with Alma Flamenca have been posted on youtube. The recordings were made on April 13, 1999 at the Halles de Schaerbeek in Brussels, during a time when the two bands played together regularly. Alma Flamenca is a (you guessed it…) Flamenco band from Ronda, Spain, and the story goes that DAAU met them while in town for concerts and recording sessions. That was 1998.

This one is pretty special because I had always known about DAAU playing with Alma Flamenca but had never actually heard what it sounded like – except for a really short excerpt that turned up on the “Ghost Tracks” album, the Alma Flamenca project seemed pretty much lost to time. Until now!

Thanks to Joaquin Orillo from Alma Flamenca, who uploaded this rarity, we can now listen to two full songs that were recorded at a live show in Brussels in 1999.

“Como el Agua” stays in traditional Flamenco waters for a while before taking an unexpected, anarchistic twist towards the end. It’s worth listening to. By the way, this is the song that was used, in a different version, on the “Ghost Tracks” CD.

Here is the second song, “Con Tomate”. I can’t tell the line-up precisely, but there’s cajón, lots of strings, possibly two accordeons, and that particular style of singing that… well, you either love it or you hate it. The song also pops up in another part of the band history – it was taken up again four years later as an instrumental re-arrangement in the collaboration with Troissoeur.

Thanks to the wonderfully named forum member “toroddfuglesteg” over at www.progarchives.com; we have a great and enlightening new DAAU interview available online here.

This is really good interview especially if you don’t know the band too well: Han took some time to go way back to the band’s beginnings as teenage youngsters playing at home after school, talks a bit about the band’s episodes with major record companies, and gives some information on every album.

With thanks to Sarah, here’s a snip from Humo from last April :