2012 will be a busy year for Greg Dulli and the Afghan Whigs, with reformation gigs at All Tomorrow’s Parties I’ll Be Your Mirror festivals in both London and New Jersey, with the latter event featuring a line-up chosen by Dulli himself.
According to the frontman, there have been requests for a Whigs reunion for the past decade. But, he says, this time around "a perfect storm" resulted in the band getting back together. "The acoustic tour I did a year and a half ago, John Curley [Afghan Whigs bassist] came out with me for five or six of the shows, and then I saw Rick McCollum [guitar] last spring when I was on tour with Twilight Singers, he came to the show and we had lunch," Dulli explains.
Although Dulli and Curley did discuss the possibility of getting back together, the "perfect storm" was created when All Tomorrow’s Parties boss Barry Hogan was left "a little bit of a bind" when Guided By Voices had to pull out of the May I’ll Be Your Mirror. "So in a lot of ways, we were kinda stepping in to help someone out," Dulli said. The reunion soon snowballed, which means that we’re going to be looking at a series of Afghan Whigs shows. "Then it turned into ‘Ah, we’ll play a few’. We’ll see. I’m imagining we’ll play more than four gigs. We’ll probably play 25-30 gigs, would be my guess. We’ve got five gigs now, and we’ll play at least another 20 gigs, I would imagine."
However, there will be no new material. "We never broke up the band for any reason other than we’d taken the band as far as we wanted to take it. We aren’t getting back together to make a new album. We’re doing this one time: see it now, or never see it again. That’s what’s going to happen here. We’ve always been friends so it’s not any kind of great thing of having to swallow your pride to get back in the room. These are my buddies, so we were never at odds in a friends relationship. We just wanted to do different things, so we split up, and when we’re done with this, we’ll split off again."
Who exactly will we be seeing in this incarnation of the Afghan Whigs? "Well, you’re getting the three of us [Dulli, Curley, McCollum], and you’ll have to wait and see who the other few people are," Dulli says. "Three guys started The Afghan Whigs, and three guys made all six albums. Those are the three guys you’re gonna see. We’re the only three guys who made all the records and did all the shows. And we are The Afghan Whigs. That who you’re gonna see: you’re going to see The Afghan Whigs."
The Afghan Whigs play All Tomorrow’s Parties I’ll Be Your Mirror in London on Sunday, May 27th 2012, and curate I’ll Be Your Mirror New Jersey between September 21st and 23rd 2012. For information and tickets, visit the ATP website. Visit the Quietus later this week for Simon Price’s full interview with Greg Dulli.
