This week, Manu Delago and his band are heading out on tour – but they won’t be disappearing into a hulking tour bus after the kickoff concert on June 1st at Innsbruck’s Treibhaus. Instead, for the second time, they’ll be getting up bright and early the next day and pedaling off into the sunrise. Yes, you read it right: it’s Manu Delago’s ReCycling Tour 2023.
We don’t automatically associate bands on tour with fresh air and exercise – if anything, it’s more the opposite: too little daylight, too much time spent inside of dimly lit clubs and tour buses, and ‘road food’ (in other words, whatever’s available at the next rest stop). But the times, they are a-changing, and Manu Delago is suggesting a way forward.
In 2021, Delago’s first bicycle tour through Austria caused a minor sensation – the concept of anyone touring at all in that fractured year was novel enough, but he had a special mission: proof that radically sustainable touring wasn’t a pipe dream. Two years later, he’s set to do it again – on a much larger scale. This time, starting on June 1st, the Grammy-nominated musician and his band will be pumping their way “From the Alps to the North Sea” – from Innsbruck to Amsterdam, the unofficial bicycle capital of Europe.
Manu Delago made his name performing with artists like Björk, Ólafur Arnalds, and Anoushka Shankar. Over time, he says, the intense regimen of traveling by jet and bus got him thinking about how he, as a musician, could contribute to climate protection, and what an environmentally sustainable method of touring might entail. At the end of June they’ll be returning home by rail – a more comfortable route, but still far more environmentally friendly than a flight from Schiphol or a 12-hour car trip.
It’s not completely without risk, of course – the band will be subject to the vicissitudes of weather and their own bodies (a slipped disc complicated the first tour in 2021). But it’s painstakingly planned out – down to hauling their own equipment in bike trailers, generating their own power, and cooperating with local businesses. It’s music as activism; it might not work for everyone – Björk’s elaborate stage productions would be tough to pack into bike trailers – but it’s proof that there are healthier ways to go about touring – for the body and for the planet.
Philip Yaeger