Hoodoo Gurus rewarded long-term fans earlier this year with a brand new touring festival entitled Dig It Up! that saw the Australian rock luminaries celebrating their 30th Anniversary with an enormous lineup of local heroes and international favourites.

Following on from the inaugural launch, which saw the Gurus visiting five capital cities through April, along with the likes of The Sonics, The 5678’s, Died Pretty, Hard-Ons, Royal Headache. It also saw the reformation of The Sunnyboys (now back on the reunion trail with a Friday night slot at this year’s Meredith), and now Dig It Up! Is set to return for 2013.

As The Music reports, the Hoodo Gurus-curated, Feel Presents promoted touring event has been confirmed by the band’s frontman Dave Faulkner on their Facebook page.

Writing about the band’s current shows with fellow rock legends The Angels as part of A Day On The Green, Faulkner states: “I’m very pleased to announce, we will be doing another run of Dig It Up! shows with a whole new crop of bands – young and old, from far and near – similar to the shows we did early this year.”

Those shows saw Hoodoo Gurus playing their landmark debut and beloved Australian album, Stoneage Romeos, live and in full, along with a host of hand-picked acts on the festival bill.

The 2013 event will once again take place “on and around Anzac Day (April 25), beginning a week earlier in Brisbane and finishing in Perth on Sunday 28.”“I can tell you is this year we will be performing Mars Needs Guitars in its entirety.”

Faulkner adds: “I’ll give you more details about the exact dates and the line-ups in the new year but what I can tell you is this year we will be performing Mars Needs Guitars in its entirety.”

A live performance of the band’s 1985 studio album in its entirety, featuring such Hoodoo Gurus hits as ‘Like Wow – Wipeout’, ‘Death Defying’, and ‘Bittersweet’, is enough to get excited about, especially considering that it may be the last chance to do so.

As Faulkner writes, “I’m not one to make fearless predictions but I reckon this will be the last time we do this particular event (no, we won’t be going through all our albums one at a time for the next half dozen years or so).”

The 2013 calendar includes the new Dig It Up! festival but also the Gurus frontman’s “first official solo gig,” with Faulkner writing, “I’ve never performed a whole set solely under my own name but I received an offer and I felt like taking up the challenge. As it happens, I don’t have any unheard solo material to unveil so I’ll just be doing a bunch of Gurus songs (well, I DID write ’em!) however it’ll be quite a different way to hear them: unplugged and raw – well, raw in an acoustic sort of way.”

Faulkner’s solo show will take place as part of the Gosford Cup Day celebrations on the NSW Central Coast on Thursday 105h January at the Gosford Racecourse. “It’s a twilight meeting so I’m performing early evening,” says Faulkner, “It’s in a very scenic location. Beautiful.”

Meanwhile Hoodoo Gurus are set to headline next year’s Between The Bays Festival, alongside the likes of James Reyne and Troy Casser-Daly for the February festival, a couple of months out from the proposed Dig It Up! 2013 dates.

Considering this year’s Dig It Up! Invitational turned out to be a classic rock fan’s dream, Hoodoo Gurus fans will be ripe with anticipation for the names they’ll be pulling for the 2013 bill. Watch this space.

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