Steve Vai Announces 2023 Australian Tour

July 18, 2023

Veteran guitarist Steve Vai will head down under later this year for a string of tour dates throughout November. Vai will kick things off in Brisbane t the Fortitude Music Hall on Friday, 3rd November, before playing dates in Sydney, Wollongong, Adelaide, Melbourne, and finally Perth on Saturday, 11th November.

The dates form part of Vai’s wide Inviolate tour, which the guitarist has been on for the last few months playing shows across North and South America. Inviolate the album was released in January 2022, spearheaded by the single ‘Teeth of the Hydra’ – the Hydra in question being his slightly bonkers three-necked Ibanez guitar, which you can see below.

Steve Vai: ‘Teeth of the Hydra’

“The idea for this guitar and track came to me roughly seven years ago,” Vai shared in a statement when the single was released. “I envisioned composing and performing a piece of music on a multi-neck instrument where all of the sounds emanated from that one creation with the exception of some keyboards and drums.

“I sent my ideas to Ibanez, and their builders delivered this astonishing wooden creature. I was stunned. It was awesome. When I first laid eyes on it, I named it the Hydra, and instantly knew the name of the song would be ‘Teeth of the Hydra’.”

Following Inviolate, Vai dropped an album called Vai/Gash, which had apparently been sitting in his archives for nearly 30 years. The guitarist and his band will spend nearly two years on tour in support of both releases.

“We are saturating the entire globe on this tour,” says Vai. “It’s everything I imagined when I was a kid jamming in my bedroom. Travelling The World like this with my band, crew and family, touching and tasting all these magnificent cultures and feeling the powerful energy from the audiences is what we call living the dream.”