Black Lips Releasing Documentary About Middle East Tour

Black Lips, the Atlanta-based punk rockers, recently finished up their four-week tour of the Middle East. While the Middle East is normally not a big destination for rock bands (The Grateful Dead were the last one to play Egypt -- in 1978), or for most performers at all, Black Lips decided to go for it, playing in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, and Cyprus.

Their tour was captured on film by Bill Cody in a documentary called Kids Like You and Me. The documentary premiered at Sonos Studios in Los Angeles last week and it will be shown in several cities in the US before it is released on DVD.

According to Billboard, bassist Jared Swilley described some of the tour as follows:

Egypt: "We were allowed to drink at all of the shows except for one in Cairo because it was a family community center."
Lebanon: "There is definitely a lot of weird red tape to get in and obtain your work visas, but that was just dealing with a lot of bureaucracy."
Iraq: "We had no problem."
UAE: "Dubai was a little weird because we weren't allowed to talk to the audience at all or interact with them. We had to play in a hotel so we were considered employees of the hotel and weren't allowed to speak to anyone unless we were spoken to."

You can see a brief trailer below, which also served as Cody's Indiegogo proposal:

The band's next goal is to perform on Antarctica, which would make them the first band to perform on all seven continents. Swilley says, "We're working real hard to get to Antarctica right now...There is a research center there and it has a pub. There are 1,500 to 1,600 contractors and scientists working there, so we just have to get the money to get down there."

It'll probably be colder than their last tour though.