Red Hot Chili Peppers to rock Egypt’s Great Pyramids, reveal new album sessions halted by wildfire

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Few artists have the clout to perform a concert at the Great Pyramids of Giza in Egypt. Pink Floyd performed a show there in 1971 and the Grateful Dead did three in 1978, while this millennium so far has seen visits only by artists at the scale of Shakira and Mariah Carey. Now the primordial purveyors of funk-influenced alt-rock, Red Hot Chili Peppers, are joining the aforementioned ranks with an upcoming show in the pyramid complex.

The band announced today that the historic performance will take place March 15th, following RHCP’s upcoming Australia/New Zealand tour. Tickets for the show are on sale this Friday, January 18th, at 8 a.m. local time. Check out the poster and a promo video at the bottom of this post.

It’s unlikely the band will have any new music from their anticipated twelfth studio LP out by then. Drummer Chad Smith explained on Monday to Sirius XM’s Volume West that progress on the follow-up to 2016’s The Getaway was delayed by the devastating Woolsey Fire this past fall that killed four people and destroyed more than 1,500 homes and buildings in southern California.

“We started to work on [the new album], which, for us, is just getting in a room and making some noise and putting some notes together,” said Smith. “And then the fires came, and the house we were working in, there was no damage, it didn’t burn down, but we couldn’t get back in there. So that halted our [progress].”

You can listen to the audio of the interview below:

Red Hot Chili Peppers held a benefit concert dubbed “Malibu Love Sesh” at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles this past Sunday to raise funds for victims of the fire (where St. Vincent notably performed a haunting cover of the band’s Blood Sugar Sex Magik highlight “Breaking the Girl”). Singer Anthony Kiedis also recently co-authored a Rolling Stone piece where he outlined the many costs of global climate change.

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