Taken Reunion Spurred By eBay Sale
Monday March 24, 2008 @ 03:00 PM
By: ChartAttack.com Staff

Taken

California band Taken, who broke the hearts of melodic hardcore fans after their 2004 break-up, are getting back together for a short reunion tour that includes two Hamilton stops in support of their new Goodfellow Records B-sides collection, This Is Forever.

"We're talkin' world tour here," jokes vocalist Ray Harkins.

Along with the two Hamilton shows, Taken are playing in southern and Japan.

"People starting coming at me saying, 'You're an idiot. Why are you not playing southern Ontario?'" says Harkins. "Once we confirmed the Japanese stuff, we figured people would be pretty bummed on us if we didn't do a show in southern California, so we scheduled that show. Then it was sort of a domino effect from wanting to release this B-sides collection, and one thing rolled into another."

It seems as though many of Taken's current fans are people who latched on after their break-up, partly because former members moved on to play in more successful bands like Circa Survive and Harkins' current full-time group, Mikoto.

"The final EP that we released was, in my mind, our finest moment," says Harkins. "I'm just very proud of that, and I think it resonated with a lot of people who might have been so-so on Taken in the past. We released that EP and then did our final show after that, and I think people really grasped the band after that."

Harkins says the development of the reunion tour and B-sides release stemmed from realizing how much kids are still into Taken.

"It's kind of a funny little back story. I was routing around in my little music collection and I found that I had three Taken demos — the original cassette demos. Realistically, I didn't need three, so I decided to put one on eBay. It was up for five days and it sold for $330. I was shocked. I'm like, 'Who is spending that kind of money on a Taken demo?' So the idea started to come to my head that obviously people want this type of material that was never released on to CD, so I decided to put out a B-sides collection."

Taken will perform at Hamilton's Casbah on Friday and Saturday nights.

—Pete Richards