Lindsay Interview 2003

For the amount of crap we give our parents, we get an amazing amount of support. My dad bought my first proper guitar when I joined the band and they’re constantly giving help and stuff. It is great! We in return have to put all of our relatives on the door any time we play any regional area where they happen to be which is a shame. Especially with myself and Jason, our families are stretched far and wide across this brown and very unpleasant land, so we’re always playing in Mt. Isa and we’d pick up the phone and there’s a guy going “Lindsay! It’s your cousin! Can you put us on the door tonight?” We pulled up to Darwin and got out of the campervan and this guy on a motorbike pulls up and gets off and we’re thinking sh**, we’ve offended someone in the town already and he takes his helmet off and he goes “Lindsay, it’s your cousin! How you doin’?” So our families help us a lot and in return we get them into shows and let them drink for free!

I first joined the band in 1996 but the band first became a band in 1992, when Jay and a few of his mates said “Let’s start a band”. It seemed pretty easy to do. There were bands around at that time like the Hard Ons and the Meanies. The Hard Ons are still around thank God. The Hard Ons just made it look really easy and obviously it is, because we’re still doing it.

Probably about the time we got off the dole. I remember we did this weird little forum in Brisbane with some record company clown. It was a forum about major labels to independent labels and discussing the differences and this clown from some label (it was one of the big ones) was saying “It’s all very well to be on an independent label, but you can only sell up to about 8,000 to 9,000 records.” And Jason said “Yeah, but we’re on Shock and we’ve just sold 25,000” and he didn’t say much else. Then we went gold. So the point of the story is I guess that we started selling albums and all the people who we used to play to started hating us. It had to be a career because we weren’t allowed to sleep on their floors anymore because we’d sold out because we played to more than 20 people. So I guess it became a career by proxy. We can now write off tattoo’s and movie tickets and magazines as a tax write off. Shoes and tattoo’s because they’re stage apparel, it’s all part of the look, it’s great, except the place I get tattoo’s won’t give me receipts because they’re a bikie gang and it’s not a legitimate business.

Not at all, actually I am pretty sure that for Jason’s 21st birthday present his dad paid $600 for the recording of the first E.P. That was all the cash needed.

I do, because I wasn’t in the band at the time and I bought it off a friend who worked at a video store in Engadine in Sydney. She was selling a bunch of CD’s because she was moving house and so I went and bought the first EP, and I think a Spiderbait album too, which I sold, but it was great. But if you’re talking about the first album that I had recorded on, which was ‘Meet The Family’, then yeah, when I got the original copy, it was great. It didn’t even have an album cover, I didn’t even know these little things existed where you got these little demo versions or whatever it is with the master. I never even heard my voice, or guitar, recorded back really. It was amazing.

April 14th it comes out.

Yeah, it’s called Sans Souci, which is French for no worries and it’s also a suburb near where we live in Sydney called Sans Souci. It’s a beachside suburb and it’s a really old 70’s style beachside suburb, and we thought it was good because we’re saying “No worries”

Epitaph in Australia and New Zealand and Fat for the rest of the world and yeah, it’s great being on the two greatest record labels in the world.

We won the Fat records deal in a game of pool in San Francisco. We were playing a gig and Fat Mike (of NoFX) was at the gig and he said to Jason “If you win this game of pool, I’ll sign you.” And he won the game of pool, so he signed us. We’d had some dealings with them before in ’94 when we did a 7” with them and they put it on a compilation, but it wasn’t until this in 1997 I think it was that they signed us.

Shock is the distributor in Australia of Epitaph and Fat Wreck Chords so that was pretty good, because we were on Shock before and that was good to have the same people because they all work on the same stuff. Shock although a million people have come and gone, it’s still the same people, so that’s good.

Well South Africa’s pretty big but… well yeah, we just fund that ourselves. They send us t-shirts and CD’s to sell but that’s about it. We just do that all ourselves. I think we get some tour support for some stuff, but it’s the sort of thing where the risk is with us and we just do it ourselves and you know, we don’t make any money, but I hadn’t planned to ever go to Israel or South Africa by myself, so that’s a great chance to go.

I love it. It’s very important to me because I get to do lots of stuff for it and I get to just be a general obnoxious arse and get pretty much free form retribution on it because you can say what you want on the internet.

We do have a Frenzal question page. I’ve been really lazy with it lately, but Gordy does a lot of it, but me and Gordy do a lot of the answering of questions. We get very abusive with fans and we love them and mean the best for them, but yeah, we definitely answer all the stuff ourselves. We’re very lazy with all our mail and fan mail that we get on the road, just because it takes a while to get back to them.

There’s a couple of solos. Definitely nothing Kerry King or Jeff Hanneman would ever admit to, but definitely there’s a whole lot of “spoo” on the guitar. That’s important for any band because we’re into the whole nu-metal, although the songs only go for about two and a half minutes, which is about as long as possible that we can play for anyway. But yeah there’s lots of songs, it’s all very defamatory. We hassle a lot of people, such as Russell Crowe, John Butler, the Prime Minister again, just all the same rubbish… hippies, so no-one is free from it.

No way! We’re nowhere near as good as those guys. We’re more the Wa Wa Nee, I think would be more appropriate.