The Meanies are the Aussie punk legends who have been in the music scene for the past 27 years. Forté chat to bassist Wally.
Hey Wally, thanks for having a chat to us today. How are you and what have you been up to at the moment?
I’ve spent the day arguing with bureaucrats about my financials, not exactly thrilling! But if the question was a more overall one and no need to be so specific, The Meanies just did a great bunch of shows throughout November.
After a huge 18 months, you guys announced your ‘last show for ages’ in celebration of your well-earned break. What have you got planned for the show?
Not sure if the break’s all that well-earned per se, with the only reason we’re breaking is so our illustrious leader Link can go and spend some time in Barcelona with his Spanish fiancé. He met her in Spain during Primavera Pro last year when his other band Sun God Replica were there, it blossomed quickly and now it’s a permanent thang. He’ll be back in Oz mid year for a wee while but then going back for good later in 2017. Hopefully it’ll mean more European tours… Nothing special planned for this show, it’s hard to improve upon perfection!
With Link off to Spain, what have you got planned for the break?
We all have lives outside of The Meanies so we’ll just go on living those. It wasn’t always the case as once upon a time The Meanies was the be all and end all but not so much these days. We’ve lost track of how many shows we’ve done in total, but our original guitarist DD used to keep count and after five years, I think we’d cracked the thousand shows mark.
You guys just recently played A Day on the Green alongside You Am I, Spiderbait, Something for Kate and Jebediah. How did you find playing a winery tour?
It was fabulous. The size, the occasion, the line up, the crew – it just felt like a Big Day Out or Homebake. The fact it was in a winery was kind of lost on you – until you got to the dressing room and there were bottles of top shelf shit for days!
What was it like for you, releasing a brand new album last year after 21 years? Were you guys nervous about how it was to be accepted by your fans/new fans.
Never! We knew it was fabulous from the get go. We never strayed from the old formula, and if anything we’d gotten better as players after all these years and the sound quality was better than anything we’d ever done before without compromising anything. Producer Sloth did an amazing job of making it sound big and crystal clear and as tough as nails at the same time. It’s been really well received both here and abroad, especially in Spain where there was some trepidation on fans part, but once they heard it they loved it. Thank fuck.
Do you have any future plans regarding new music or future shows?
I’m super keen to make another Meanies album. There was talk of making a covers record – like that’s never been done before, yeah right. But we had a series of 7” singles, it’s still going, where an unreleased Meanies track is on the a-side and two bands doing Meanies songs are on the b-side (Spiderbait, The Drones, Cockfight Shootout, You Am I). So we were thinking of covering songs from all of those bands. Either that, or an album of brand new tunes mixed with older ones that never got recorded when they were written, which is exactly what the latest album is. But these things cost money that we don’t have, and pretty soon we’ll be missing an integral part of the recording process – a singer songwriter guitarist! So who knows, the world is our oyster.
When & Where: The Eastern, Ballarat – December 16