If you don’t know who Me First & The Gimmes are by now, then you either have little taste in music and/or a sense of adventure, or you don’t listen to music at all.
If you have been figuratively touched by these fun loving punk reprobates then you will already know that the band only recently visited these shores on a blitzkrieg tour, and you will also likely not be surprised to hear that everybody’s favourite punk covers band are about to board the plane from the U.S of A for a return visit dubbed The Band Of The Long Weekend Tour.
Except it goes for more like two weeks.
Armed with their latest release – a tribute to the late Billy Thorpe with Most People I Know – Me First & The Gimmes are set to once more decimate Australian crowds, and, according to frontman Spike Slawson, can’t wait to experience our good old Australian hospitality once more. With less than seven days to the first Brisbane show on October 30, we start by asking if he is packed and ready to go.
“Getting there,” he smiled. “I always leave it to the last minute, but we’re getting there. Preparing ourselves mentally and emotionally and infrastructurally it’s always a challenge, but somehow we always make do. And the flight keeps getting shorter and shorter! I think they hit some kind of slipstream or… I dunno.”
Talk turns to the name of the tour and the fact that Me First & The Gimmes are anything but predictable, both as people and in the sonic realm.
“We like to put our fans and facilitators at a disadvantage,” he joked. “I think it’s… it’s not a strategic thing as much as it is just a sort of troll. Our shows are an hour and a half long troll and at first we try to set the bar high for ourselves by really alienating our potential allies until the point where they are actually expressing their displeasure audibly. Booing. We like to bring them to about that point before we start to reel them back in. When it really kicked in was recently – two or three years ago – and it was still during lockdown so it was a crazy tour, but we were on a bill with the Violent Femmes and Flogging Molly as well as a band from New York called Thick. All the other bands played originals, or at least mostly originals, so, as with most bands that play originals, they are the heroes of their own stories. They’re very earnest, and they’re very serious about their music. They may be smiling but it’s a serious moment they’re sharing with you. Whereas for us, we understood right off the bat that we were the heels of the bill. Just as we are the heels of any bill that we’re on. Interestingly enough, the nights when you alienate the crowd the most, those are the nights where you end up selling the most t-shirts. Isn’t that funny?”
In the full interview, Spike reminisced about their previous performances in Australia and their upcoming return. He expressed his love for classical pop music and punk music, particularly the Ramones and the Buzzcocks, revealing that his band’s covers would likely come from outsider pop or weirdo pop, which was prevalent in the 1970s. He also discussed his admiration for the music of the 1970s, despite its sometimes jarring themes. We spoke about support band, Dwarves, and how this coming tour will differ from recent shows, places where Me First & The Gimme Gimmes WOULDN’T play and more.
