Interview by Ali Williams
CRASH TEST DUMMIES have reached a particularly agreeable stage of their career. They can tour when they want, play songs that have already survived several decades of public consumption, slip some new material into the set without causing mass panic, and frontman Brad Roberts no longer feels obliged to work quite as hard as he once did. Catching up with HEAVY’s Ali Williams, Roberts was happy to announce their return as well as share some memories and insight on the band’s journey so far.
The Canadian band are heading back to Australia in April, following a previous visit that went well enough for another run to be organised almost immediately. For Roberts, that response carries more weight than any grand discussion about longevity. People came. They enjoyed themselves. They wanted the band back. CRASH TEST DUMMIES were equally happy with the arrangement. “We had such a successful tour last time that we booked gigs almost immediately after finishing the ones that we did,” Roberts tells HEAVY.
There was, however, a substantial period when touring wasn’t part of the CRASH TEST DUMMIES routine at all. After stepping away from the road for some time, an invitation around 2016 unexpectedly put the machinery back into motion. Roberts remembers the moment he wanted to start touring again – mid performance with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. Not exactly the sort a conventional way of planning your bands next international tour , but there is something wonderfully reassuring about a musician with Roberts’ history casually deciding to tour again albeit mid-performance. The performance went so well that the band found themselves asking a very simple question: why weren’t they doing this anymore?
“So, for about the last ten years or so, we’ve been touring again,” he explains. And yes, he still enjoys it. Perhaps even more now. “It’s more enjoyable in some ways because I don’t have to work as hard.” There’s an earned practicality to Roberts’ view of the band’s current life. CRASH TEST DUMMIES aren’t attempting to recreate an earlier version of themselves or pretend the intervening decades never happened. They have an enormous catalogue, an audience that has remained attached to it, and enough distance from the chaos of their commercial peak to appreciate what they built without becoming trapped by it. Importantly, they are still making music.
The band’s most recent release is 2024 track Sacred Alphabet, which Roberts admits has surprised him with the reception it receives live. New songs inserted among well-known material can occasionally trigger the communal concert response of hundreds of people suddenly deciding it is an excellent time to inspect their drink, but that hasn’t happened here. “I would have thought that people would be kind of squirming in their chairs during an unfamiliar song,” Roberts says. “But we get a really good response from it.”
Musically, he considers Sacred Alphabet different from earlier CRASH TEST DUMMIES material, although not completely removed from it. “There’s a family resemblance,” he says. That might be the neatest description of how a band with such an identifiable musical personality moves forward. Nobody particularly needs CRASH TEST DUMMIES to manufacture replicas of records they already made successfully the first time. New material can occupy its own space without denying its parentage. Of course, any conversation with Roberts eventually arrives at the extraordinary period when the band found itself enjoying international success on a scale few musicians ever experience. The story becomes considerably stranger when Roberts points out that while their breakthrough material travelled spectacularly well around the world, their home country proved less enthusiastic about the international number one song Mmmm Mmmmm that became their enormous global hit. “The only country that didn’t play that song was Canada.”
For a Canadian band, that is almost impressively inconvenient. Their first album had performed extremely well at home and brought major recognition, including a Juno Award. When the second record arrived, however, Roberts says the Canadian music industry responded very differently. “We got eaten by our own country, as it were,” he says, making a distinction between Canadian listeners and the industry surrounding them.
According to Roberts, the song and its video were rejected by the local music business, the single moved through the charts quickly without climbing particularly high, and momentum at home disappeared. Then America picked it up. From there, it became a worldwide success and eventually travelled all the way down to Australia, where CRASH TEST DUMMIES found an audience that clearly hasn’t forgotten them. It remains a peculiar chapter in the band’s history. The people responsible for deciding what supposedly wouldn’t work got their answer from several other countries at considerable volume.
Three decades later, Roberts doesn’t appear particularly interested in squeezing bitterness from the experience. The band survived the machinery surrounding the success, disappeared from touring when it suited them, returned when the opportunity felt right and now occupies the unusual position of being able to draw from its past without living entirely inside it. That also makes the continued popularity of anniversary-era touring fairly easy to understand. Audiences aren’t buying tickets because somebody has forced them to revisit music from decades ago. They are buying them because the songs remain part of their lives and, crucially, the artists are still capable of standing on a stage and delivering them.
CRASH TEST DUMMIES will bring both the familiar material and their newer work when they return to Australia, with Roberts estimating the run at around six or seven shows. This visit will be confined to Australia rather than extending across to New Zealand, and Japan remains unexplored territory for the band despite Roberts being very open to the idea. “I would love to go there,” he says, although he isn’t sure what sort of following the band has in Japan. Australia, fortunately, has already made its position known. There will also be a couple of days off during the upcoming run, although Roberts hasn’t assembled an ambitious sightseeing itinerary. His preferred touring recreation is considerably easier to organise.
Good restaurants.
One of his favourite things about life on the road, he explains, is “pursuing culinary bliss.” After decades of records, international touring, chart success, awards and the general absurdity that can accompany having a song suddenly explode around the planet, Brad Roberts has apparently distilled road life down to an excellent meal and some free time. There is wisdom in this.
CRASH TEST DUMMIES return to Australia with a history large enough to fill the room before they play a note, but this isn’t a band being dragged around by its former achievements. Roberts sounds genuinely content with where the group sits now: still touring, still creating music, still discovering that audiences want them around and, mercifully, no longer required to run at full speed to prove anything. Australia wanted them back.
CRASH TEST DUMMIES were more than happy to accept the invitation. And somewhere between shows, Brad Roberts will be looking for dinner.
CRASH TEST DUMMIES April 2027 Australian Tour Dates
Friday2nd April BRISBANE, The Tivoli
Saturday 3rd April TWEED HEADS, Twin Towns
Thursday 8th April ADELAIDE, Thebarton Theatre
Friday 9th April MELBOURNE, Forum
Saturday 10th April SYDNEY, Enmore Theatre
Wednesday 14th April PERTH, Astor Theatre
Tickets HERE
