It is hard to believe that during their illustrious career the almighty Extreme have only ever toured Australia once… something that band is about to rectify with their tour to Australia with the equally impressive Mr. Big. The band topped charts in the 80s and 90s with hits like ‘Hole Hearted’ and ‘More Than Words’ but only true fans knew that the band was a lot heavier than these tracks suggested.
Despite their popularity though Extreme has only visited Australian shores once so there is little doubt that the fans are excited about the fact that they are about to tour again… even more excited though it seems that excitement is also shared by the band themselves. When HEAVY sat down with frontman Nuno Bettencourt his excitement for the tour was evident as he chatted.
“You know I’m supposed to say all the things to promote the tour but you know what I am truly, truly, truly excited because it has been so long,” Bettencourt explains. “I feel somewhat embarrassed that we haven’t been there in so long, but because of that it is going to be a great time to reconnect with everybody – it’s been like twenty-something years so it is going to be super exciting. I hope everybody is as pumped as I am. We actually only ever toured Australia once, during the Three Sides tour and it is really shameful and annoying that we haven’t been back since because the crowds are so incredible, it is so strange that we have waited this long to come back.”
Bettencourt laughs when we start talking about set lists and some of their biggest tracks. “To do something really new we’ve decided that we will do our whole new album… all new stuff and none of the old stuff…what do you think about that?” he asks with a serious tone before laughing. “That would certainly be one way to piss everybody off, wouldn’t it? But no it is quite the opposite, we do have some new material that we have been working on, but what do you do when you haven’t seen somebody for a long time? You catch up and that’s what we are going to do… we are going to reconnect. We are going to do as much as we can from each album, we’ll do three or four tracks from each album… and we’ll take them on that journey as we play all the stuff that they want to hear you know… that they want to experience.”
You can grab tickets to Extreme’s tour of Australia with Mr Big and all info is below.
