For Grammy Award winning rockers Greta Van Fleet their maiden Australian tour didn’t exactly go to plan. After playing a killer show in Sydney the heavy touring schedule caught up with lead singer Josh Kiszka and doctors ordered him to cancel the rest of the tour and rest his voice. The decision was a hard one for the band but one they had to make. Now the band are returning to Australia to finish off the tour and it was very obvious when HEAVY Mag spoke to Sam Kiszka that this is something that the band are really looking forward to.
“We are unbelievably excited,” he says the excitement very obvious in the voice. “Australia has some of the greatest rock bands in the entire world. Man-oh-man, AC/DC is the epitome of you know the hardcore rock, and someone else I think a lot of people don’t appreciate as much as they should also came from Australia – Vance Joy. I am a big fan of his work, as a contemporary artist I am really into his music.”
“If I told you you wouldn’t believe it,” says Kiszka when I ask how shattered the band had been when they had to cut short their first Australian tour. “It was really bad, it was emotionally very taxing to just have to remain sitting in a hotel room when there is literally nothing that you can do. But when Josh felt that he just couldn’t do his performance justice then there was no we were going to put ourselves out there and give Australia anything less than the best of Greta Van Fleet. It was pretty rough because by the time we got to Australia, and you have to remember that we had just toured, we did Saturday Night Live and then went to Japan, that was pretty quick, and then we flew down to Australia, we were about three or four shows in and then Josh came down with this illness from travelling, switching time zones, not getting much sleep. It is a really fucking hardcore job to tour and to be honest it was surprising he held up that well.”
In the rest of the Greta Van Fleet that you can hear on Spotify Sam talks about Saturday Night Live, the Grammy Awards and plenty more.
All the tour dates for Greta Van Fleet can be found on this page.
