Muso on Muso: Jaret Reddick & Frank Turner
Bowling for Soup vocalist and guitarist Jaret Reddick and English punk troubadour Frank Turner sat down together and chatted about their favourite song to play live of their own, along with their favourite live track of each other’s, ahead of their joint Australian tour that kicks off in May.
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Jaret Reddick: My favourite song of ours to play live is ‘Girl All the Bad Guys Want’. It’s just one of those things where I am always so amazed at bands that have hits, and they have that attitude of like, “I'm not going to play that song. I'm sick of playing this song.” Because why would you want to play what people want to hear, right?!
And there's just something about the moment when that riff starts in ‘Girl All the Bad Guys Want’, everybody knows it in two notes. I love the excitement that they feel, and we make the chorus a call-and-response thing too. It’s just such a fun song to play, and I love the reaction that it gets.
I will never be sick of playing any of our hits, and we play them every show. But my favourite song to see Frank play is not actually my favourite song by him, but my pick of his live would be ‘I Still Believe’. When he does that “I still believe” chant and the audience is like, “I still believe!!”...Frank, I saw you at The Loft in Dallas one time, I've seen you like four times in Dallas for whatever reason, which is crazy that I was home.
Frank Turner: I know the reason. You live there.
Jaret: Yeah, that's true. Well, I know that, but I'm never here! But man, I'll fucking never forget that moment at The Loft. You opened up with that shit and people were just losing their minds. You played that at the Olympics too, didn't you?
Frank: We did!
Jaret: “I still believe in the saints!!”
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Frank: To lift off from what Jaret was just saying, I could not agree more about the whole thing about the bands who are like, “oh, it's such a drag to play the song that's going to make everyone lose their fucking minds, and it's the reason why everyone came to the show. What a drag.” I mean, how many bands don't have any songs like that? It’s like: get over it. Take three minutes of your life to entertain people, which is literally what you're being paid to do and it’s also the best feeling in the world. That's a roundabout way of saying that I like playing songs that get the crowd moving.
We have a song called ‘Four Simple Words’. We've tried putting it in places in the set other than at the end and it's just pointless. So we always play it last just because everyone loses their mind and it's become a bit of a thing now that we always close to that song. And it doesn't bother me that we always close with that song, I think it's cool.
With that in mind as well, Jaret I'm going to ask for your help on my answer to the other part of this question because I remember seeing you guys at a festival and you had…it might have been ‘1985’, it might have been ‘Punk Rock 101’, but you had a song where you got the crowd to start singing the chorus and then you guys all just sat down and started drinking beer.
Jaret: (laughs) Oh, okay, yes. Instead of our encore…hold on, are you talking about the photograph opportunity where we go and we pose for photos?
Frank: No, no, no, you literally cue the audience up for the first line of the chorus and then you just sat down.
Jaret: Oh, yeah! So basically, that's the end of our show.
Frank: Which song was that?
Jaret: It’s ‘1985’.
Frank: It is 1985! Ok, that’s my answer.
Jaret: Yeah, instead of leaving the stage before the encore because there's usually stairs involved, we’d just sit there because you know we're coming back on anyway, right?
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Frank: Yeah, yeah. I mean, not only was it funny, it was funny and it was kind of a bit of a flex, which was cool as fuck as well. But as well as that, I'm trying not to get overly philosophical about this, but community singing is the root of all human music, humans singing together without instrumentation. And a room full of people bonding over that collective experience of singing a song that they know and indeed are passionate and excited about; there was something incredibly primal about it. It just felt like: this is where all of this started. It's all truly about this. It's about a group of people forging communion with each other through this collective action. And that is perhaps a really overly philosophical way of talking about this, but I was kind of floored by it at that moment. And I was also slightly like, “...do I have any songs where I could steal this and do this?”
Jaret: You did! I just remembered that was in Italy because that’s when you told me, "I'm totally stealing that bit.” And I was floored about that.
Frank: Oh yeah, I mean, we all steal, right? But it was so fucking good man, it blew my mind.
Jaret: It’s pretty wild. I mean, we're 32 years in and we started out as a bar band. So those fans that started with us are now in their 50s and 60s. There are now three, and in some countries they start young, so maybe four generations that have been coming to our shows. And they're still coming together and they're standing at the barricade.
Honestly, one of my favourite things in the world is a message that I get so often, it's a parent saying, “Man, I had nothing in common with my kid, nothing. We found Bowling For Soup, and now we're gonna go see this band and this band and this band, and now music has brought us together.” We've kind of always been that band that parents and kids agree upon because you get the humour, and it’s fast. And we’re told a lot that we're the first band that everybody’s parents let buy the album, even though we say “shit” on every song. It’s just one of those things, and I love that. And I think that's such an important part of music in and of itself, just how it brings friends, family, and sometimes even adversaries together. It's just a magical thing.
Frank: And you with your audience as well. Jaret will know what I'm talking about here. There are many examples of this in life, but there's one specific moment that springs to mind for me here. We were on tour and I was having a bad day. I just wasn't in the fucking mood and I don’t think the show had sold super well either. I think we were in Idaho and we were playing ‘I Knew Prufrock Before He Got Famous’. The central part of the lyrics for that one is a roll call of a bunch of friends of mine who used to work at a bar that's about five minutes walk from where I'm sitting right now. And this guy, this 50-year-old guy in a suit who wasn't with anyone, had his eyes closed and his hands on his tie, and he was screaming every fucking word about a bunch of people he's never met. And I just slightly stood there, and I was like, to myself, “get over yourself. Look at this, you get to do this for a living. This moment is what this is all for.” And if he was the only guy in there, it would still be worth doing this. I can still see his face when I close my eyes.
Catch Bowling for Soup and Frank Turner & The Sleeping Souls at Hindley Street Music Hall on Saturday 9 May. Tickets on sale via moshtix.com.au.
