“We’ve had our ups and downs over the years, like everyone else,” Jones says with a little understatement. “I think I was gonna quit the band one time and then I thought about it and I rang everyone up a few days later, said, ‘Look, uh, I’m not gonna quit the band.’ I had my moment but I didn’t stick to my guns, I decided to go back to the group and I’m glad I did because there were more adventures to be had.” Nowadays there are no thoughts of quitting, however. “Everyone’s getting along, everyone’s pretty healthy. It’s cool.”
Jones puts their longevity down to the fact that though there’s a lot of years between now and their formation, in between there were plenty of side projects and gaps. “We didn’t exist for any long period of time. We always, when we got together and played, it was always very briefly and that’s kept it all interesting for everybody. Each time we got together there’d be fresh ideas, new material, that kind of thing.” It also made every time they managed to come together again feel like an event. “Not being in people’s face that whole time, it gives people a chance to miss us.”
To celebrate their 30th birthday, over three nights, three different incarnations of Beasts of Bourbon will play songs from different eras – the original crew, the version of the band who recorded The Low Road in 1991, and the current lineup. That original version got together earlier this year for their re-formation gig at All Tomorrow’s Parties, a well-received set overall, though it did include one surprise in the middle. Their thudding, discordant song Playground, according to Jones, had people “cringing and white-knuckle gripping the chairs” as he relates with glee. “It’s our big industrial number. People were like, ‘That was a really great set but there was one song in the middle I really hated,’” he says, barely able to keep himself from laughing at the memory. “And I’m thinking, ‘this is great, this one tune that has this effect on people. They really dislike it!’ We’ve always enjoyed confronting people like that, so that song stays in. I’m looking forward to playing that one in fact, looking forward to seeing the disappointment and annoyance on people’s faces.”
But there are also songs from various points in their catalogue that even the bloody-minded Spencer P. Jones isn’t looking forward to hearing again. “I’ve always had a couple of songs I didn’t like playing,” he says, “and they weren’t always in the set so it didn’t bother me, but there’s gonna be one in one of the sets, one of the lineups, that I’m not keen on playing. But you don’t need to know what song that is!”
As part of the birthday celebration, the Beasts picked out three live recordings representing each era and packaged them together as the compilation 30 Years of Borrowed Time. A recording from All Tomorrow’s Parties is joined by one from Festival Hall and one from the Byron Bay Blues Festival. “When you do a festival, your first song is gonna suffer because that’s when the sound guy is getting his shit together,” Jones says, “so I think we dropped the version of Chase The Dragon from the Byron Bay gig, which was the first song on the day. But it’s on the Festival Hall show so it doesn’t matter that’s not on there. We tried to get as many tracks on as possible so there are songs that are in common, like there’s two versions of Let’s Get Funky for example. I think that will be of some interest to some people, some guitar nerds I know.”
The ATP gig was originally planned as a one-off reunion but, seven months later, the Beasts are still together. Jones says that there’s no plan to stop now, although it’s just the current lineup that will carry on. But whether or not they’ll record again is another matter. “That depends how creative everyone gets, you know? I’ve always been able to pull a couple of new songs out of the hat. If you give me a date that the Beasts are supposed to be in the recording studio I assure you that I will turn up with six songs, no problem.”
BY JODY MACGREGOR
