“Being the Australian way, public holidays tend to be a big party,” Marr says. “You do the ANZAC-y stuff during the day and then you go out for a beer at night and celebrate [with] rock’n’roll. It’s pretty much all we know how to do.”
Since the release of their debut album, aptly titled Full Throttle, Massive have been constantly on the move. That trend is set to continue after their Titty Twister gig – the lads will be taking off on a whirlwind tour across Australia before heading towards international pastures.
“We’ve got quite a few shows coming up,” Marr says. “We’re doing a regional run interstate and going up the east coast. We’re [also] recording the second album in between all of this. We’re busy every day, which is good for a rock band.”
Late last year, Massive completed an extensive tour of Europe, where, in addition to flying the flag for Aussie rock’n’roll, they played alongside high ranking rock’n’roll outfits from all over the world. They shared the stage with The Treatment from the UK and Blackberry Smoke from the US. According to Marr, their was pretty hectic,” he continues. “We landed on the Sunday and our first show was on the Monday, and we basically played six nights a week for seven weeks. It was an experience. It was something to cherish, and we loved every second of it.”
While there’s nothing absolutely set in stone as far as actual tour dates are concerned, and given they had such a great time, the band are hell-bent on getting back over to Europe again.
“We’ve got a few offers,” Marr says. “We don’t want to go for a ten-date run, we want to go for a good three months, or even longer, if we can. At the moment, we’re looking at being there around September; we have tentative dates pencilled in there, so in 2015 we’ll be back in Europe for sure. For an Aussie rock band, there’s 22 million people here and so much more over there.”
Another exciting development in the history of Massive was their signing with legendary heavy music label Earache a year ago, for a five album deal. The signing, the album’s release and the extensive touring of the world seem to have come very quickly for this band, who only formed three years ago. But Marr feels the individual band members all did their hard yards previously.
“We’ve all been in bands before, we’ve been doing this since we were in high school. It did come around quickly, but we’d already done the ‘playing to no one in a shitty bar’ thing. we wanted to do something a little bit bigger. Really, we’ve done the hard work for a decade.”
BY ROD WHITFIELD
