“The last time Warped tour was in Australia we came over. Mighty Mighty Bosstones were on it, MxPx and a couple of other bands,” remembers New Found Glory drummer Cyrus Bolooki.
The American pop-punk quintet are listed towards the top of the 2013 lineup, but Bolooki reveals that they started playing Warped tour in the US when they were merely a bunch of pop-punk hopefuls.
“The first Warped tour we ever played was in 1999 and we played one show at our local stop in South Florida,” he says. “We were the nobodies then and the next year we got a couple of shows and then it kept going from there, so we definitely came from being the nobody young band to one of the veterans.”
Historically, Warped tour hosts some big name drawcards as well as introducing crowds to the hottest young blood toiling in the faster genres. In recent years, the festival has broadened its reach beyond the punk-rock category and this year’s lineup ranges from The Offspring’s old school pop-punk and Parkway Drive’s world shattering metalcore to Mallory Knox’s neo-alternative rock and the indie go-go of RDGLDGRN. Having participated in Warped tour for a number of years, Bolooki emphasises that such a wide-spanning showcase is one of the festival’s defining features.
“No matter who you are, I think when you go to a Warped tour you can always count on finding at least one band that you may not have heard of. It’s such a big mixture of bands and styles that you’re guaranteed to find something you’ve never heard of.”
New Found Glory have outlasted many of the bands who emerged in the turn-of-the-millennium’s pop-punk boom and Bolooki indicates that cultivating a committed fanbase has allowed them to stay relevant for over a decade.
“Luckily for us we definitely wrote good music, or at least catchy music. I think another thing is just the way that we relate to people. We don’t feel like we’re above anybody else – we’re the same [as the] kids that are out there in the crowd.”
Even though New Found Glory have long surpassed their status as stargazing pop-punk enthusiasts to be embraced as one of the genre’s most important groups, Bolooki stresses they haven’t lost sight of what drove them to make music in the first place.
“You go back to years ago, we were the kids at Warped tour looking up to bands like Blink 182 and Millencolin, wanting to be on that stage. We know that it’s very fortunate for us to be here and we try to keep level heads. This is just a true story of kids who had a dream and worked hard to get out there and play music and see how far we could go with it,” he explains.
Last month New Found Glory unveiled their very first live album, Kill It Live, which grabs tunes from the band’s seven studio albums, focusing mostly on 2002’s Sticks and Stones and the 2004 follow-up Catalyst. These two albums were released during pop-punk’s mainstream proliferation and Bolooki understands fans are especially attached to the records.
“We go back to Stick and Stones and Catalyst [because], besides the fact that sales-wise those were two of our biggest records, music-wise and song-wise that’s what people want to hear. People are going to crucify us if we don’t play My Friends Over You, All Down Hill From Here, Head-On Collision and Understatement.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
