“We’re really excited,” he states sincerely. “It’s been a while since we’ve been to Australia, so we’re excited to get back. I couldn’t tell you offhand [how many times the band has been to Australia]. It’s been quite a bit, it’s gotta be seven or eight times, if not more since the band started. Do you know?” he asks laughing.
So why are we the lucky ones to get this tour, outside the US and Canada? “Well, we’ve always got a good response from fans in Australia,” he explains. “We love going there, there’s just some places in the world where the band seems to go over really well, and Australia is just one of those places.”
Nolan explains that it is a true co-headlining tour, as opposed to a true headliner bringing a support act with them, given the high profile of both bands in this country and across the world.
“Each band plays about an hour,” he says, “and we switch back and forth who closes the set out, so it’s basically like two full headlining sets.”
The band have six full-length albums out now, and while they try to play a good cross-section of material from their back catalogue, some band and fan favourites still regrettably need to be left out of an hour-long set.
“We try to cover everything,” he reveals. “Obviously that’s a lot of songs, so we can only do so much. But we try to play at least a few songs from every album and try to give a good mix of the entire catalogue when we’re putting a set together.
“There’s always songs that different members of the band have that are more their favourites, and someone else will be like, ‘No, I don’t want to play that one’, and you gotta go back and forth and compromise. And then there’s a few songs that fans of the band look for that we usually don’t play – there’s always those who are huge fans of some obscure song that it just doesn’t make sense to play because 90 per cent of the audience doesn’t know it. And it’s like, that 10 per cent who know it would go crazy, but you can’t play to that 10 per cent, unfortunately,” he laughs again.
The band’s history goes all the way back to the late ‘90s, and Nolan has mixed feelings when asked if it feels like they’ve been around for a decade and a half.
“Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t,” he reflects. “In certain ways, you think about it and some things seem like yesterday, and other things, you think about it and go, ‘Oh my God, that seems like a lifetime ago’. It just depends on which memory you think about.
“I think it’s the same thing for anybody when they think back ten or 15 years ago, you know? Some things just seem longer ago than they are and some things seem like yesterday.”
Nolan tells us that they actually spend very little time looking back over their careers and congratulating themselves on a great career so far. What’s past is past and they prefer to look forward to the next song, the next album, and the next tour.
“We try to stay focused on the future,” he states. “We think that’s the best thing to do. We have plenty of people looking at what we’ve done and talking about what we’ve done in the past, so we leave that to them.”
That said, he has a definite favourite moment from the band’s career. “About four years ago, myself and Shaun re-joined the band…the first show we played was in New Jersey. There was a lot of excitement, a lot of tension leading up to it. It was just amazing, the feeling that we all had on stage, and coming from all the people in the room, it was unlike anything else.”
Fifteen years and six albums into their career, John feels that the band is in a great place, still has plenty to say and still has plenty of juice left in the tank, creatively and personally. The immediate future is also looking very busy and very bright with demand for the band across the world high and work on album seven to commence.
“Sometimes I feel like we’re just getting started” he claims. We’ve got a lot of touring to do off of this album. In addition to the Australian shows we’re doing some European tours, we’ve got a whole bunch of festival shows throughout the summer, and then we’re probably going to tour throughout the rest of the year. Then I think we’re just going to get back into writing and preparing for the next album. So we’re far from done yet!”
BY ROD WHITFIELD
