“We were actually supporting ourselves,” Beardraven/McMillansays. “We had another band at the time and this was a gag. It was our other band’s CD launch. We kind of threw together this gag band, The Beards, as a bit of a laugh to support ourselves. We played the set, then went backstage, shaved, and then came back onstage and played the other gig. A lot of people didn’t realise we were both bands. A lot of people came up and said, ‘Who were those first guys?’ It was the most ridiculous idea that we’d come up with.”
While conceived as a lark, The Beards have become a much more serious entity in the years since. “It was just a bit of a gag, a bit of a joke, a goof, for our own amusement really,” McMillanadmits. “Happily, we discovered there was a ferocious public appetite for songs about beards, so we were forced to play more than one gig.”
Oddly enough, to describe the Australian public’s desire for beard-related content as ferocious might even be an understatement. The Beards are now an undeniable force – an award-winning band with one of the most devoted fan bases in the land. Over the course of their career, they’ve released five albums and a live DVD, giving birth to bristly hits like You Should Consider Having Sex With A Bearded Man and Beard Related Song Number 38, all while inspiring equal amounts of adoration and bemusement.
McMillan has enjoyed every minute of his time as The Beards’ hairy frontman. However, after rising to the top of the beard-related novelty genre, McMillan and co. have decided to bring the project to its close.
“It was hard [to end the band],” says McMillan. “We’ve been touring pretty heavily for a long time, and we knew we either needed that break or we needed to go out with a bang. It’s going to be a little bit sad, but we will certainly be keeping the band together as a core entity. We’ll certainly be looking for other ways to spread our pro-beard message. So that might mean releasing more material down the track, but the touring stuff is done… at least that side of it.”
The Beards’ farewell tour sees them bringing love and facial hair to venues in a vast number of capital cities and rural outposts. Although the tour is still in its early stages, by the time it’s all done and dusted the band will have visited more than 50 locations across the country. But despite the melancholic nature of the tour, McMillan admits that the full significance of the farewell shows hasn’t hit him yet.
“It’s not as [sad] as I maybe though it would be, but I do think it will get there. So far it’s been fine – pretty cruisey at the moment. Just a few festivals, a few headline shows. We played [South Australia’s Blenheimfest] in the Clare Valley recently and we got to sleep in our own beds afterwards, which is a rare treat on tour.”
The guiding principle behind this tour was simple – to give back to the people who have shown so much love for the group over so many years.
“We’ve been lucky to just build up followers over a time,” McMillan says. “We have a really loyal fan base. And I guess this last tour is a way of getting out there and saying thank you, and having one last beard party before we call it a day.”
BY JOSEPH EARP
