“Super super pumped up!” he enthuses. “I love the bands we’re playing with, so I’m really excited for that reason.”
If you haven’t experienced The Bennies before, you are in for a treat. They have been described as ‘genre-mashing’, fusing rock with punk, stoner, reggae, psychedelia and whatever else they can get their greedy musical hands on. But whatever label you want to lay on them, they are a band with no boundaries, as far as the musical styles they cover in their songs. More ‘genre-smashing’ than genre mashing, and Anty begrudgingly agrees.
“Just depends which way you flip the coin I suppose,” he laughs. “We just try to change things up, challenge ourselves. It’s always interesting to find a new sound and see if we can work it in, we’ve all got short attention spans, so it kinda comes from that.
“With the genre thing, we get asked that a lot in interviews and stuff,” he goes on. “For a long time, that was a massive thing that people criticised us for. It was like, ‘They’re alright, but they can’t decide what genre they are’ and all this sort of stuff. Our whole attitude the whole time is, ‘If that’s your mindset, well you’re an idiot. If you need to be told what genre a band is before you can like it…I don’t really care what you think anyway’. That’s kind of our attitude anyway.”
What it comes down to for the band members is just a hunger for new styles of music to listen to, be influenced by and bring into their own sound. “The common ground is a love of punk music and punk ethos, that kind of ties it all together for us. Two of the favourite bands between all of us is Sublime and The Clash, they’re both bands that combine a lot of styles.”
The band recently came off tour in Australia, and after Beechworth Music Festival and the Polyester Books Benefit Show, they have some massive plans for the rest of 2014 and into next year, including new recordings and some major international touring.
“Our last gig on the tour was March 16, then we’re going to do some more touring, and then aiming to record another album through the middle of the year, or the third quarter of the year,” he says. “Whether the album gets out this year or the start of next year I’m not sure, but that’s the aim. We’re also going back to China, and we want to get back to America as well, but we don’t really know what we’re doing there, so we’ll see how we go.”
BY ROD WHITFIELD
