“That’s amazing, he says. “We were right on the cusp at that time. I hooked up with (guitarist) Quinn (Allman) around then.”
Bert and the band are very much looking forward to a return visit Down Under, for what will be their fifth time here. “I can’t wait man,” he says. “What a way to celebrate, bringing The Used out on the return of the Warped Tour to Australia. We couldn’t be more grateful. We feel blessed to be a part of it.”
Sweetening the deal further for Bert himself is the fact that he’s married to an Australian girl, and he’s about to move permanently to Sydney. “My wife is Australian, so I’m over there all the time. And I’m just moving over there about five days before the tour,” he reveals. “We’re all one man, we’re all brothers. We live in Sydney now.”
Bert has a very simple answer as to how he thinks placing a planet between himself and the other members of the band will affect their career. “We’ll probably play in Australia a shitload more,” he says. “I’ll be flying a lot more than I ever have in my life. I enjoy flying. But we’re staying very prolific at this time, I think it’s important for bands to continue to release music because people have really, really short attention spans these days. My attention span on the other hand is like slow drying concrete,” he says. “I can read a book for 40 years straight.”
The decade that the band has been around has yielded five albums, and they intend to cover as much musical ground as possible on the Aussie tour. “We try to play a little bit from each of our favourite jams, which we think are pretty much everybody else’s favourite jams,” he says. “Our live show is all about the energy, so it’s great to have people singing along. We’ll be playing a lot of the songs that were mythological singles back in the day. We like to switch it up and keep it interesting and exciting for us as well.”
On top of those five albums, the band have also just put out a brand new, five-track EP. Bert is happy to tell us all about the new release, about its rough and ready sound and about the messages contained within its grooves, and tells us that they plan to play at least one track from the EP on the Australian tour.
“It’s called The Ocean Of The Sky, and we’re really proud of it,” he says. “We worked really hard to get a specific type of sound, and we wanted to pay homage to the heroes of our musical beginnings, like Nirvana and Sonic Youth and all those. So it’s really noisy and it’s really messy, and we left all the mistakes in there. It’s a human approach to recording music. We produced it ourselves, and there’s actually a lot of really deep messages in there and there’s a lot of quixotic nonsense,” he laughs. “The deeper you dig, the more excited you’ll be.
We’ve actually been playing the first track Iddy Biddy live,” he says. “It’s kind of about the human condition and the world, and about confusion and evolution and creationism, and power and money and policy, and it’s a pretty heavy jam. We may swing another in there too.”
So the rest of the year, plus moving into 2014, is looking like a very busy period for the band overall, with the release of the EP, American Warped Tour, Australian Warped tour, plus plans afoot for the next full length album. It seems the tyranny of distance won’t slow them down.
“We plan on recording in October,” McCracken says. “So we’ll do the next full length, then it’s Australian Warped Tour, and maybe a few other shows around the same time, and then the record will come out at the beginning of next year. Then there’s rumours of putting Taste Of Chaos (Tour) back together, so we’ll cross our fingers.”
BY ROD WHITFIELD
