The Butterfly Effect On Tour…

Legendary and much beloved Australian rockers The Butterfly Effect celebrate the twentieth Anniversary of their landmark debut album, Begins Here! Crashing into homes nationwide on August 3, 2003, Begins Here spawned four massive singles, One Second Of Insanity, Crave, Always & Beautiful Mine, appearing in the Hottest 100 across 2003/2004. The album peaked at #23 on the ARIA Album Charts, topped the Independent charts, was included in the top 10 albums of 2003 by the UK’s Kerrang! Magazine and was certified Gold!

In celebration of this momentous milestone, The Butterfly Effect are on the road for an Anniversary tour throughout February including Adelaide and will bear witness to Begins Here being performed IN FULL for the first time, plus a selection of tracks from the bands killer catalogue including songs from their most recent album 2022’s IV. Ben Hall from the band talks to Hi Fi Way about the tour.

Reflecting on the 2023, did that exceed your wildest expectations?
Yeah, and then some! For us, that was is probably the biggest tour we’ve ever done. So, to have that occurring, twenty years after dropping the first record is pretty wild. I don’t think any of us would’ve prepared for such a success, I guess you could say.

Froth & Fury Festival here in Adelaide was a massive show and almost sums things up in terms of where you’re at right now?
Yeah, mate, that festival is amazing. They’ve got that right. We’ve played a lot of festivals and that one is definitely up there. The whole thing was quite relaxed, very comfortable and great for the fans as well.

When everyone went off and did their own thing for a while what was the catalyst to get back together? What do you put the new found energy and vibe within the band down to?
For us at this stage, there’s pressure in terms of performing to the standards that we would like but toward the end of, let’s say TBE 1.0, we were doing it as a full-time job, so there was just a lot of financial strain and trying to keep it moving forward in the way that we had set it up. In terms of being essentially a full-time job it just wasn’t viable. We weren’t clever enough to go, okay, well let’s take some time off everyone, go back to work and set up your lives outside of the band, so this can be fun and not just build pressure back up again.

Obviously too for us at that point we were having families and that sort of thing, it’s just a lot more pressure on it and we probably weren’t smart enough to actually just step back and go, okay, let’s change some things, do some things differently. We were just trying to force it, force it out the way that it would always work and it wasn’t working. Eventually the relationships broke down and it was just too hard to make it happen. Whereas now, there’s no real pressure. We play when we want, it’s not something we rely on. So it’s fun, which is essentially what it was when we started in 2000.

Does that come down to maturity and growing up as everyone’s priorities shifted?
Absolutely. Like I said, I don’t think we were very mature, even though we were probably old enough to be, we should have been mature . We were all early thirties at that point in 2012. We’ve definitely grown up a little bit in that time since. It’s just a really nice feeling around getting together, hanging out, being creative and reliving some of the glory days as we do, which is probably ninety percent of the time. I think everyone’s in a much more secure and settled place, with that new sense of passion.

Is it quite different in the band room these days compared to back in the day?
The entire recording of the last album was actually fun. I don’t think we had a fun recording experience ever in any of our recordings previously. The EP was fun, but the other three albums were quite stressful. I guess we got the results that we were chasing mostly, but it wasn’t fun. This time around there was no real deadlines, but we were completely independent self-funded band, so we’re spending our own money, so there’s no one chasing us for deadlines and that sort of thing. We just kind of took our time and had a blast. I think that that was probably what we needed. If that was the last record that we recorded, then at least we ca n walk away saying that we did that one properly. Whether it reached the successes of the ones prior or not, we did it our way on our terms and as a happy sort of unit.

Can you get your head around the idea of it being the twentieth anniversary tour for the band?
It’s pretty wild. I mean, to be honest, I never thought we would do one of these kind of tours, to me they were always, um, I don’t know, they just seemed a little bit, not odd, but it just didn’t seem like something that we would be interested in. But now getting prepared for it after we were talked into it by friends and people around us, I’ve probably enjoyed the process of getting ready for it more. Getting back into the mindset of me when I was when I was twenty two, has been a bit of a blast in the past. Some things, I’ve got no idea what I was thinking in terms of the playing, but I’ve been listening to the songs again in depth, which is something I haven’t done probably since we recorded them.

I admire Kurt and Clint’s creative chemistry. There are some amazing vocal performances on that album and some of Kurt’s songwriting for twenty one, twenty two year old bogan because I know him well enough to call him that, he was amazingly creative. Just some of the ideas that he had going on, um, which you’re in there in the moment, you don’t really take it all on board, but we’re very brave and just a moment in time that I was very, very lucky to be a part of.

Do you remember those early tours and do any of those shows still stand out now?
Yeah, very clearly. It was always pretty manic. I remember that from when Begins Here was released was the first time that we actually had agreed to take a wage from the band each week. That was an exciting time to become a full-time musician. In saying that I think it was probably three hundred bucks a week, so it was probably enough to pay rent, have a phone and eat watermelon, bananas, , were never got rich! Prior to that I remember I was working at a bottle shop up here and I had the Triple J Net 50 on and Crave came in at number one on that particular Saturday evening and pretty much just stopped the bottle shop telling everyone, “hey, that’s my band, which was definitely a moment in time that I may not do going back, but was pretty awesome.

Are you looking to play Begins Here start to end?
It’s definitely going from start to finish. The benefit of going back to something like this is that I’d like to think that we’ve kind of gotten better over the years so we can probably play some of the parts in a more interesting fashion. It’s actually part of the fun of putting it all together as being going back and going, actually why did I do that? That was terrible and I’ll do this instead. So, revisiting those parts and reshaping some of them has been quite exciting. The album will be played in full in the order, but there’s definitely a few different ins and outs and that sort of thing.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch The Butterfly Effect on the following dates, tickets from Destroy All Lines…