Are You Ready For Some More From Me First And The Gimme Gimmes?

Adelaide are you ready for some more from Me First and the Gimme Gimmes?

After last year’s blitzkrieg tour, punk rock’s premier cover band are back with new album
¡Blow It…At Madison’s Quinceañera! and are ready to do it all again! Spike Slawson talks to Hi Fi Way about the tour, the new album and that cover of an Oliva Rodrigo tune.

It must be great to be back in Australia for another tour?
Indeed, we’ve got new and exciting things to share with the Australian demographic. We have a brand new record, where we trolled an entire quinceañera birthday party and recorded the event for posterity. We’ll have some songs that Australia will be hearing for the very first time from that record, as well as a surprise specifically for Australian sensibilities that I hope you guys are going to dig. There’s going to be a seven-inch release in correlation with this new live event that we’re planning. I really think that people are going to dig it.

Becoming regulars now on the tour front. I think we need to adopt you as our own.
Yeah, you could do so depending on what happens in November, yeah, sure, we’ll take it!

What is it that keeps the band coming back to Australia?
There’s a sense of irony and a weird sort of adversarial kind of thing with even people that you like, that certainly exists. It’s specifically, it’s regional here in the States, but in Australia, I think it’s very general quality that you find in audience. It only varies by degrees. So, being your friend, is a very close cousin to being the people like throwing projectiles at you. Do you know what I mean? What we like to do with any audience, and not just in Australia, it works pretty much everywhere, is that we troll people, up to and beyond the point of actual verbal displays of displeasure or disapproval and then we try to reel and we see how far we can cast the line out, generally speaking.

I don’t know what it is. Um, we’re not good people, we try to cast the line out as far as we can, and then we try to reel it back in to close the circle, redeem the night, and then on the nights where we get the worst booing and those are the nights where we end up selling the most T-shirts, interestingly enough. That’s not just Australia, you know what I mean? Like, that’s not specifically you guys, but it is definitely is a quality to it, a sort of sense of irony, you guys know how to have a good time.

Having covered so many songs, how do you go about creating the set list these days?
We’re like an actual cover band at this point. We could potentially play a good two to three hours of music if we prepared. We have a lot of songs. Maybe songs that we haven’t played somewhere, we were there not too long ago, as you said we’re getting to be regulars, but we do like to play something different from what we played there last. It’s nice to have a new record, which we’ll have for sale as well, I should mention. Where is the record store in Adelaide, man?

We’ve got a few good ones left…
Still got them? That’s good. Well, you can get the record there, but you could also come to our live show and pick up a record. I think we have special like tour only coloured vinyl additions of it as well.

Is every night going to be truly unique based on what you’ve said a bit earlier, depending on how much you get booed and how many projectiles thrown on stage?
Well that’s a yes. It’s a question of degrees, hopefully, otherwise the set will remain mostly the same for all of the Australian dates, but it will differ a great deal from the last time we were there because we have songs, renditions of songs that we played at Madison’s quinceañera birthday party that Australia has not heard yet, unless they heard it, or at least they haven’t heard live our live renditions. Hopefully some people have heard the record, which I’m very happy with and I would say that the record is a very good indicator of what it’s like to come see us in a live environment. It’s a little weird, I’m not going to lie.

Is there any particular genre of music that you’ve been deliberate in trying to avoid?
Music that I like, which I naturally maybe am a little precious about. When people want to change chords or time signatures or take too much license with those songs, then I start to get a little sensitive, maybe overly sensitive, but there are songs that are done that are like a punk band trying to like quote, punk up a song like Saved by The Kinks or something like that. It would only just make it clownish fast. To me, that’d be detracting from a song that, as I said, I feel very strongly about, whereas, when we first started we did show tunes and what you would hear on American AM radio, like contemporary adult, contemporary soft rock music and I just loved that because I didn’t really like the songs, but I loved what we were turning them into, it was a kind of a troll as much as a band. It was an excuse to troll.

How many live recordings did you go through to settle on this one?
Well, unfortunately for the attendees, Madison and her family and friends had to go through the entire set twice. So, we did have some to choose from, but rest assured there was a DJ that played in the intermission and that played after we were done through the night, songs from Madison’s generation. I think before the Olivia Rodrigo song, the most recent song we had done was probably from the mid-eighties or something like that. So that was a real stretch for us. But, given the environment and the room we’re willing to take some risks.

The Olivia Rodrigo cover was an interesting one. Did you get a lot of positive and maybe not so positive feedback on that one?
When we released our first record, there was an interesting dynamic where kids that were bringing the records home, because it was primarily teens, early twenties, their parents were walking by their room listening to their music and they would say, Hey, I know that song and there was a weird sort of bonding, maybe reluctant bonding experience that took place and what I’ve noticed since the Olivia Rodrigo song, since the record was released and people are aware that we did that, we see teenagers in the crowd, people that look to be in their mid to late teens and you look closer and you see their parents right there with them. Their parents are rocking out to the music and the kids are kind of angry that they’re there and they’re really bored, but they’re way up in the front, which is always kind of a weird thing to see.

Then we play the Olivia Rodrigo song and they’re dancing up and down and singing all the words and they switch on like a light, and then they switch off as soon as that song is done and go back to being bored and angry that their dad had brought him there. It’s funny how life takes you full circle that like, my parents took me to Neil Diamond when I was fifteen years old or something like that, and then he played one song that I actually liked. To be the band that the kids are reluctantly are getting dragged by their parents to go to see is interesting. That’s the cycle of life, the rich tapestry of life I guess you could say. But that’s a phenomenon that I’ve noticed that happens since we did that song, and it’s pretty cool.

Next year is a big milestone for the band the band, can you believe how fast time has gone to get to this point?
No, it’s very abstract. You can’t trace time, that’s bizarre to think. My goodness. Was it 95? Good golly Miss Molly!

Are you looking to do anything special to celebrate?
Yeah. Thirty fucking years man!. We’ll be back with bells on.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Me First & The Gimme Gimmes at The Gov on Sunday 10 November, tickets from SBM Presents…