Hot Water Music & The Flatliners To Rock The Gov Tonight…

Legendary American punks, Hot Water Music are in the country playing in Adelaide at The Gov tonight. Joining them on this punk rock tour will be The Flatliners from Canada.

It has been an absolute age since Hot Water Music have played a headline show Down Under (since 2010, in fact), so it’s only fitting that the revered band are returning to celebrate their thirtieth anniversary here in Australia.

Three decades and ten albums in, Hot Water Music stands firmly as an enduring pillar of punk rock. Since ‘94, their pioneering sound has taken them from sweaty clubs in their hometown of Gainesville, Florida, to massive venues worldwide countless times over. Their big-hearted anthems, trusty chords and trademark scruffy vocals have soundtracked the lives of many, whilst continuing to have an undeniable influence on punk and hardcore at large. Jason Black (bass) talks to Hi Fi Way about their return to Australia

It is great that you are back in the country for another headline tour?
Yeah, it’s been a long, long, long time. It’s been about fourteen years. We’ve really started picking it up last year and we’ve been trying to do play in a lot more places. We’re not just doing Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and leaving, which I’m happy about for sure.

Is that a bit of a tough juggle these days with families and all sorts of other commitments that you’ve got on the go as well?
Yeah, it is. Everyone’s got family and everyone’s got a lot of other things going on. So, we’ve been in a place lately where everyone’s has the ability and desire to do more and we got an offer to come down. It made sense. We’ve been working on this tour for like a year and a half or two years. We had to reschedule, it’s been such a long process to even get there that I feel like we’ve been planning it forever.

Also bringing the Flatliners is a great addition to the tour as well making for a great double.
It’s fun, we don’t do a ton of shows with them which is a bummer because we love those guys and like playing with them. It’s cool to be able to get a chance to do that, especially down there. I find it more fun to leave the country with another band, especially someone that your friends with. It makes the tour and the travel just a lot less cumbersome.

Thirty years is a wonderful milestone, do you feel like so much of your life events have happened whilst being in this band?
For sure, I was just doing it different. We’re working on a documentary, so we were doing some interviews for that and like one of the questions was loosely about people we’ve met through the band and who have we met through the band. Pretty much everyone that we’re all friends with at this point, including like wives and partners, we’ve all met because of the band, if not directly through the band. Obviously, everyone’s still got a few like childhood friends from before the band, but we started the band when we were, eighteen, nineteen, twenty depending on which one of us it is and now we’re all getting close to or are fifty. That’s like a really lot of life when you zoom out and look at it in that perspective. It’s been on one level or another even throughout the breaks and everything, I feel like it’s pretty much steered all of our lives.

Another thing to be celebrated is having a consistent line up. Is there like a secret to longevity?
For us it’s breaking up a bunch in between then and now. Communication is definitely the key, I mean obviously if people didn’t care about the band, I think we’d still be a band if there wasn’t interest outside. We just wouldn’t be touring and all that sort of thing. I think communication is absolutely the hardest thing at least for us to succeed at and to maintain. I think I could accurately say that ninety-five percent of the problems that the band’s ever had have just been because of lack of communication, if not poor communication, if not lack of communication, mostly just lack of communication. Like any friendship or relationship, if you’re not communicating things to each other, a lot of dumb assumptions get made and it just tends to spiral in a not so positive way pretty quickly.

Are you really proud of what you have achieved with the new album Vows?
It’s one of those ones where, and I think we’ve all said it at some point, it’s our best record because that’s what bands say whenever their new record comes out. I’ve been trying to phrase it as I don’t, I can’t say what our best record is because it’s different for everyone as far as they receive it as a listener. But I know that we could not have made a better record at this point in time. So, it is the best record we could have made. It’s, definitely one of my favourites that we’ve done for sure.

It’s got some incredible guests on it. How was it collaborating with the likes of Brendan Yates and Daniel Fang (Turnstile) Thrice, Dallas Green (City and Colour / Alexisonfire), The Interrupters?
It was cool. I mean we were lucky. We know all of them on different levels. Dallas, we’ve been friends with forever because we toured with Alexisonfire a long time ago and we’ve just stayed friends with them. Working with him was awesome. Everyone we asked to be a guest said yes. It was easy to work with everyone honestly. With Dallas we were like, could you do some backups on this? Then he just ended up basically doing a duet with Chuck, which is great, obviously it is a beautiful song, and he did an amazing job. The Thrice guys we’ve known forever. They had Chuck on their reissue of “The Artist In The Ambulance” so we were kind of like, oh, we should ask them to be on this.

Interrupters, Chuck’s done a bunch of shows with them, and we’ve met them a few times as a band, but we wanted to get a female presence on the record and that song made sense. He had just done some shows with them so it was easy to get Amy and the rest of the band involved in that. The Turnstile guys, funnily enough, we’ve still never met any of them, talked to them a lot. We’re fans of, I mean they named their band after one of our songs. We’re mutual admirers for a long time, Brian McTernan did their first record as well and they’re from Baltimore, where he’s from. It was kind of a little bit of game of telephone to get those dudes involved. But we had been talking to them about doing something together for a while now and so it was cool to be able to get that to happen. Who else we got in there? Popeye from Farside was another one. I mean we grew up listening to Farside, so that was another great one. uh, there. I’m super stoked on how all of the collabs came out and very, very, very honoured to be able to have all those folks on our record. It’s a very cool feeling.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Hot Water Music and The Flatliners at The Gov on Thursday 20 February. Tickets from SBM Presents…