Spiderbait Are Set To Rock Look Out Festival

Riding hot off the back of last year’s inaugural Lookout Festival comes the long-awaited announcement for 2025! Lookout is turning up the energy and bringing a line-up of iconic events that will be nothing short of extraordinary! Get set to experience Australian rock legends Jet, Grinspoon, The Veronicas, Spiderbait, Jebediah, Magic Dirt & Youth Group in one electrifying event. Gather your crew and get amongst the waves of roaring live music in this truly unique concert experience.

Lookout is a premier live music series that honours the very best of alternative rock—featuring timeless tracks and fresh, powerful sounds. This is where rock unites in a unique setting to form an unforgettable and outstanding live music experience. This event is for those who love soaking in electric live music and rocking with their mates on a huge day out – for those who not only want to hear music but to really feel it.

Spiderbait’s story is as extraordinary as it is true: three friends from the small Australian town of Finley took on the national music scene and emerged victorious 25 years later. Despite their humble beginnings, Janet, Whitt, and Kram, blending influences from Slayer to The Bangles, carved out a unique niche in music. Starting in a shed on Janet’s farm, they moved to Melbourne and quickly became key figures in the vibrant music scene. With seven acclaimed albums, multiple ARIA Awards, and a significant live presence, Spiderbait remains a beloved and influential band. Their ongoing journey promises more exciting chapters to come. Kram talks to Hi Fi Way about playing Look Out Festival and their love of Adelaide.

You must be looking forward to coming back to Adelaide for Lookout Festival this Saturday?
Yeah, the tour kicked off in Brisbane last weekend and it was fantastic. Just such a great vibe. I’ve just been looking at some photos and stuff of the show we were sent and it was epic and my son Lonnie got up and played drums with us on one song, which was killer. I think all the bands had killer shows and we had a great time. So yeah, we can’t wait to come down to play the next stage of the festival in Adelaide.

It seems like everybody who’s planning on playing a show is playing in Adelaide this Saturday there’s that much happening.
Really? Oh, that’s sick. Yeah, it’s weird, isn’t it? It’s like you guys always get that when the Fringe is on and there’s always a lot going on at certain times of the year, so, yeah that’s awesome.

Do you think you can top the whole sSpiderbait versus Dom Dolla at LIV Golf?
Oh, I don’t know. I think that’s like comparing a sports car to a spaceship, you know, when we did it at the, Sidney Myer Music Bowl, it was such a trip. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen any footage of that. It’s up on Dom’s socials, but it was epic. Then he was like, hey, do you want to do it again in Adelaide? We were like, yeah, that sounds sick. It was really fun. We had such a great time that I’m pretty sure we’ll do it again somewhere around the world.

Does that get you thinking about particular ideas that you could keep taking Spiderbait forward even further?
Um, it’s a weird one for us because one of the things about Dom’s version is that it’s still, I mean, if you’ve ever seen him perform it live, he basically just plays our version for the first half of it. When I first saw it, just watching the crowds at, I think it was at Spilt Milk Festival a couple of years ago, and it was just like, holy shit, everyone’s just going off. I love the way crowds do that sometimes too, when people just play tracks, whether it’s a DJ playing a track or something in between bands. I always remember we did a Big Day Out many years ago in Auckland and Rage Against Machine weren’t playing that year, but they played Rage Against The Machine in between bands. I think it was Killing In The Name and the whole crowd just went nuts as if Rage was actually on stage. So there’s something in that great party atmosphere that happens with a big crowd and whatever’s being played over the system. Dom’s a master of that when his remix of the track kicks in halfway through it just goes absolutely off. It’s funny because for us, I guess the song has always been such a trip for us that it’s such a big hit and it’s been such a big song all around the world for over twenty years now. I think it’s one of the reasons it mixes dance vibe with, rock and metal and those two energised musical styles stuck together, I think is one of the reasons that it was such a successful song.

So, whenever we do the song, and particularly I think with Dom, it was like, oh, this is a good vibe, we should muck around with this combination of energies a bit more often. But I think with us there’s so many different musical spaces going on that it’s always interesting to see how our record ends up and then with our live shows, it’s totally different again. So yeah, the answer to your question, sorry, it’s such a long one is actually, actually yes. I’ve thought about a lot of, in writing some stuff in the past year for another record for us., but as we go along the experiences we had have keep informing what what it’s going to end up being like.

It must be really cool as well returning with the Adelaide where there’s such an affinity and a love for Spiderbait that’s goes back many, many, many years. It must make you feel pretty humble coming back each time?
Coming to Adelaide for so many years and all around Australia, people having grown up with us and now we have noticed that a lot of fans who come and see us are much younger and they probably maybe heard about the band from their parents or from older friends or whatever, but having that intergenerational success and connection with audiences is very important to us because we’re from that generation too obviously as well. I do really feel that, particularly in South Australia where we played so many shows and continue to do so always such a great energy down there.

With this iteration of Look Out Festival does it feel more like alumni reuniting?
It’s funny because everyone in all the bands knows each other. Nick Cester is a dear, dear friend of mine, I love him dearly and after our show he popped into our band room and said, hello. So I haven’t seen Nick for a while, but our families are good friends. Mark in Jet is a dear friend of mine who we play ARC with as well, they’re all sweethearts but by the same token, we love the guys in Jebediah, Magic Dirt and Grinspoon who are great guys. We’ve known them for many years as well. Just to have the whole mixture of bands from that era on the one bill is very comfortable, but it’s also makes for a really exciting show.

I really noticed that having The Veronicas there as well is a bit different but really cool. I really enjoyed their set in Brisbane. Last year we did the same festival and it was with Queens of the Stone Age, The Chats and Pond. It was a different type of a lineup and that was awesome as well. They’re all really cool guys too. There’s always something social about these types of events, which I think actually is really good.

Did anyone’s set in Brisbane surprise you?
I thought it was great. I thought Grinspoon sounded epic. They sounded really great and we didn’t see much of the other bands as we were flying in. So, Grinspoon had a great show and I was just really pumped and proud that of my son getting up there and playing drums with us, making me look good. Yeah, Lonnie’s a legend!

Another milestone rolls around this year with the thirtieth anniversary of The Unfinished Spanish Galleon of Finley Lake, are there any plans to celebrate this one?
Well we are going to do a vinyl re-release of that record. That’s one thing I’ve really liked with these anniversaries of the release of our records and events throughout our history is you get to do the vinyl where maybe you didn’t get to do it back then. We’re just going through all that artwork and stuff. It’s been interesting going through all the artwork that Janet did and revisiting the photographs from that era. It was like our first foray into, into the mainstream, but it was a self-funded record. We were just a bit skeptical about crossing over I guess, but it all turned out really well and it’s an interesting record.

The memories have come back, but also just realising how many good songs are on that record that we still play live. So, I think we will do some shows for it. I don’t think it’ll be as extensive as the Betty Tour, but we’re going through the motions right now of working out how, because it is a record initially I wasn’t sure when the anniversary idea first came up, but now we’ve all talked about it and I’m like, actually that could be really cool. So maybe we’ll do some shows of that later in the year. We just haven’t quite worked it out what it’ll be yet.

Are there plans for new music?
That’s what I’ve basically been working on pretty much since Covid. I remember during Covid, I lived up in Byron, so my Covid was pretty good. We just rode our bikes on the beach and stayed away from other people and just wrote a lot of heavy metal songs at home really. That was a bit different to everyone down in Melbourne who just went crazy and was really tough for them. Ever since that time I tried to focus in on what I wanted the new record to be like if we did do another record. I’ve been doing some recordings in the past year or two and now it’s all sort of starting to build up and come together. We’ve got the bare bones of it. Everyone seems to delighted with the material so the plan is I would hope is to have a new record out sometime into next year. We can’t give you any more detail than that, but I’m happy with it, sounds really good.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Spiderbait at Look Out Festival in Adelaide at Point Malcolm Resereve, Semaphore on Saturday March 1. Tickets from Face To Face Touring…