Beanflipper Have Been Exhumed To Rock Necrosonic Festival

‘They’ve got that song ‘Cicada’ and I was listening to it, they’ve got it all going on in one song and that’s the kind of stuff we really love. We love mixing it up as well. We will put a little bit of funk into it and we’ll put a little bit of hardcore into it, put a bit of metal in there. A couple of the guys in the band, including myself, and not ashamed to say that we’re Pink Floyd fans. We’ll quite often put a little bit of that feel into it.’

Beanflipper Sean Barley is discussing fellow Necrosonic Festival showmates Blindolded And Led To The Woods music as one to watch. However, despite arguably being the elder statemen on the festival, the return of Beanflipper after nearly thirty years, except the odd reunion, is who a lot of fans and bands will be eager to see

‘We’re here because Kent Bartley asked us to. I mean plenty of people have put the idea to us to come back and to do gigs often comes up, but this was the most plausible idea. We found out that Kent had bought plenty of other bands back and it worked out. So, this looked like it was going to work. We jumped on board, not immediately there was some apprehension. It’s been a while and people have had their lives and a lot’s sort of gone on. So we put the word around and we had a good think about it and worked out how we’re going to do it and then yeah, then jumped onto it. He’s put so much work into these festivals and so it’s really easy to be confident in what Kent’s doing. He delivers!’

Having been away for so long, the Victorians did get up and perform a warm show, albeit in unusual circumstances, just a few weeks back to see if the magic still happened.

‘We call it match practice! We wanted to do a practice gig. We went under an alias, so we did not go under our own name and we just wanted to just see what it felt like to play together before we got to Queensland and was shocked by it all. It was ex-lead singers Bucky’s birthday, and we were invited to do that and Bucky got up and sung a song with us and it was fantastic. It was a lot of fun. People loved it and it was good warmup. We’re all really glad that we did. It got us in the mood.’

In the intervening years the band have been glued together by Matti so successfully, the bands name still reverberates around Melbourne’s Grindcore scene, not forgotten, just resting. King Parrot for example, have cited the bands influence. Sean though doesn’t feel that.

‘It is hard to see that from the inside. There’s a lot of the King Parrot band that we’re fans of and friends of. If we influence any bands, I guess we all influenced each other. There were a lot of bands around us at the time. It was a tight little sort of grindcore scene that we had.’

For Necrosonic, the band will show up and melt your face – nothing more, nothing less – to the tunes of the Total Dysfuntional Collapse Album

‘We’ve had a bit of a go at some of the other songs that we’ve done from the other albums, but we’re mainly just going to focus on this album just being the anniversary of the album and it fits together pretty nicely. We’ve got a time limit to kind of fit it all in as well, so we’re pretty conscious of that. So yeah, no real surprises. I guess the surprise is it will sound a little more polished than it did back in the day. We’re all a bit older and we’ve got better equipment. We take our rehearsals a little bit more seriously and we put a lot of work into this.’

Interview By Iain McCallum

Catch Beanflipper at Necrosonic Festival on Saturday August 23. Tickets and further information HERE…