Wheatus On That Song, Vegemite And New Music…

Wheatus are a finely tuned rock and roll machine, committed to spend every waking moment celebrating the anniversary of their debut album that still means so much to so many. In addition to playing their awesome debut record in full each night they’ll also be taking requests from their Australian and New Zealand fans for any other favourites from their three decade career – a ritual they’ve upheld at headline shows for almost twenty years now.

It is incredible that it has been twenty five years since the release of the album and its timeless smash hit,
Teenage Dirtbag, yet somehow the song is arguably the biggest it has ever been. Everyone knows THAT song, but for those needing a reminder about the enduring magic of Teenage Dirtbag, Wheatus’ iconic debut single, released back in 2000, it remains a cultural touchstone a quarter of a century later. Brendan B. Brown talks to Hi Fi Way about the milestones and returning to Australian with a full band next week.

You must be really excited about coming back to Australia so soon with a full band this time?
Yeah, that was the dream. We had conversations during the acoustic tour, wondering if it was possible to come back with everybody, because we really felt like the acoustic shows had a… rock energy to them that surprised us, so we figured it out. Awesome.

Were you blown away by the level of support from around the country last time that you were here?
You guys have always surprised us. The first place in the world that ever truly embraced Teenage Dirtbag on the first album was Australia. We had kind of come and gone in the States, single had come and gone, the record had come and gone, our tour had come and gone, and record label wasn’t really calling us back. Then sometime around the end of that year, late November, early December of 2000, we got a call and said it’s going to be number one in Australia. I thought, yeah, right. Then it actually happened, so we came down and did Cold Live at The Chapel and Channel V, and all that stuff, and it was fantastic. I had to eat a lamington on camera, that was interesting.

Did you get into the Vegemite?
Well, I’ve always been into the Vegemite. Vegemite was the first thing I fell in love with down there. I have a jar on the counter back there that has my initials on it. No, we’re a proper Vegemite family. I put a lot on. A lot of butter, a lot of Vegemite. Occasionally, I’ll hit some Promite, especially if I’m down there. Promite’s a little harder to get up here in New York, but we can get Vegemite all the time.

Oh, there’s no comparison. So, are you in the fridge or out of the fridge with Vegemite?
Out. One hundred percent out!

I don’t know about that, but anyway…
Well, it’s a bit hotter down there. Well, is it dangerous? Are you saying that it’s dangerous? Is it mental?

I think on the back of the label, I think it says refrigerate when not in use, so we’ve always kept ours in the fridge.
Well, how can anything grow in that? It’s like rock salt!

I know, exactly right. But what were some of the highlights from the tour when you were here?
Adelaide was sick, Scarborough was really fun, out in Western Australia. Got to walk into the Indian Ocean. That was an interesting moment for me. We played, oh man, what was the name of that place? It’s like… had excellent barramundi, it was like a little fish bar somewhere down the coast, the west coast [Clancys Fish Pub], that I really enjoyed. You know, I like weird spots. I don’t need a proper venue to have a show. You can set me up anywhere and I’ll enjoy it. There’s a venue in England that we’ve played before. It’s actually a bathroom, a public bathroom. You know, Tunbridge Wells Forum, if you will. But I enjoy all kinds of shows. As long as there’s barramundi or something like it on the menu, I’m coming.

Was there not quite enough room in the schedule to fit Adelaide in this time?
Yeah, I think we were trying to get to Tasmania for the first time. We’ve never been to Tasmania. That’s the first time for us, so we figured, let’s get somewhere new, because we’ve been to Adelaide a few times. On the acoustic tour with Art Alexakis in 2024, and then again in 2025. It’s really crazy that we’re able to come down there twice in one year. That’s amazing to me. Within a twelve‑month period it’s impressive. We didn’t used to be able to do that, and we’re pretty grateful. We feel fortunate.

Touring with a full band, does that just create a whole different touring dynamic for you now, and makes it all the more exciting?
We’re going to be an eight‑piece on tour down there. One of our singers is from Cronulla, Karlie Bruce. We toured with her last time we were down there for the acoustics, but she kept saying, you should bring the rock show here, just do the rock show, let’s bring everybody down, so… I said, of course, yeah. We don’t get the chance to perform the full regalia, because it’s expensive, and it’s not a lot of time to rehearse or get everybody on the same page, but we have Gui Fuentes is going to be on the polyrhythmic kit this time, so it’ll be two drummers sandwiched between each other on the centre of the stage, and then the rest of us will be all around them. We had a show like that when we toured with Living Colour, Hoobastank and Everclear in the States doing that back in 2021. It was really cool. Then we did it again for the first time in that many years here in New York, we had this little club show, and it was sick. It was crazy. So, we’re looking forward to bringing the full thing. We don’t do set lists, it’s all requests. So, you shout your songs out, and we’ll play them.

When you reflect on twenty five years of Teenage Dirtbag, what does it mean to you now?
It was fascinating, I’m again, feeling very fortunate, but never thought that it’d be a single. I’d kind of written it off in that regard, because I thought it was too long. Too long, too meandering, too many plot points. I thought it would maybe be interesting to some people, but I didn’t think it would be what it’s become. I had no imagination in that regard that it would do something like what it’s done so far. It’s all really cool.

Are you continually blown away by the legacy that it has created and it seems to have taken on its own life in pop culture folklore in a lot of ways?
The interesting part is kind of letting it go and having it to release it to people who see it more as their song than our song, and that kind of cool. It’s like the only thing that’s important about it, the only thing that continues or endures about it, is the way that people see themselves in it in their own lives. Whatever I meant when I wrote it, it’s not that important, you know? It’s more like what they need it for. That’s what matters and that’s how it keeps going.

It’s a matter of embracing it, some artists might see it as a bit of a curse in some ways as they have done other stuff as well, but everyone tends to focus on that one song.
Well, it doesn’t really bother me. When I was ten years old and I was watching Angus on TV, I would have taken any version of what he was doing as a living, and wasn’t too precious about it. Like I said, I feel really fortunate that there’s a song out there that people care about that keeps us on the stage. One of the reasons we do all‑request sets is because sometime around 2006, 2007, 2008, people started showing up who weren’t too familiar with Dirtbag, but were into the other stuff. And of course, it became this group of people who were really into Dirtbag and showed up for that, for that only, maybe. Then a whole bunch of other people who didn’t care about it that much and wanted to hear the other stuff. So, we started doing all‑request sets for that reason. Because we didn’t want anyone to go home unhappy, and of course everybody’s going to get their Dirtbag, that’s a guarantee.

It never gets old. It’s a really tough song to play correctly. We got to rehearse it all the time. Anytime we get a new drummer in, it’s like the hardest one to learn. I think that has maybe to do with the fact that it’s a song that’s true to me as a songwriter, it’s true to the band as an entity. I think a lot of bands who go through that, maybe the song that becomes ubiquitous for them, maybe not representative of what they do as a band. It’s kind of like an outlier, and therefore they’re constantly having to change shape and get into this other mode to do their big single. Or it’s not their song, it’s like a cover, or the A&R guy’s idea, or something like that. I could see that being a problem, but that’s not what Dirtbag is to us. It’s just a very real, emotionally important tune that we know everybody wants to hear, and we’re happy to play it the way that they need to hear it.

With an all request setlist how many songs have you got on rotation?
There’s somewhere around eighty total in the catalogue. The band have learned almost, I think, about sixty of them. I know the rest acoustic if I need to perform them. So, there’s about a pool of about sixty songs that anyone can call out, and we’ll drop them at any point. You’ll see me at the beginning of the show, kind of walking around asking people what they want to hear first. I like to do that and get a little conversation going with the audience to find out what kind of day they’re having, and see what they want to hear. Might be delicious.

After this tour is there new music in the works?
We’ll try to take a month off in February, but that rarely happens for us. We say that, and then it doesn’t, then there’s shows that get booked. But the truth is, we have three records to make. We’re going to make an acoustic record, because the acoustic touring has been so cool. We’re going to make a covers record of all a bunch of songs that we’ve loved over the years, AC/DC included, some Rush, perhaps a Darkness tune. Then we’re going to try to make album number seven, the studio record of all originals that’s been sitting, boiling on the stove for over a decade now. There’s three of those songs currently streaming online. A song called Michelle from our live record, another one called Tipsy that I wrote, sort of inspired by a conversation I had with Liam Payne back in 2014. And another one called Lullaby, which is like an experimental, sort of sludge‑metal jazz tune that I wrote. So it’s figuring out how the album is going to be with these prototype songs, and then go in and record a full length.

Do you have an idea of how that’s going to sound, or the direction it’s going to take?
I want it to have all the sharp edges of the second album, you know, Lemonade, The Deck, Fairweather Friend, and Freak On, and all that stuff. The same clear‑cut production, but I want it to be almost punishingly heavy. Picture really heavy music that you can sing along to that has accessibly pop qualities, but super slammin’, and weird jazz chords. I’ve been obsessed with this idea lately that jazz used to be pop back in the Judy Garland era. When pop songs were jazz, like Somewhere Over the Rainbow is a jazz song. That’s the kind of stuff that I want to try and figure out how to fit those two together, make a hybrid of really accessible sing‑along music that’s also super heavy jazz.

Do you have to put yourself under a bit of pressure just to get it finally done?
There’s always that, there’s always that moment where it’s like, okay, here we go, this is going to be it. We’re going to commit it to tape finally, and be done with it. It’s more exciting to me these days than it used to be. I used to sweat it out a little bit, and because the first album took four years to make, we made it three times, and then the fourth final recording was the one that you know. It took a while to figure out where the hybrid needed to be.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Wheatus on the following dates, tickets from Teamwrk Touring…