Ten years ago, The Matches were a little, little DIY punk band of California, releasing their first album E. Von Dahl Killed The Locals, an album full of thrashy, loose, fun songs about girls and friends and parties. Now, they're playing sold out shows across The States in celebration of that album. In anticipation of their Australian tour in January, I had a chat with lead singer Shawn Harris about how it feels to be playing those old songs to old fans and how it feels to be back playing punk songs with his first band.
What have you been up to today? Is it day over there?
Yeah, it's kinda day, it's dark out already, but I kind of missed today because we were flying to Chicago, Illinois. We're playing a show here tomorrow. It's a bit chilly, but I haven't experienced weather in a while so we'll se what happens.
Awesome. And this is part of your – um, is it a farewell tour or a reunion tour? What is happening, exactly?
[Laughs] That's a good question! This is our celebration of recording our first record 10 years ago. Um, and I don't know if that's a...let's call it a reunion.
Awesome.
I'm not sure if it's a farewell or a reunion, but it's been going amazingly, so far, so, yeah, we're playing punk rock again, that's what's going on.
That's awesome. What have you been doing in the last few years since The Matches stopped being a thing?
Well, I moved out to Australia and started a band with Jake Grigg, who played in the band Something With Numbers, and we signed to Stop Start EMI out there and I lived out my two year artist visa in Australia until you guys kicked me out of the country [laughs] and then Jake moved over to Los Angeles and we did the same thing over here and we did a few new projects, I started playing with a bunch of the guys that were in Maniac out here in the states, just a bit of a rock and roll project that we play in now – my sister's in the band – but yeah, just doing the exact thing, playing music with different groups. So, I'm still a musician.
Awesome, yeah. Does it feel good to be back with The Matches again, though?
Yeah, it's been really cool. There's something that I, um, once we played our first show – you know, I thought it might be weird because I haven't been playing punk music per se since The Matches ended. I got tired of it, basically punk rock is a concept for me, not a sound, so I sort of felt like the genre kind of lost what was punk to me about it so I kind of like went off and did a few different things in a few different ares to try and sort of reclaim that feeling of urgency and excitement. But having re-banded together with my first band, with The Matches, and having a couple shows under our belt now, there's something that I've really missed about the music, and it's like I feel like, I mean I guess just in terms of all the shows I've been going to in the past five years to a decade, I haven't felt the energy from the crowd and myself being in crowds I haven't put forward this kind of energy. It's like, there's this uh, it really kind of converges on you when the crowd is singing the same lyric, kind of all this like, you know, floating on the stage and all pressed up against each other and everyone's sweat is coating everyone else and it's something I know very well from my childhood but it kind of, maybe that experience got old or it got cheapened or we saw too much of it or we saw too much of it associated with bands that, you know, we didn't like, that didn't age well or that we didn't like a lot, still being like 'oh yeah, fuckin'Blink 182, yes!' or anything.
Maybe it didn't age well. And I'm not saying that all The Matches stuff aged well, but what I'm saying is that there's like a nostalgic element that's bringing the crowds that we've played for so far back to, like, regressing them into their teenage years in this way that brings out this energy that I haven't been present that I've played or that I've been to in the last 5-10 years which is the most noticeable thing for me. It's, so far playing these shows, there's chemistry between the audience and the band. It's not just us. In fact, when we were preparing for these shows we were just kind messing around and going 'oh cool, I remember how to play that!' all just kind of winking at other and going 'oh yeah, remember, alright, you get longer here and I go longer here, cool, we remember how to play the songs let's go do this'. And then as soon as we set foot in front of the crowd they completely changed what we were doing. Like, completely, the attitude and the vibe in the room completely changed and it was an amazing trip but at the same time there's something about these shows that I didn't know I'd been missing but that I had been missing in live music, so it's cool, it's a neat trip. I'm learning a lot from it is what I'm trying to say.
Well, that's really awesome, because that's actually one of the things that I remember the most about The Matches is that feeling of no separation between the band and the crowd. I saw you at Enigma bar when I was 14, which would have been like 8 years ago, and that was incredibly raw, so it's awesome that that's still there. Sorry, I only found out that I was doing this interview last night so I'm not super prepared, but I'm kind of prepared.
No, that's okay, I'm good at bullshit so just give me a prompt and I'll go [laughs].
Alright! Well, any plans when you're coming to Australia – because you're coming here next month – are you excited about that? You lived here – were you living in Melbourne or Sydney?
I was living in Woolloomooloo in Sydney.
Are you excited about coming back?
Yeah. I can't wait. Some of my best friends live over there, so I'm really excited to hang out with Hayley from Cancer Cancer who used to be Chain Gang and then Twincest, and Rocky who played drums in Maniac, of course my best friend in the world Jake Grigg from Something With Numbers. I'm so excited to see these people, and I guess it's a bonus that I get to play some shows too [laughs]. I was ready to use the first excuse to come hang out with my favourite people in the world, so yeah. Australia's got a special place in my heart. And for the rest of the band, because Australia was where we had our first kind of commercial success because Triple J got behind the band and were like 'oh you know what, of the few international bands that we're gonna play, this is one that we deem important'. So you know, we got a lot of followers because of their support and it was cool, because we weren't a commercial band in the states, obviously commercial music works different to the way yours does in Australia, but we got a lot of followers and fans that we didn't have over here, and it's not like we were writing the best music for profit so it was cool to be a band that people were finding out about through the radio in another country.
Because we were very much a word of mouth, DIY, underground sort of band over here and we experienced a pretty big level of success over here but it was all through like, really scrappy work on our part and so it was obviously, you can't be everywhere at once so it was cool to come over to Australia and like, actually turn on the radio and hear our songs when we came over. It was like, holy shit this is awesome, you know? Like, we had the best of both worlds. We got to be, like, the radio band over there and then we got to do our really like, punk rock, DIY thing in the States and they were both successful but in like, different ways, so it was really fun to go over there and see like, how it's aged over there. Over in the States, um, I think our success was very much by region and it's like, like we just played four sold out shows in the Bay Area, which is where we're from, and the area very much, like, owns us. They're more the band than we are.
They're like, 'this band is a product of our scene' and they run the shop. Like, I know the names of like 250 people that still, they're in the audience and they're like 'this is our scene, this is our band' and so there's this great sense of camaraderie and ownership that everyone feels for the music, and I'm like, yeah, we wrote some pretty cool songs, you know, but like, we had insane support from the scene here, and it's cool that people re-emerge still feeling like it's their band. There's only four of us that could actually be on stage in the band, but largely there's so many places where it really feels like I'm in a band with 300 people, you know what I mean? Because these people they broke us, they made us, they were burning these CDs and getting people out to shows and, yeah, it was cool. It felt important, when we were young, and now it feels important because it was important to us when we were young. These things take on a greater weight as you get older, you know?
Well, you kind of made up a lot of people's sort of teenage years, I think. I know in Australia there's a lot of people who are really excited because we were all like 14, 15 when you sort of made it big in Australia, so that's...I think it's a really cool place to be I guess as a band.
Yeah, yeah. I mean I think we lucked out in that we were sort of...I think like, probably our greatest success and our greatest set back was that we wrote like really, I don't know, just really personal songs, like I would put the actual name of friends in songs, you know what I mean, that I was writing about and sometimes that meant, like...right now we're playing these songs, I'm 32, and I'm playing a song that's main refrain is 'this town gets so boring when you're not scoring', like I don't still feel that way, like I'm married now, you know what I mean? And it's like weird to play that but at the same time it definitely brings you back to when, like, yeah that was true. I mean, I wouldn't tell anybody now that that was me, I would be like hey, this was exactly where I was at, like there was a girl who lived down the street from my house that I would just like walk by her house like 16 times a day to see if she would come outside. Like these are not details that I would want people to know about me at that age, but you know, they're in the songs. Sometimes it's embarrassing, but I also think it's why...it made us a bit different than a lot of other bands that we were playing with that were kind of writing this vast and general songs about, like, togetherness and love and those kind of things. We weren't really writing about love, we were just writing about specifically, like, just real literal, specific events and I think that's why, ten years later, people kind of connected a little more than they did with some other shit that was on the radio at the time or something, you know.
Well yeah, I went to see another band from the same sort of era recently and there was that feeling of, like, I could see it, I could see why I liked it when I was a kid but it wasn't stroke me us much, whereas I guess, yeah, The Matches connects you much more deeply to a specific time of your life, I think, which is cool.
Yeah.
Sorry, I'm getting really philosophical about your band, which is probably really weird, but like, I was really into The Matches when I was younger.
It's weird, I have been doing that lately too because I'm like, I'm also trying to understand why we got together and said 'oh, let's put this out on vinyl and press maybe like 100 and let's do one show and we'll see if we can sell the vinyls at the show' and like, how it went from that to like, us doing many more pressings of the vinyl and then adding all these shows and having all of them sell out and I'm like, trying to figure out like 'oh wait, you remember this' like, why was this important? I wanna know that too, because it wasn't really...I don't know, it's just cool, really neat to come back to it because at the time it didn't feel like we were necessarily always succeeding with The Matches, and when I say succeeding I mean commercially. And we weren't really concerned with that to begin with, but then once we had like, a record label and manager and all these people like, relying on us to like, bring in their incomes, all of a sudden we had this burden of like, 'oh, we're not really writing these ultra-commercial songs, but we don't really know how, we only know how to do what we're doing' and then we had people disappointed in us, and saying that we'd like, undersold our potential, but all we were doing was what we'd been doing from the start which was writing the kind of songs that we knew how to do.
I mean like, if you want like a massive anthem then The Matches were not your band. Like, go to Coldplay or something like that, you know what I mean? It wasn't that, we wrote these very specific songs for specific people who were very similar to us, and I think that's why there's still a really strong connection with people that were into us and our music at the time because we were, the band was so similar to the fan base. There wasn't this great disconnect between the people that were writing the songs and the people that were listening, you know?
Yeah, it's sort of like, I remember it feeling like The Matches sort of belonged to me in a weird way, because it was the first band that I sort of discovered, the first kind of punk show that I went to, so yeah, I think that's really very important, whereas a lot of other bands felt sort of distant.
Yeah! And you know, sometimes I envied those bands. Like, we toured with this band in the UK, Biffy Clyro, and they were so elusive and magical and feeling like, I knew them personally and I still felt like I could never know them, and it chilled me. I was like, they're so fucking like, cool and like, hidden. And after shows like, they'd disappear. I don't know where they'd go but like, they've never spoken to a fan in their life, you know what I mean? And I was like, dammit, we're so lame, all we do is like, after the show we just sit there and like...I felt like, exactly like a fan. And sometimes you look at pictures of like, Jimi Hendrix or U2 and Biffy Clyro and you're like, these people innately cool, and unapproachable and just cool, and it's like fuck, we don't have that, we're not going to be successful. So it's neat to come back and be like, you know what? There was something to the shit we were doing.
There were some dudes that were around playing in the same bands that were on tour with our band that were cool, and they're not doing fucking 10 year reunions that are selling out, no one gives a shit anymore because you know what, they weren't real people, you know? Like, if you're a real person and you're cool, like, good for fucking you, but we were like, we're just real people and we're like, really similar to the people that dug our music, people that related to it and stuff. That's why we're still around. I feel lucky to kind of be able to experience this and to realise, you know, just the merits of being yourself, you know. Being yourself isn't something that you're always going to be proud of, and there's songs on the record that I cringe when we sing right now, but I still appreciate that I didn't like, that I didn't hide who we were and I didn't, you know, obscure the lyrics, or try and hide what it was, that I just said it for what it was, because that's why we're here, that's why we have these sold out shows going on right now, so.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think we're running out of time, but that's so much for talking to me, and I look forward to seeing you in January.
Right on, that's fantastic. What city will you be in?
I'll be in Adelaide, at the Fowler's show.
Adelaide? Okay great, I look forward to playing the show and catching up with you then.
Yeah, cool! See you, and have a good day – or, night. One of the two.
Alright cool, you too. Thank you!
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The Matches are touring Australia in January, 2015. Tickets on sale now.
FRIDAY JANUARY 9TH – AMPLIFIER BAR, PERTH 18+
Tickets available at www.oztix.com.au
SATURDAY JANUARY 10TH –FOWLERS LIVE, ADELAIDE 18+
Tickets available at www.oztix.com.au | www.moshtix.com.au |
THURSDAY JANUARY 15TH –BRIGHTSIDE, BRISBANE 18+
Tickets available at www.oztix.com.au
FRIDAY JANUARY 16TH –OXFORD ART FACTORY , SYDNEY 18+
Tickets available at www.oztix.com.au | www.moshtix.com.au |
SATURDAY JANUARY 17th –THE CORNER HOTEL , MELBOURNE 18+
Tickets available www.cornerhotel.com | www.oztix.com.au
PRESENTED BY SELECT TOURING & TAPERJEAN TOURING
