Dune Rats On The Never Ending Fun
When I was nineteen, I moved to Canada with $500 in my bank account.
I traded the surf for a snow season, lived in a house with nine other people, broke four bones within a year and had the finest drug education one could imagine. At the same time, a young band from Brisbane called Dune Rats formed and started putting out a kind of surf, garage music that dominated Australian radio playlists and a particularly well known song that mirrored exactly what I, and every other young Australian and Canadian on the mountain, was doing. You couldn’t go to a single house party without that song playing in the background. If you don’t know what song I am talking about, or if you don’t know who Dune Rats are, I’d imagine you’re the kind of person who had a coming of age devoid of any rule breaking or fun. While known for soundtracking the wild years of youth, Dune Rats have undoubtedly become a mainstay of Australian music culture. With four albums under their belt, Danny Beus, Brett Jansch and BC Michael have been touring for over fourteen years, continuously putting out great music inclusive the odd bong song or two. Pretty good for a band who started out playing at pubs so they could get a free bar tab. On Wednesday 12th March, the Dune Rats will be playing a set as part of the official Monster Children SXSW Showcase. We caught up with Danny ahead of the show below.
If you don’t know this song honestly I’d probably just give up now
Hey Danny, thanks for jumping on. Oh wait you’re in a car. Where are you?
We're dead smack bum in the centre of the United States. Not even joking, if you looked at a map and pointed to the middle that’s where we are. It’s all cornfields. We’ve just been in New York, Toronto and Chicago. This is the first time in a couple of weeks that we haven’t had full jumpers, beanies, gloves and all that on.
Yeah I was going to say, hasn’t it been particularly freezing in New York of late?
Yeah it was so cold. I never get it when the weather app says minus six but feels like minus fourteen. Just say it’s minus fourteen.
(Laughs) Fully. How long are you in America for?
We are here for another couple of weeks. Yeah. We finished up at SXSW, doing that thing with you guys.
You are. Plus a DJ set at Flower Shop too.
Nothing rules harder than us DJing.
(Laughs) Yeah what’s your go-to guaranteed gee up song?
Look, you can’t really go wrong with Durude’s ‘Sandstorm’. It’s iconic. But we have a healthy mix of everything. We play a lot of our style of music, like Skeegz, DZ Deathrays mixed with real trashy bangers, some Britney Spears. We did our first proper DJ set at Big Pineapple and it was fun as. Riding the hitails of that.
Are you guys still living in Brizzy or you're all elsewhere now?
We’re kind of elsewhere. Brett is near Ulladulla on the South Coast, I live in Meriumbula, even further down south. BC is still in OG Brisbane. I think if he lives there for another twenty to thirty years they'll give him a bronze statue at Suncorp Stadium.
Right next to Wally.
(Laughs) Right next to Wally. Exactly.
I used to live in Wollongong so I know the South Coast well. It’s beautiful down there. How do you manage the band being apart from each other?
We literally just got asked that today and we realized that we spend about ten months of the year together anyway. Whether it’s through shows or writing or recording. If we have new songs, we’ll get together to rehearse them for a few days before a tour. If it’s in Brisbane I usually stay at BC’S parent’s house in his old childhood room.
No way.
Yeah and then Brett stays with BC at his place. His mum enjoys a glass of wine so it’s good to come home from rehearsal and hang with her. But yeah for the last ten years, we’ve lived in each other’s pockets which is probably why we moved twelve hours away from each other.
I see how that can be good for the band to be separate and have your own lives going on.
That's it. And we all have our own little studio at our house. So, the boys will come down to my house or we'll go to Brett's house or we'll go to BC's house. It keeps it pretty fresh.
You said ten years, is that actually how long it’s been? I guess that checks out because Duney’s were the soundtrack to my late teens.
Yeah longer actually. It was 2010 when we first started the band, but just playing to get cases of beer. We feel super lucky to still be going. Last night we played a show in Omaha, Nebraska which was interesting that we have people who even know us there.
How are you feeling about music now?
It's kind of strange because we never really were a band that took the music side of it super seriously. We'd always just play shows to be able to play shows. And we were actually saying this the other day. I feel like our music is the best it’s ever been but physically we’re the shittest we’ve ever been. Like if we had the bodies we had when we first started when we were living off bongs and cigarettes, with the music we're writing now, I think we'd be way bigger. We've written songs together now for so long it's really turned into the real fun part of it as well. We still really just love playing shows, drinking beers and travelling. It’s crazy to think back on it though. We played this place in Chicago a couple of nights ago. It was our third time there and we were tripping because I’d never thought that I would go to Chicago once, let alone people starting to recognize us there. The first time we went there the bartender convinced us to do this shot of Malört, which is a Chicago thing. It made me so sick. As soon as I rocked up the other day he just asked me if I wanted another one and I was like ‘fuck he remembers that?’ That kind of stuff is crazy.
Yeah, wow. Do you ever feel like you want people to take you more seriously? Because it’s almost impossible not to mention bongs when talking about Dune Rats.
I think there’s always going to be that element of our fan base because that is how we started. But even before ‘Scott Green’ and ‘Red Light Green Light,’ which are still our biggest songs, we were never writing about that kind of stuff. It was a very surfy pop dreamy sort of stuff. When we released ‘UP’ we knew the song would go one of two ways especially with our original fan base. Also just Tik Tok being a big thing and the label asking us to do Tik Tok, we were like no one wants to see a thirty year old who used to smoke a bunch of bongs dancing on fucking Tik Tok. So we just decided to do the whole film clip of us dancing as a joke and now that song goes bigger than ‘Scott Green’ live.
I think we’ve definitely got a way broader fan base now. A lot more girls are coming to the shows, in the mosh pits. And there’s still eighteen year old kids even though we’re five albums deep as a band. I think we've constantly written about other stuff, which has helped have both sorts of sides. There's always going to be a drug song or two on an album but we definitely aren’t just in that box.
You mentioned as well that when you first started out, the ambitions for the band were to be able to get beers and play the next show, but I’d like to know what the ambitions are for the band now?
I think we never really expected to be able to do it for more than a couple of years but now it's getting on to fourteen years or something like that. We're doing it. I think the ambition is just to keep doing it. This is who we are now. Anyone who's been in the industry for long enough knows it just becomes weirdly like your identity. All my mates back home are tradies and they see us travelling around the world and playing shows and they’re always like ‘where are going next?’. We just want to keep doing it. Playing shows in people’s backyards, writing songs.
To just keep going, I like that.
Yeah, it's definitely weird when you go into a country and they ask what your occupation is and we go ‘musician.’ I feel that should be reserved for people playing in orchestras and pianists and all that stuff. But the square is only so big. So you can't write blokes who write things about smoking drugs.
(Laughs) Musician it is. Have you played at SXSW before?
Yeah we did it a couple of years ago and I think we did something like ten shows in three days. It was just so crazy.
Yeah it sounds like a hectic schedule for up and coming bands who are trying to get noticed by someone.
We have a mate who just went to New York Fashion Week and we were talking about SXSW saying how we’re not sure the business that actually gets done there. It just seems like a fun thing to get people together that you haven’t seen in ages and get pissed at. Do I think it’s going to change the trajectory of our career in America? Nope. But will I have a few beers and laughs? I reckon.
Catch Dune Rats and a lineup of other amazing artists at the Monster Children SXSW Showcase on Wednesday 12th March at SXSW Texas. Yeehaa.
