Bluejuice
Bluejuice are calling time on a stellar thirteen years experiencing all the highs, lows and in betweens that the music business has thrown at them. Bluejuice have just about done everything a band could possibly do and Jake Stone talks about the final tour and the legacy they leave behind.
This is it! The finally tour! Is it a bit of a strange feeling?
Yep, it is the last one, it is a strange feeling like a coffee bean dipped in chocolate.
Was it an inevitable decision? Or the right decision to call time?
Well, you either stay together or break up. To some degree we have been together for thirteen years and if we were going to stay together we would be heading to stay together forever. There are the rough years where you don’t have much of an audience into the other good years later on which every band that has been together this long has to do. We didn’t want to go in to a time where we couldn’t release on a level we’d be releasing or have to change label or something like that. It is important for us to stay with the team we’ve had and do a good job of seeing the band off at a time where it is still vital and has all the power that it has had before which we think is a good idea.
Do you think people really know how hard it is to keep a band going these days and the effort required?
No one knows that, definitely. No one knows that because it’s not their business to be in a band so I guess they don’t need to know. We’ve done a lot of the things you can do in this country in terms of industry things. It has been a long but not hard road but it has been a lot of effort for thirteen years. I suppose it has been all very rewarding and we’ve been lucky that it has gone well. I guess some of us want to have more relaxed lives than that and the others want to keep playing music. That will probably be what happens and that’s ok. The tour is doing well, the new single is great and I have no genuine regrets about what this band has done.
I guess not having to work out how you’re going to pay the rent is more comforting?
It hasn’t been that hard at all for seven years because we’ve had enough money in the band to be able to live. It hasn’t been a major struggle in the last seven years financially because the first seven years were devoted to getting the band up and running as a business. The next seven years were enjoying the success of the band in a way that wasn’t lavish. It was great to be able to do it as our job for so long. We were never giving strangers blow jobs for rent or never to that length of poverty it was always fairly comfortable after Vitriol.
Are you getting nostalgic thinking about all the good times that have happened in Bluejuice?
Yeah, I’m thinking about those moments but it’s also for the audience to think of those moments to. Trying to think of my favourite moment is a challenge because there have been so many things that have happened. The things that we’re really proud of is the film clip for Act Your Age and doing big festivals around Australia like four Splendours and however many Big Day Out’s. It’s also the fun things that work like putting singles to radio like Vitriol which really took off. We were about to break up when that single took off. We’d been playing together for so long at that stage without that much success. It was a wonderful surprise when that song worked.
Are there plans for a book or something to document the life and times of Bluejuice or is once the tour is done that’s it?
I intend to record the tour on camera which will give an insight to what the tour has been like. There are plenty of stories in there and there’s enough documentation to be able to do that. I don’t know if it would be a whole novel but more of a long form magazine article.
Will the footage be available commercially in some shape or form?
I’d like to make it available to fans, not necessarily a saleable thing but something that would be put up on YouTube and shoot it ourselves, spending some time editing it also. Nothing fancy, just a couple of headings with a bunch of tour footage stuck together. I think you would get a good impression of what is going on.
Is it interesting being the final tour the amount of new fans that are getting in to the band now?
I hope there new fans but I am sorry that we’re breaking up but the intention of I’ll Go Crazy is to put out a single that is excellent so it would feel like it could be coming from any new band. That is always our intention of releasing new singles as it would be the first good one. To those fans I’m sorry but come and see the shows and they’ll see a whole bunch of songs they didn’t realise were ours.
It must be a job to pull together the set list! Are you guys going to play for three hours to cover it all?
We’re not good enough to play for three hours, there are not enough good songs to play for three hours. I think we could play a really solid hour and a half and that’s what we intend to do. We’re going to go out playing all the hits plus a couple of new ones we really like plus a couple of strange ones we don’t normally play at shows. We don’t want to go on and on, that’s something that the band doesn’t do live. We’ll smash it out times twenty.
Are there any surprises like midgets being fired out of cannons and dancing girls?
The surprises are the way the tour is structured and all the supports are all the bands that have supported us in the past who we’ve really liked and they have said yes to coming on to do this tour. There will be bands that are relatively well known and some who have been more successful than us and some new bands who are just starting who are likely to be big that we have good relationships with. You’ll never know which of those bands will be supporting in which city and it will change from night to night.
How do you think you’ll feel during the last week and final show?
I think I’m uncomfortable sharing how I feel about that because I don’t know how I’m going to feel. The amount of emotion I’m going to feel during our last gig is something I’m not going to be able to express to the public or even explain.
Whether it is rummaging through vinyl at record stores such as Clarity and Title finding hidden gems to scouring the internet to find that album by the next big thing or chasing bands to get that elusive autograph and photo his passion is music all the way.
- Aversions Crown - January 27, 2017
- Sick Of It All - January 19, 2017
- Refused - January 11, 2017
