By Sophie Scannell, Music Editor
‘I’ve got two tickets to Iron Maiden, baby / Come with me Friday, don’t say maybe’ is a lyric you’ve likely screamed on Thekla’s deck one Thursday or another. What you may not know is that Wheatus, the debut album by the 2000s indie-rock icons of the same name, turns a whopping 25-years-old this year. To celebrate, Epigram had the privilege of chatting with frontman Brendan B. Brown about the milestone, the madness, and their upcoming tour in December.
With one word, Brendan sums up the 25-year journey that himself and his band has embarked on. ‘Mostly just lucky’, he explains, with an everything-happens-for-a-reason attitude that encapsulates the ethos of the band. This time 25 years ago, the band found themselves with a debut album quickly gaining traction and recouping its costs, only to be dropped by their major record label just as fast.
A ‘homemade, record-at-your-mom’s-house sort of band’, Brendan admits an enormous gratitude at being dropped, retrospectively deciding that they weren’t a particularly extravagant group and so didn’t fit into major-label structures that many bands of the 2000s fell prey to: ‘At least I don’t have to deal with the guy who thought I needed to wear pirate shirts and leather pants’.
To mention the debut without nodding to noughties smash hit ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ would be hugely remiss, and having scratched the surface of corrupt label corporations, we dive into adjoining politics in lyricism, a contentious feature of Wheatus’ discography given their hit’s background (or the ‘dirt’ behind ‘Teenage Dirtbag’, if you will).
The history of the 2000s indie classic is a dark one. A stabbing in Brendan’s neighbourhood amongst teens in the name of Satan was the mere tip of the iceberg, as it was the felonious teen wearing an AC/DC t-shirt at his time of arrest that really rocked the boat.
Rock music became instantly synonymous with satanic, anti-social, and aggressive lifestyles to the rest of mainstream society. What this meant for Wheatus, then, writing a seemingly innocuous song about fantastical high school ideals, became a policed sentiment censored in shops and radios across America for the infamous line ‘her boyfriend’s a d*ck / and he brings a gun to school’.
‘I think it’s impossible to tell a valuable contemporary story without being political. I don’t think that’s a thing, and if it is then you’re trying not to be political which annihilates any value in its narrative’
‘There’s no way to sanitise content from politics’ is Brendan’s take on it all. I’m taken aback at the serious tone we’ve found ourselves egging each other on to talk about, especially given the debut’s dealings with being a ‘Wannabe Gangstar’ and blowing sunshine up one’s ass. Not exactly scathing from the initial listen.
Wondering how to balance the funny from the soul-sucking realities, Brendan thinks them to pair quite well together, and is delighted at my comparison of his band to fellow 90s humour poets, Ween. ‘You use stupidity as a device’, he chuckles, ‘I grew up around some pretty violent knuckleheads and I used to have to play dumb. I’m not saying its cognitive, if I’m in the environment it just slips out, it’s a survival technique’.
‘If you can’t approach something with intellect because you’d be endangering yourself, you will find a way to be stupid to protect yourself’, and his way of illustrating that now as a songwriter is by ‘writing some dumb lyrics about some dumb sh*t’.
Difficult to catch its poignancy at first as, I’m sure Brendan won’t mind my saying, the debut rattles through a plethora of stupid lyrics: ‘suckin' d*ck in the bathroom of the bus of the Iron Maiden cover band’ and ‘chew on a blunt, wipe his butt with a magazine’, to name just a few. He compares his politics in humorous music to a Louis Armstrong quote: ‘he wasn’t overtly political because he was ‘putting a little poison in your tea every time he stirred it for you’. That’s how you subvert stagnant idiocy’.
Amongst a generation becoming fatigued with AI slop, I become more refreshed with every answer Brendan gives to my questions. He even credits the success of indie-hymnal ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ to us, after questioning him about the journey the song has gone on from suburban horror story to UK cult classic: ‘that extrapolation process is the only thing that can give it any kind of legs’.
Thirty years on, and people who are still listening are doing so completely independently of whatever push or platform this major label had given them all that time ago. The love for the music, however stupid the lyrics, has proved to prevail.
The band have a brilliant setlist in their live show in that there is actually no setlist at all. Each live show is formulated purely off of a request-by-crowd basis, and this has been the case for about 15 years. Brendan will also often do an acoustic session after the show in the crowd should someone request an especially unexpected deep-cut that they’d like to hear.
Though playing Electric this time around, the band are most familiar with Thekla. ‘I love Thekla. The last time we played there the [slant of] the boat was so extreme that we were falling on the stage, and our equipment was sliding across’. Having slid across that boat myself once or twice, it’s nice to know there’s some common ground between myself and this hallmark legend of noughties American rock.
Orla Ruane
Safely wobble-free on the flat surfaces of Electric this time around, the band are kicking off their tour in just under a week, bracing for an inevitable request of a B-side that they would’ve likely skipped a rehearsal of.
Having just announced that Philip A. Jimenez, an original member of Wheatus, will be embarking on the tour with the band, and the fact that they are set to be playing the debut album in its entirety each night, nostalgia seems to be the word for this one. Find tickets for the 11th December at Electric here!
Featured image: Black Arts PRWill you be catching Wheatus next month?
