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 Frontman TONY SLY from veteran from Cali-punks NO USE FOR A NAME talks about touring and trends with DAN RIDLEY.
“We wanted to play a bunch of small towns. We thought that us and Strung Out would be a big enough package to do all of those and get away with it.”
Perhaps frontman Tony Sly isn’t giving No Use For A Name enough credit. 21 years and 13 studio albums into their career, the band has proven they are more than capable of holding their own many times over. This latest Australian tour with fellow hard-hitters Strung Out has a sense of almost being needlessly excessive in terms of pulling power. But in a world where for every legal download at least 20 others take place, and for every Fall Out Boy there are 20 wannabes, the concept he is endorsing is sadly not farfetched at all. So when the opportunity arose to call Strung Out touring partners, it made complete sense.
“When the offer came up I was kind of like, ‘well I don’t know’, but it just kind of made sense to have stronger packages,” he explains. “Throughout the world now, because the market place is so saturated, a lot of bands are coupling up now and that’s what we are doing with them.”
The tour will also provide a chance to showcase their latest album The Feel Good Record Of The Year. As he explains, he is more than satisfied with the release.
“I think that the songs are really good. I like it better than our last album a lot more,” he admits. “It has an older element of the band mixed with newer elements we haven’t had and I like that a lot. It’s definitely something that we set out to do and (I feel) that we have accomplished.”
For the veteran quartet it has always been a case of see no evil, hear no evil. Choosing to pursue their musical ambitions to whatever end suited their passions while steadfastly ignoring developments in the current musical climate. This is not to say the group has not become disillusioned with what is broadly coined as ‘alternative’ today. Having survived so many trends already, Tony laments the lack originality from a genre that once fiercely upheld the ideal of the individual.
“It just seems like there is a lot of bands out there now,” he sighs. “You know exactly what they are going to sound like, what they are going to look like and all that stuff. There just doesn’t seem to be a lot variation between bands. Before I think each band seemed to have its own thing. Now each band has everybody else’s thing, each other’s thing.”
Perhaps the most suitable example of this can be found in the Vans punk extravaganza known as the Warped Tour, held annually across America since the mid nineties. No stranger to the tour, he explains that the festival’s unbridled commercialisation over the years has left the group disenchanted with the whole affair.
“It used to be more intimate thing – it was more like 20-25 bands. Now I think it’s up to 80 bands a day with all these stages and stuff,” he explains. “It’s really polluted and no fun to play anymore because you just get lost in the shuffle. At the time it used to be the best thing to do because it was more like a summer punk rock camp. It was kind of nice. But I think those days have been shoved aside just by the oversaturation of all these emo punk screamo bands or whatever you call them … you know, that crap.”
NO USE FOR A NAME play with STRUNG OUT at the Coolangatta Hotel Thursday Jul 18, The Arena Friday Jul 19 and the Sands Tavern Saturday Jul 20. All shows feature locals Bad Day Down. THE FEEL GOOD RECORD OF THE YEAR is out now on Fat Wreck Chords/Shock.
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