Suicidal Tendencies

Mon 30th Nov, 2009 in Features

It wasn’t hard to tear myself away from the Playstation controller to answer the phone knowing that none other than Mike Muir would be on the line. After exchanging pleasantries I ask Muir his current location and whether the rumors of his east coast property purchase were true. “You know, I always love what I find out about myself doing interviews. Apparently I own a house and live in Perth too”. While the Perth rumor is new to me, he goes on. “The best thing I’ve ever found out is that I was dead”. I can assure everyone that Mike Muir is not dead and both he and Suicidal Tendencies are very much alive and kicking.

2010 is set to be a big one for Suicidal Tendencies, with plans to release their own Vans clothing line which incorporating not only the stock standard Vans footwear but shirts, wallets, trucker caps and boardshorts to boot.

Along with this there will be a partnership with snowboard makers and masters, 686. “They only do one collaboration a year and in the past they’ve done work with Levi Strauss and New Balance so having them choose Suicidal is pretty special.” Muir assures me that Suicidal have had their hand in the design aspects. “We’ve worked with some pretty great people and that has made it easy for us.”

Despite their ventures into a new product range, the biggest return for Suicidal Tendencies will be the release of their first studio album in a decade. It’s been a long time between drinks, so they’ve been hitting the road heavily in the lead up to this album’s release. “We didn’t want to do what every other band does and release a record and tour off the back of that. We wanted to get people believing in Suicidal again. We’ve played a lot of European festivals and back home in States.”

It would appear that these shows having been knocking over punters with Suicidal Tendencies coming up trumps in post-festival polls for Best Show and Most Surprising amongst others. “I think that the people who don’t know Suicidal are great too because they have no preconceived notions of who or what Suicidal are.”

Infectious grooves drummer Eric Moore has jumped on board for the new Suicidal Tendencies album. “When we were doing Infectious Grooves everyone kept telling me that we HAD to get Eric in Suicidal. It was so obvious but we didn’t want to, we wanted to keep the separation but we knew it was definitely the right thing. He is a one man show in himself, he’s dynamite and sometimes that’s good and sometimes that’s bad. People are always like I cannot believe he’s a drummer, I cannot believe he’s a drummer.”

There was a time when everything wasn’t rainbows and sunshine for Suicidal Tendencies. Never the type to shy away from controversy – just look at the band name – there was a time when it was impossible for the band to play a show in the greater Los Angeles area. “When we started off you have to understand that punk rock was really, really small and it was a lumberjack and Mohawk kind of thing. When we first started going to shows there were Mexicans, bandanas and the flipjacks and the punk rock look. So people would ask if we wanted to open their show and we would open and bring way more people than anybody else and then they left afterward. So a lot of punk rockers were pissed off because we were doing our own thing.”

“We put on shows before, when we started, where we would rent out the halls and we were getting a big following. So we went straight from opening shows to headlining and then it got kind of notorious. Then we were trying to get shows in bigger places and then we couldn’t get any shows or sometimes the venues because we had to get the police permits to do the shows. Or they said – œyeah we’ll do it’ then they got problems from the police, authorities, liability, so it was many years before we could play in LA. If you don’t play there for a while there are all the rumors like people got killed at Suicidal Tendencies shows and we were like look it up. You’re not going to find anything because it didn’t happen.”

Punk in early eighties culture was vastly different to the spoon-fed rockers that walk modern day streets but as the old adage goes, where there is a will there is a way. “People were uncomfortable because we came in, we were different and they didn’t like it. The first time we played back in LA was in Orange County, it was at the University of California and we were playing on a Sunday night and the promoter that did it was trying to get us for years. He had a brilliant plan, it was University of California so it was state property so the local police don’t have any jurisdiction so they couldn’t come in. So we played in the basketball arena there and filled it out and before you drove in there were hundreds of cops on the outside of the campus hoping they could come in, but they couldn’t. It was a situation where if they could have come in there probably would have been a riot. Because we went in there and there were no problems so we were able to play the Santa Monica Civic which was where we grew up and we always wanted to play there.” How times have changed.

If you were ‘suicidal for life’ in the 90s then you’re wondering why the hell they’re doing three shows in rather obscure places on Australia’s eastern seaboard. “It’s about getting back to the fans. It is something that we would do for the fans back in Venice and we wanted to try it here too. A couple of years ago we played all the little surf towns and in places where when we announced the shows people were like no way, they’re not playing here. People were like I grew up here and I flew home just to see you here.”

What you might not know about these shows is that they are being put on by Suicidal themselves. No middlemen, all ST. “We’re playing one place on the Sunshine Coast (Kings Tavern) that has never had an international act play there before, and you’d never ever think that Suicidal were playing there. I know we’ll do it right to about 400 people and years from now there’ll be thousands of people saying ‘Oh yeah, I saw Suicidal there’ and they’ll all be lying but it will be one off that may never happen again.” Losing your international virginity to Suicidal Tendencies is something Kings Tavern can undoubtedly spruik for years to come.