BDO LOCALS: Se Bon Ki Ra

Wed 27th Jan, 2010 in Features

Heavy hitters Se Bon Ki Ra make their debut at the Adelaide Big Day Out. Mike Brown goes in to detail about the experience both past and present.

What’s the feeling amongst the band in the lead up to the Big Day Out?
We’re keen as! It’s been a long term goal for us as a band and as individual members, so it’s a bit of a dream really. The band’s been working hard since November 2007 doing local shows and picking up a couple of decent support spots, so it’s awesome to be invited onto the line-up this year! We’re really stoked to have been given a 6.15pm time slot too. Lots of bands aim for a spot on the Big Day Out line-up and unfortunately don’t get the chance to play, so we feel really privileged to get the opportunity and intend to make the most of it! It’s a proud moment for us as musicians and we hope its also a proud moment for metal heads of Adelaide considering that it shows that Adelaide metal acts can get noticed and get an invitation to be involved in a mainstream industry event.

The Big Day Out is such an institution now in the Australian music festival scene that it’s a real milestone for a local band. To think that at one stage a few years ago when the Big Day Out skipped a year, it looked like it might not continue, but now its selling out around the country in record time. It’s an awesome thing for the organisers and its awesome for the event going public too. The Big Day Out provides a great platform for international bands to tour on and brilliant opportunities for Australian bands to be exposed to a larger market. We’re just really thankful for the chance to be involved with a slickly organised event and we’re rehearsing our arses off during January to put on a good show and have a truck load of fun doing it! Hell Yeah!!”

With so many other bands doing their thing, how do you plan to win over punters on the day? “Our brand of groove thrash isn’t shared amongst many of the other bands on the line up this year, so we hope to appeal to music lovers that like it hard and heavy and those that might not have had the chance to see us live before. The line up this year is actually a bit starved of heavy bands, with Fear Factory and Mastodon being the main attractions in the genre. We hope to bring an Adelaide metal flavour to a crowd wanting to share some brutal tunes and good times.

We’re on at the same time as Lily Allen and Jet so we’ll have a heavier option on offer at the Hot Produce stage, depending on personal preference of course! In terms of winning people over, we’re just gonna do our thing like we usually do, have a ball doing it and invite any Big Day Out punters checking us out to get involved and have a good time along with us. The fun that we have playing our music live is pretty evident I think in our live show and the intensity of the energy created, so that seems to motivate people to be part of it.

There will be some die hard fans and mates flying the flag by wearing their SE BON KI RA merch to the show and we will be selling a limited edition Big Day Out t-shirt too, so hopefully we’ll have a bit of a presence before, during and after our set. We only released our debut EP One thousand ways to be in mid 2009, so our material is not as well known as it could be, but that doesn’t stop a keen few in the crowd shouting the words to the EP tracks back at our front man Chad while he’s busy spitting them down the microphone. The EP is available on line at http://sebonkira.bigcartel.com Grab a copy and then get down the front and shout the lyrics back at Chad, he needs a good heckler or two to get his blood pumping!”

What’s the best part of being a band playing the SA leg of the Big Day Out? “Because there’s not much metal on the bill, most of our usual local crowd didn’t buy tickets and some of them are spewing now! For us though it means that we get to play live to a new crowd that probably haven’t seen us before and may choose to come out and see us doing local shows in the future. That is awesome exposure that we wouldn’t be able to achieve in any other way.

It’s so cool to be able to just cruise on down to the showgrounds where you remember as a kid dropping your fairy floss off the chair lift and dodging the vomit on the Gravitron, to play amidst a line up of international quality bands. You know what I mean? This place is our backyard and now we get to own a small patch of it for 45 minutes and kick some arse! That’s an awesome thing for a hometown band.

The other thing for us as a local band is what else may result from being on the bill, like offers of support spots when internationals play in town, etc. It’s great exposure for the SE BON KI RA brand and we’re not going to be shy about using it. Hopefully we can share it around a bit too. There’s plenty of good quality Adelaide metal talent out there. We want to promote the scene and inspire the metal heads who only come out of the woodwork for international shows to get out on a regular basis and support local artists who are often entertaining crowds at their own expense.

Come to local shows, pay your entry fee, which is usually less than the price of two drinks, and have a blast with good people and good local talent. So many bands are under-rated just because they “belong” to us. Sometimes it seems like if they came from somewhere else, we would appreciate them more. Anyway end rant here, I just love the richness of our scene and want to see it as proudly and highly regarded as it should be!”

What bands are on your ‘must see’ list? “Fear Factory, Mastodon and Karnivool.”

How do you plan to unwind/celebrate after your set? “There’s a reasonable chance that we may indulge in some liquid refreshment… Then I reckon we’ll just soak up the atmosphere for a while and join in the Fear Factory mosh! The hardest thing about playing at 6.15pm is going to be keeping ourselves in the shape to play! I reckon that by the time we come off the stage we’ll be ready to fire up our own party and just enjoy the event as the fun loving punters that we are. It will probably take a whole for the buzz from playing to wear off, so it might be a very loooooong night!”
Mike added, “After the Big Day Out we are going to have a month or so off from gigging and spend some time working up new material. We have a stack of riffs and song sections and lyrical ideas sitting there waiting for us to get to them. 2009 was so busy with gigs, especially since the EP launch in July, that we haven’t had a chance to really get them cranking. We keep jamming on bits and pieces and getting really excited about them but not bringing them out for anyone to hear! It’s frustrating because our new stuff is an evolution of our song writing and playing. It’s the next level for us as a band so we want to increase our work rate again with new material and inject songs into the live set more often. Heaps of writing is happening all the time, but then we don’t get the chance to get the songs finished and into the set. We also plan to head interstate for some shows this year and would like to play some international support spots if and when the opportunities arise.

Do you have a good story or memory from a previous BDO experience? “Seeing Metallica play with lightning in the background was pretty special. Soundgarden back in the early 90s was awesome too. Rage Against The Machine, System Of A Down, Rammstein, Soulfly and the first visit from Prodigy are also standouts. The event has had such a wicked history that there are too many stories and memories to narrow it down. It’s been a firm date on our calendars for years now! For some reason I’m thinking that the 2010 Big Day Out might be the one we remember though…”

Se Bon Kira hit the Hot Produce stage at 6.15pm.

For further information check out http//www.sebonkira.com or www.myspace.com/sebonkira