House of Pain

Wed 30th Mar, 2011 in Features

Everyone’s favourite Irish-American hip hop group – House of Pain – broke up back way back in 1996 but last year Everlast, DJ Lethal and Danny Boy got back together and in May this year they’ll be jumping on a plane for their first Australian tour in fifteen years.

Lethal’s busy with the new Limp Bizkit album, but Everlast and Danny Boy will be in Oz to play at the Groovin the Moo festivals and a run of headline shows in Melbourne, Brisbane, Coolangatta, Sydney, Adelaide and Perth.

FL caught up with Danny Boy to quiz him on the band’s reunion and the double-edged sword of being branded a ‘one-hit-wonder’.

What were your high school years like with Erik [Everlast] and Leor [DJ Lethal]?
Pretty crazy, we used to just go out every night and get drunk, get in a lot of fights, then come home and make music. So they were the wild years, the solid days… but it’s changed greatly since then.

What’s been particularly influential in your musical career?
All of our experiences, they are our inspiration. We’re all originally from New York so coming to LA and being in that hip-hop scene in the early days, with Ice-T and all those people… we were on the scene for a while and when we finally got together we just had that LA vibe going, that 91 Riot vibe going, with Cypress Hill and Funkdubious, all on the same page… we were just making hardcore hip-hop music. We inspired each other.

Does your Irish heritage play into your music at all? Lyrics, melodies or otherwise?
Yeah, in the scene of rebel rousing, I mean being white kids in a black sport; we had to be tough kids to survive. We were some of the only white kids on the scene. But we found a thread, that most of us were either Irish or Jewish and we put that in the forefront as a way of rallying our cause. It was a way of saying that we’re proud of who we are. We’re Irish kids and we like to rock too.

On that note, what was it like being one of the earlier white hip-hop groups? Did you receive much criticism from the black hip-hop and rap community?
Not really. I mean locally, in California, you had to be tough! The Beastie Boys were already successfully but they were coming out of Def Jam with the support of Run DMC, Public Enemy and the were embraced in that family… but we were on the streets, in the real hard core hip-hop scene, and there you couldn’t be a Beastie Boy, you had to be a tough kid, so that’s how we survived it. But it was tough in those days for everyone, white, black or indifferent.

Tell me about the bands dissolution in 1996?
Well it came to the point where Everlast had aspirations of doing solo stuff, and he wanted to see what he could do outside House of Pain, and after that we let it run its course. He felt he was better doing his own thing at the time.

It caught Lethal and me by surprise. But Lethal went on and did Limp Bizkit and I did a few solo projects that never came out, plus I was going through problems of my own. But it’s like being in a marriage, sometimes they work and sometimes you’ve got to put them back together. It’s tough… I’ve always admired groups like the Beastie Boys that stayed together for 25 years plus, but it’s just not always the case.

Has the reformation of House of Pain been easy and civil?
Yeah it was totally natural. After we started La Coka Nostra and Everlast came on board we all worked together and we worked harmoniously and we realized we had the same ambitions again and had missed working together. We became aware that people still wanted to hear from House of Pain and why not give them what they wanted. It’s been 20 years in the making so we thought; let’s see what we can do. We’re all having a good time so far and we look forward to more.