Black Rebel Motorcycle Club put longevity down to their 'try anything' attitude

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This was published 6 years ago

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club put longevity down to their 'try anything' attitude

By Craig Mathieson

Not every musician would look forward to playing the venue where they once took a pint glass to the face, but for Robert Levon Been a gig at Glasgow's intimidating Barrowlands venue is just the latest stop on the Scottish leg of the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's British tour.

"Oh, I've all had all kinds of things thrown at me in Glasgow, on and off the stage," Been says with a commendable level of leather-clad insouciance. The confirmation is in what previously happened at the former dancehall after Been, the band's bassist and co-vocalist, was clocked by the glass flung by an audience member. Bloodied but unbowed, he played on.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's Robert Levon Been (left), Peter Hayes and Leah Shapiro.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's Robert Levon Been (left), Peter Hayes and Leah Shapiro.

"Not playing the show would be the wrong kind of protest. It's better to play the gig and get into the mood that you want – loud and dirty and out of control – and that the audience respond to," Been says. "We've got pretty good survival instincts, and part of that is being connected to the audience no matter what happens."

Those instincts, honed at more than 1250 shows since Black Rebel Motorcycle Club made their live debut at then hometown San Francisco's now shuttered Club Cocodrie on January 14, 1999, have served the band well. With their malevolent three-piece rumble and outcast ballads, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club – Been, guitarist and co-vocalist Peter Hayes, and drummer Leah Shapiro​ – have forged a faithful following that has stuck true to the band over 18 years and eight studio albums.

At a time when most of their guitar rock contemporaries have disappeared from view, or been gone long enough to now work the reunion circuit under the blanket of New Rock nostalgia, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club are an ongoing concern despite keeping a low profile between albums. If there's a secret to their durability, Been doesn't know it.

"A lot of it is blind luck that what we started doing, which we never thought about, is what worked for us and our fans," he says. "Sometimes you just also have to consider that none of this is really happening – if nothing's real, maybe you can just try anything."

Released this month and produced by long-time Silverchair collaborator Nick Launay, the new Black Rebel Motorcycle Club album, Wrong Creatures, consecrates their preferred genres. There is tempestuous, epic soundscapes (Calling Them All Away), thumping backbeat for the moshpit (Spook), love songs for the wronged (Haunt), and lean machine boogie (Little Thing Gone Wild). Sunglasses are essential, no matter the time of day.

The connection between Been and Hayes stretches back to high school, with the latter often ducking out of a fractious home environment to stay at the former's house. Shapiro arrived in 2008, after original drummer Nick Jago left after several years of making his unhappiness publicly clear, and one of the reasons Wrong Creatures is out five years after 2013's Specter at the Feast is that Shapiro had to undergo brain surgery in 2014 for Chiari malformation, a condition where brain tissue extends into the spinal canal.

"At first it was utterly terrifying, then it was just terrifying, but she's come out of it as well as can be hoped," Been says. "She's recovered now and she's completely back to playing music. It's cool that all she has to complain about is the stupid everyday stuff of being on tour."

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Rock'n'roll has been on the backburner of popular music for much of the last decade, but Been and his bandmates have been canny enough to know that trying to chase trends wouldn't work for them.

"There's a real temptation for bands to second-guess themselves, and most of the time they end up losing part of what made them who they are. I've never tried to fully understand what we do, because it can be better not to know why something works so well."

As far back as 2001, when they released their feedback-drenched breakthrough single Whatever Happened to my Rock'n'Roll, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club have been lamenting, pint glass to the head and all, the absence of rock's primal pull. But it turns out we weren't listening properly.

"We've never had the answer," Been says. "We've always been the question."

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club play the Enmore Theatre, Newtown, March 23, enmoretheatre.com.au and the Forum Theatre, Melbourne, on March 24.

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