It was late last year that Simon Berkfinger, Dan W Sweat and MC Bad Genius kissed and made up.
As an integral part of rebuilding their often complicated relationships, they decided to tour around the country to celebrate the release of Berkfinger's debut, solo album under the moniker Feelings. It was hot, it was sweaty, it was loud, it was chaotic, it was... right. PHILADELPHIA GRAND JURY were back!
And now Philadelphia Grand Jury are back.... again. But this time, they're not just touring around for the hell of it. This time, they're touring around to raise the funds necessary to record a follow-up album to 2009's ‘Hope Is For Hopers’, tentatively titled ‘Ulterior Motif’.
But before they embark on a quick, four-date east coast tour, Simon Berkfinger shares five things that MC Bad Genius has done during his time with Philadelphia Grand Jury.
1. Taken off his shirt during a show at the Annandale Hotel, revealing his unbelievably thick, dark Italian body rug – we used to call this 'The Woolly Toga' when we were teenagers, because it kind of wrapped up one side of his body and across his shoulder then down his back – then unthreaded his belt, thrown his bass to the ground and proceeded to whip his bass with the belt, producing tonnes of terrible, terrible whipping-bass fuzz sounds. I don’t know why he does what he does, but I suppose this kind of thing interests him.
2. Booked us a trailer, with no lid, so that we could tour the south coast of NSW in his dark green Mitsubishi Magna sedan. That thing was a P.O.S. and of course it rained and the tarp wasn’t much use. He mumbled something about hire cars and school holidays. I am pretty sure that we also stayed in a school camp on that tour. There were wood huts and a ropes course. This was when we were a pretty well-known band, mind you.
3. Been carried off on the shoulders of the crowd into the night after a show at the Corner Hotel in Melbourne. He was, for some reason, wearing a karate headband and we didn’t see him again until well after all the gear had been lugged into the van.
4. Broken my 1959 Silvertone Electric guitar into two pieces at the Cambridge Hotel in Newcastle, 2009. Now he claims that it was in one functional piece when he last saw it. That would have been when he threw it violently onto the stage and stormed off at the end of the show. I suspect the impact may have had something to do with the neck of the guitar being snapped nearly in two. This was the guitar that had played hundreds of shows and been used to make every song we had ever recorded, so I was naturally upset and upon finding the injured guitar when packing up I had a brief moment of insanity and threw it against the wall, putting it out of its misery and breaking it well and truly. Later I found a master-guitar builder who painstakingly glued and pressed each splinter of wood back into place with some big tweezers and a vice. It didn’t help him that I had thrown it at a wall. He was a nice guy.
5. Broken my 1959 Silvertone Electric guitar into two pieces, again. This time it was at the Karova Lounge in Ballarat in 2010 and it was definitely his fault. He was standing on the vintage Gretsch Kick drum, flailing about as he is prone to doing and I was playing a drum solo. I guess Susie was out the front singing ‘99 Problems’. I had repeatedly told him not to stand on said drum and when he did, for the thousandth time, I lost it and pushed him off. Now Bad Genius does not exactly possess Swan-like agility, he’s more more like a fried chicken and you can imagine what happened when his long and solid frame was suddenly ejected from a great height. He did well to do a weird, commando roll thing and save himself from terrible injury. I imagine it was like one of those summer rolls you used to buy at the newsagent – all sweat, hair and filth from the floor of the stage of the well-trodden Karova. The cost of saving easily repaired, regenerative tissue was, of course, snapping the guitar neatly into two against the foldback speaker. A very calm discussion was had at the merch table where it was decided that we agreed in no way whatsoever about what had just happened and whose fault it was and that this would never be discussed again. I paid to have the guitar fixed by the same guy and it’s coming on tour this month.
Philadelphia Grand Jury Tour Dates
Sat 8 Nov - Ding Dong Lounge (Melbourne)Wed 12 Nov - Beach Road Hotel (Sydney)
Thu 13 Nov - Cambridge Hotel (Newcastle)
Fri 14 Nov - Alhambra Lounge (Brisbane)
