The summer festivals are rolling into town, and none of them more highly anticipated than Summadayze. While it doesn’t explode across the Perth foreshore until January, you can still get excited about it now. After all, The Juan MacLean are, and lead singer John MacLean (aka Juan MacLean) took some time out to chat with OUTinPerth about his all time festival stories.
What makes Australia so fun to play in?
I feel like, in the US – and the UK and a lot of places – people just aren’t that excited at shows. I think they just suffer from… maybe that they get to see so much live music that they’re just not impressed by it any more, or they’re just too cool to be seen having a good time – I don’t know. But my experience has always been that in Australia it’s a bit crazier. It makes it a lot more fun.
Do you have an all-time best summer concert story that’s happened to you, or someone you know?
There’s a festival in Spain called Summercase, and we were there with LCD Sound System and Hot Chip, and the first show we’d all flown in for the festival, and none of our gear arrived at the festival. So, over the course of a few hours, we frantically borrowed gear from LCD Sound System and Hot Chip and assembled this Frankenstein set-up of gear, and we literally finished putting it all together onstage right when it was time to play, and we had no idea how any of it would work out, and we got up there and played and it ended up being amazing. One of the best shows we’ve ever played.
And on the flipside to that do you have an all-time festival horror story?
I think I have one from that same festival. When LCD Sound System were playing, Tyler, the bass player, broke a bass string in the first song, and James Murphy and Tyler were so messed up – I think because they’d partied a bit too much before going onstage – that they stood there in front of like 10,000 people, attempting to change this bass string, and putting it on wrong. It took them like 10 minutes, which was almost half their set time, and people were throwing things at them. It just went really badly.
If you had unlimited funds and could organize a festival or a concert, where would it be and who would feature on the lineup?
That’s an easy one actually. A bunch of us on DFA went to Corsica, just off the coast of France – right on the Mediterranean. And we loved it there so much – just jumping off cliffs into the ocean, swimming every day, we were even talking about opening a studio there. That’s definitely the place I’d want to have a festival, and I’d just have my friends play. Right off the bat what comes to mind is DFA bands – Hercules and the Love Affair, Holy Ghost, LCD Sound System, Cut Copy, they’re really good friends of ours, Soul Wax, they’re quite good friends of ours as well, Hot Chip – that’s quite a lineup actually. Ooh… I’d call it Juan’s World.
What do you currently love about the music industry in general?
It’s funny – what I love most about it has also contributed to a lot of its problems. With the access of the internet – which obviously brought with it illegal downloading and plummeting record sales – at the same time it’s made music really accessible to people. Even though music sales are the lowest they’ve ever been, I feel like more people have all this music than ever before, and there’s no geographical boundaries, so people in the United States can be really familiar with a band like Cut Copy, and people in Australia can be really aware of DFA and Juan MacLean and things that are going on here. So to me, it’s really exciting that the music gets passed around so easily all around the world.
How would you describe your music?
I’ve always thought of it as punk-rock dance music. We very much are a live band, we don’t have any laptops or anything like that. So it tends to be a bit more chaotic than what you’d see when you go to see what typically gets billed as live, electronic dance music, which tends to be performances where if you close your eyes, you might as well be listening to a CD at home. At the same time, I feel like we’re not nearly as overtly hard or punishing as new electro music, which I think the world is growing very tired of.
Tickets for Summadayze are available now at www.ticketmaster.com.au.
