Interview with The Great Sabatini
Rezine: Who plays in the band?
Sean, Rob, Joey and Steve
Rezine:What are the latest news about the band?
We're always working. Always. Even though this is the first year since our inception in 2007 that we won't do any touring at all, we are planning a small release (couple songs) for some point this year and we might be writing a ton of songs for something else. Or we might just be spending all of our time at the scrap yard shooting gumballs at rats with a sling-shot.
Rezine: How did the band starts?
Robby played guitar, Jamming good with me and Joey, and the Centipedes from Venus. That was a Bowie reference. I guess I blew it by calling it out. Anyway, eventually, Steve's band, Tugnut, the best band that EVER existed, broke up and we capitalized on that by persuading Steve that we were awesome, at this shit-hole in London Ontario called The embassy. Steve was the only guy there. Then we set ourselves back YEARS by pursuing our dreams in vans across North America and Europe.
Rezine: What influences the music of the band?
Whatever our current musical fixations are, PLUS the fact that we are all natural-born contrarians. While writing Dog Years (2014) I was listening to a lot of the old punk records that I discovered in my teen years... the Undertones, Buzzcocks, Black Flag, Bad Brains etc... by the time we got to the jam room, the natural instinct to write in that mode was corrupted by our deep-rooted desires to ruin anything normal or predictable or even a little bit easy. Also, complex rituals involving mold scrapings and a shortwave radio.
Rezine: What inspires the lyrics for your songs?
Mostly other great word-smiths... Van Dyke Parks, Walt Whitman, W.B. Yeats, Shel Silverstein, Kool G Rap, The Frogs etc. Not kidding around here. A distinguishable use of words is important to us, even though nobody other than ourselves will EVER care or even understand a word that gets screamed to tape (just kidding, we use pro tools) for our records. Also, cracking up another member of the band is always good. I came up with the line "pieces of the zoo keeper in the tiger shit" mostly cos I must have known it'd work on Rob. It does... he loves that line, haha.
Rezine: What's coming up for the band?
We have a couple of shows coming up in August (Montreal and Sherbrooke) with Sights Of War and Crux Of Aux. The Montreal show also has Rhino. Other than that, you can expect us to be hiding any real progress nervously behind closed doors and NOT posting about it on instagram (@thegreatsabatini) or facebook or twitter, for fear that we might actually write some shitty music for once and have to scrap it all and go back to the drawing board. That'd be embarrassing if anyone out there were to be expecting something in the not so distant future.
Rezine: Do you have other projects?
Steve has a project called Greber with Marc (Fuck The Facts), and often plays in Biipiigwan. I (Sean) have a project called Angles which I share with Will (IRN) and Thom (Animal Ethics). I also have been putting some time in with Biipiigwan for the last year or so.