This is where you can read interviews and
articles about Biscuit, from various papers/magazines/etc... If you have
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BISCUIT - GOING CRACKERS - In Press Magazine 5/11/97
Biscuit are a kick out Melbourne band playing to thousands of kids all over Victoria. They have cottoned on to the thumping all ages scene and it's so cool playing to over a thousand uninhibited super kids. Everyone should give it a go! Glenn Peters spoke to front guy, Wesz Parry about the scene and his angry approach to songwriting.
What's happening?
How about when Crettins Puddle were models on The Price Is Right?
Do you write songs about stupidity?
Are Biscuit into stamp collecting?
BISCUIT - Pushover 97 Booklet, 22/11/97
The Answering Machine
Wesz from Biscuit
On The Simpsons
His musical delights
What scares him the most
Plans for New Year's Eve, 2000
BISCUIT – Beat Magazine 26/8/98
When did Biscuit form together as a cohesive unit? I noticed your music appeals to younger crowds, I see you doing a lot of all ages shows. Talking about Korn, I noticed you were using samples with your new stuff. You’ve been doing a few festivals, do you prefer those to pub gigs? With all this gigging you must have had some strange live experiences.
BISCUIT – Pushover 98 Booklet, 21/11/98
Being my first time interviewing somebody of any importance, I was naturally nervous.
To get the ball rolling I asked Chris if he was looking forward to
PUSHOVER? 'Absolutely, hanging foir it. We had a ball last year, it
was great fun. We were very surprised, we didn't expect that sort of
response. We're gonna have a ball this year'. Chris went on to tell me
that one of his main goals at the moment is 'to play music for as
long as I can, and for it to remain fun'. And in keeping with the PUSH's
ongoing sponsorship slogan, I couldn't resist asking Chris what he
thought it meant to 'be your best?' Not wanting to mince words, Chris
simply replied: 'not to be your worst!'
So what's the best thing he's ever scammed? 'Before I was in Biscuit
I was in another band, we played night-clubs and they decided to not pay
us at the end of the night so we stole a set of bongos'. (Heh heh)
What would Chris most like to push over? Pauline Hanson of course.
'Off a very high cliff'.
After my questions, we talked about the up coming Big Day Out and
past festivals. We ended the conversation with Chris promising to say
hello to me at PUSHOVER, so I'm holding him to it.
Glenn Peters
"We do mainly all ages shows these days. We don't do many pub shows anymore. It's not like we don't enjoy doing the pub scene, it's just not as big as the all ages scene. It's massive. You are talking about gigs where you have a minimum crowd most of the time of 300 up. Sometimes 600, sometimes 1200, it's a lot more than a pub gig. Most of the dudes at the all ages gigs buy everything. It's like their mum had just given them money for show bags. It's not like they are fanatical, it's just they get into it a bit more. They don't have any inhibitions about jumping and moving around. They are not massively known bands on the all ages scene. We play a lot of these shows and we have built a pretty large crowd base. How many shows in a pub does it take to play to 1200 people? You get a band who plays one show every two months to twenty people and they are branded as the next big thing. I don't know if some bands have realized that it is a better scene. They seem to be topping away at the pub scene and I don't see why. Maybe their music will not come across to an all ages audience, I don't know. It's either that or they can't get into it. It's one of the other. We did that Push regional tour with Gravel and Area 7 recently. It went all around Victoria, as far as Portland to Colac. We do places like Sale and Wodonga all the time. It's really funny. We went for to Sale. A few saw us on Recovery a while before and earlier we did a show in Morwell. There was only a couple of hundred people there. They asked us back and next time there we are there 700 to 800 people treat us like gods! It's amazing how many people recognize you six months after being the house bands on recovery. Imagine if we were on television all the time."
"I went to the show as a member of the audience. It's like a midget set. I didn't get on. The camera panned past me a couple of times but I don't think they wanted me on the show because I think they thought I was some circus freak or something."
"I wrote about a lot of anger to be honest. It has to do with society. Lizard Head is about the idiosyncrasies of the industry itself. "H" was done a lot longer before Tool did their "H". It's not about heroin. If you read the lyrics you could say it's about a smack in the arm but it's not. It's about Harry Suburbans and suburbia. A lot of the lyrics I write are about society and how it does not accept different people like myself. I'm not trying to get too cynical but it seems like the world is a very mundane place. You look at the people society classified as normal and you find that they are really fucked up people. The weird people are the normal. Somebody said to be one time, 'Why don't you write happy songs?' I said that there wasn't much happiness to write about at this point of my life. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't say I am an aggressive person. I like the stage because I can get my aggression out in a physical way. In the live situation it is more like our motto, 'In your face', it's kind of confronting."
"Not as yet but you never know. We could do the Frenzal kind of thing. Frenzal are trying to do these Pez heads. We could have Biscuit stamps. Go the way of having really obscene pictures on stamps. You could put a moon on a stamp. There's no comeback to a moon. There's nothing you can do to a moon. You can't beat it."
"Hi. You've reached Barney's Burger Bar. Leave your order after the beep" growls some deep-throated voice.
Ooo, scarily interesting.
Quite unscary and full of integrity, but he just talks a damn lot. Hardcore? Weird? Tatt-infested? Maybe,
but so what, he's normal...
I love The Simpsons. There's a couple of episodes... well all of them are good. It's like
The Thunderbirds, it's not really a kid's show. It has all these underlying messages.
I enjoy all facets of music. Some of the stuff I listen to you would never picture. The guys in the band think I'm a weirdo.
I just bought Tori Amos' CD today. She's got a beautiful voice. She just seems to have a lot of passion in what she does
and that's what I really appreciate in a musician.
Sometimes myself. Sometimes society, oh actually nah, I know what they're like. Basically
myself, because I don't know who I am. You look in the mirror, and sometimes you can see right through
yourself and see different things.
They're all the same to me. All it is is an opportunity for the "normal"
in society to allow themselves an excuse to fuck up. It comes around and they seem to think they can
be who they're not, doing anything they want. They just seem to fuck up really
badly. All this confidence, picking fights, random kissing, groping... If you did that in a
pub, someone would turn around an whack you one. But it will be pretty scary and also
exciting. What comes with the good comes with the bad.
Andrew Tijs
Biscuit circa ’98 has been known as quite the live animal, fostering a huge appreciation within the underage crowds, cementing a regular spot on just about any festival you’d care to mention and serving up their most solid slab of recorded material yet, in the form of A Manga Movement. Chris and Matt, spare some time in between rehearsing to ponder the Biscuit experience.
Chris: I’d say, November ’95 when I joined, is when Biscuit as it is now, started. These other three guys were playing with another guitarist and the only thing that’s been the same from then to now is the name really.
Matt: When I joined the other guitarist was in the band and for that year I just had a heap of songs to learn so I just didn’t really do anything until Chris joined. It was kinda cool when Chris joined because he was closer to my age than the other guitarist. The band as it is now, and mostly over the past six or seven months, have really shaken the cobwebs off from the old band and we’re just as one. When we play live we all know what each other is doing and it’s just so comfortable.
Matt: I think the heavier music is coming back, with Korn and the like. It’s not just the all ages though, the last two over age shows and the Tote and the Public Bar we had two full houses. The over 18’s is much better as well.
Matt: I’ve always been into sampling from Living Color, Will Calhoun was always triggering heaps of stuff even back in the 80’s. I was influenced by them, I don’t really listen to Korn. It didn’t come from them, it was something that I’d always planned to do. We’re more interested in instrument samples, not so much the bits and pieces from TV that we’ve used in the past.
Chris: With the guitar, I’ve only just started to use more effects on the guitars. About the sampler, we wanted to use it more as an instrument rather than a fill-in; instead of having a cut from a movie.
Matt: In our live set we use that because we tune up and down in between songs so we thought that it was a good idea; so there’s something going over (the tuning) to keep the crowd interested. We use the sampler in a new song, Monkey Boy, where we sampled Wesz screaming and I trigger that in the song instead of having him scream live. It seems to work well.
Chris: We love doing festivals because everyone is there for the same thing, or at least I hope they’re not there to get pissed from three days, so it’s fun. We get to meet other bands and more people and get to see how a festival runs. It’s been really exciting.
Matt: I think for a band of our size, playing on a big festival, you couldn’t look at it as a bad thing. A lot of bigger bands always talk about how they prefer the pubs because you’re a lot closer to the audience, you can see what they mean. At Push Over we played to about 7,000 people and the stage was just huge. You’re so far away from each other that you have to rely totally on monitors to hear each other. And the crowd is so far away from you that when you get back to a pub with a full room the vibe is a lot better.
Chris: Exactly, so it’s a bit rewarding to see that the crowd is there to see you and not just watching you in between other bands.
Matt: Then again Push Over was a good gig for us because we were the third band on the main stage and while we were setting up the crowd really filled out. It was like there were a lot of people interested in specifically seeing us. It was a bit of a buzz.
Chris: Word of mouth spreads too. I’m guessing that word of mouth spreads more through the all ages scene because the kids are more enthusiastic about new talent. It’s like the way Spiderbait did it. They sold 15,000 copies of their EP and when they became big, they already had a big underground following. It made sure that they weren’t a flash in the pan.
Matt: Actually we played a gig at the St. Kilda Inn when they were trying to turn it into a live venue. It was going pretty well, there was a few people there when a guy walks in off the street in full cycling gear with the helmet and the bum bag. Half way through a song he whips out his dick and starts smacking it on the foldback speaker.
Chris: We were just thinking "What the hell is this guy doing". And he did it through the whole set, just stretching it out and flashing it at us and we were trying to look elsewhere.
Matt: At the end of the set some chick with no front teeth jumped on stage and was flashing her tits at the crowd, and asked them that if they wanted to see her ass to throw money on the stage. Then she walked through the crowd with our mailing list and getting people to sign up.
Chris: Wasn’t she trying to sell ecstasy too? That was a strange period in our development as a band.
Nichole Borrow
After introducing myself to Chris (the guitarist) and talking for
a few minutes I found him to be a really nice guy and easy to talk to;
happy to talk about any subject that came up in our conversation.