“It’s A Frustration Vibe” Aussie Punks Drunk Mums Interviewed
Question: What do Céline Dion, Anastacia, Shania Twain and Dixie Chicks all have in common?
Answer: Your Mum probably listens to them when she’s been on the wine.
Or at least that’s the case for Australian punks, Drunk Mums. Formed in 2011, the band are now on a 19-date tour around the UK, playing their third album ‘Beer Baby’ after a four year ‘hiatus’. They are sat down with me on a pub bench as we dissect the playlist they made for Clash of songs their mums would listen to after she’s been on the bottle.
“These are stereotypical drunk mum songs,” singer and guitarist, Jake says.
“Special to all the Sharon’s out there!” continues singer and bassist, Adam.
“Is that your Mum’s name?” I ask.
“No” they laugh. “It’s just like a mum’s name. Sharon. Shazza!”
“My mum loves Dixie Chicks,” continues Adam.
“Céline Dion’s ’My Heart Will Go On’, it’s just got that motherly vibe!”
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Ahead of their show tonight at The Trinity on Easter weekend, the guys start talking about bands they would listen to themselves whilst pissed. Agreeing that their Aussie counterparts Gee Tee are a regular go-to, we start discussing egg-punk as a genre.
“It started off as a fuckin’ meme or something,” begins Adam.
“This is kinda fitting for Easter,” adds guitarist and singer, Dean. “Someone needs to do a fuckin’ egg-punk show on Easter.”
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But with a name like Drunk Mums, it poses the question, what funny stories do they have about their mums whilst drunk? The guys laugh at the question, hesitant initially to respond, but they start to chime in and answer on each other’s behalf. Adam begins, “My mum fell over when I was very young, pissed, coming out of a RSL. Do you have RSLs here? It’s like where old people go to drink.” Dean adds, “It’s like a retired soldiers league club”.
“But yeah, mum fell over in a lavender bush outside. I remember that distinctly. And like, spewed all over herself”.
Dean then points to Jake and responds about his mum on his behalf, “conceiving you… on a roundabout!”
Jake adds, “Yeah, apparently I was conceived on a roundabout…”
“In the bushes of a roundabout!” Dean laughs.
“The name [Drunk Mums] comes from Jono Blues Bar, I used to play there with my old band,” says Jake. “We had a residency there, and older women would come up and be absolutely wasted and grab your cheek and be like, ‘You’re so cute!’”
“Did you have a fedora on?” asks Adam. The band all laugh at this comment whilst choosing to not show me photographic evidence of Jake in a fedora.
“He looked fedorable” Adam jokes.
“When Dean’s mum got drunk, she used to dip her hand in melted candle wax whilst she was watching TV because she liked the feeling…” says Jake.
“That’s not that weird, I like that feeling too!” I protest.
“She did it for hours though,” Dean laughs. “It’s sick”.
“Sick in the head!” Adam adds.
“She just liked the feeling, then she got one of my ex-girlfriends onto it as well. It was fucking weird.”
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But drunk mum stories aside, for a band that have previously been barred from venues for cooking sausages on stage and have got in trouble for putting Jake in a tumble-dryer before a gig, it’s only fair that they share some of their own embarrassing drunk stories.
“I’ve got a fuckin’ big one,” begins Adam. “So I was pissed and decided to smoke weed as well. I was trying to go to bed and was like ‘I’ve got to fuckin’ spew’ so I went out the window fuckin’ spewing and then the window fell on my back and I was stuck. I couldn’t fuckin’ get out. I was yelling outside and there was spew everywhere. And then I shit myself. I couldn’t get out the window. My girlfriend then came home later and wiped my bum for me…”
“That’s true love right there!”
“Oh, we’re not together anymore” he laughs. “She got me back though because she spewed all over my face once and then passed out.”
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Beer Baby by Drunk Mums—
“Healthy relationship!” Dean jokes. “I think out of self-preservation I’ve chosen to forget my one million stories.”
“The thing about Dean, back in the day, he used to get so wasted that he just used to become like a rock and just fall asleep anywhere. We would call him Shitby because his last name is Whitby. There’s countless stories, and we would just be carrying him out of a bar because he just fell asleep there.”
“My name is Dean Whitby and they would call me Dwayno Shitby.”
“We all missed a flight home once from Paris,” Jake begins.
“We had a day off. But it turned into a day on” laughs Adam. “And, yeah, we missed our flight the next day.”
“We had this thing called a zombie cocktail and it was fishbowl size.” Dean adds. “We were all sitting in a booth with a few mates and we connected all these straws together so we could all just sit back, drink and not move.”
“And we were sniffing amyl as well!” Adam laughs.
“Yeah, that was my last memory and the next thing was waking up in our room in Paris like ‘Ah, we missed the flight’”.
“Daddy Dean bailed us out…”
“Yeah we had no money in the bank after the tour, so I had to use my savings to get us home.”
With stories like these filling the table with laughter, I question, on this 19-day tour without a single day off, do the guys plan on slowing down their booze intake? “Don’t know! We’ll find out. We’ve only got 18 days to go and look how fresh we are now!” Adam says whilst swigging his beer.
The band are here in the UK touring their new album ‘Beer Baby’ which came out after a four year period where they didn’t release any music. In Clash’s recent review, we worked out that 1000 litres of beer would have been consumed between four average Australians in that time. “Sounds about right!” Jake says. “Yeah that checks out,” Adam adds. “Maybe even more than that. I mean, over Covid I was drinking like a case a day.” But despite the band’s wicked sense of humour and constant state of laughing, they do touch upon serious themes in this new album which we discuss. Having shared writing duties on previous releases, this new record is the first one to have been written entirely by Jake. Discussing track ‘New Australia’ and its heritage he says, “I guess being 37 and still working five days a week my whole life, living pay check to pay check. It’s a frustration vibe on that. It seems a lot of people feel it too, with the price of living. I’ve come to realise the government just want us to stay poor and just benefit business owners. I mean, we do have two business owners in the band, they’re doing alright for themselves. But if you’re a hard worker and doing nothing but working for someone else, you’re not gonna get ahead.”
“And if you don’t have generational wealth,” Adam adds.
“Yeah, and if you don’t have generational wealth…”
“It’s all tongue in cheek though!”
“Yeah, we’re not a serious band. The majority of songs we write are based off melodic elements and just fast and fun.”
‘Beer Baby’ in comparison to the previous self-titled and ‘Gone Troppo’ albums definitely feels more punk than garage in its sound. It’s interesting to hear the guys compare influences from previous albums to this one. Agreeing that Gee Tee, The Saints, Ramones and The Hives were all big overall influences, previous albums took inspiration from artists such as Radio Birdman and Jay Reatard. “They were overall influences,” agrees Dean. “But not for this album specifically”.
“The Hives were a big one for the first and second album,” Adam says.
“‘Mutant’ is pretty Hives. Yeah, The Hives are great!” Jake continues.
“We saw The Hives support AC/DC” Adam adds. “How sick is that! That was great. It was like three years ago. Or six years ago. It can be any amount of years ago, it just wasn’t this year,” he laughs. “Like, I love AC/DC, but The Hives were great.”
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Previously called The Dames (a fact about the band that they claim no one else knows), that name apparently originated from The Dame pub that the band were once drinking in whilst in America. “Even I didn’t know that,” laughs Dean. “That night though in America, I remember we all got White Castle burgers and got food poisoning whilst sleeping in the car. I was so sick that I had to crawl out the car and was just puking in a fuckin’ car park”.
“Another [fact] that not many people know [is about] Maxine’s where we took the photo for the first album cover,” Jake begins. “We all had partners at the time, but we had pre-organised to get a photo of some breasts for the first album cover. So, we are sitting down with our partners in this strip joint called Maxine’s in Brunswick. Maxine, she’d bring out these ladies and they walk all these ladies in front of us and they were all like young, attractive women. We were like, ‘This wasn’t what we were looking for’. We wanted, like, the older lady”.
“She was the host of the club,” Adam adds. “The mistress. She was the one organising it all, and we were like ‘Can we have you?’. It was so awkward.”
Jake continues, “Dean took the picture and went into a room”
“I had like a tripod and shit,” Dean says laughing. “I also don’t smoke weed, but that arvo we did. So, I’m stoned and like three doors deep with this random woman who’s taking her top off.”
Adam continues, “Her name was ‘Sandy’. Yeah, that was an interesting situation. The energy was… interesting”.
Jake laughs, “We also had to go back a few months later and get her to sign a release form”.
Drunk Mums really do live up to the Australian stereotype. Guzzling beers, saying ‘cunt’ every five seconds and being nothing but welcoming and warm to anyone they meet, the band will have your cheeks hurting from a constant state of laughter. Making sure no one is left out of the party, their welcoming attitude doesn’t go unnoticed by anyone in the venue tonight. Waking up the next morning, I was convinced I had laughed so hard with the band that I had laughed on a six pack. Looking down at my stomach, this isn’t the case. Perhaps the only six pack involved in the night was a six-pack of beer? Although, upon reflection, a 6-pack of beer is merely just a drop in the ocean on a night out with Drunk Mums.
But with drunk stories, boob pics and an original band name stolen from a pub, Drunk Mums may not label themselves “a serious band”. However, the turnout of fans throughout their tour would argue differently. Coming from Australia to play to full rooms in the UK proves that their music is loved across the world. By staying around after the show to meet fans and party until the early hours of the morning, something tells me the guys haven’t learned their lesson from previous drunken nights out. But hopefully this time around, the tour won’t end in missed flights, freshly-shit pants or getting barred from any venues. Watch this space.
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Drunk Mums new album ‘Beer Baby’ is out now.
Words: Jazz Hodge
Photography: Bella Keery
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