Celibate Rifles: Gun It.

The Celibate Rifles play the East Coast Blues & Roots Music Festival at the Red Devil Park in Byron Bay on Friday, the Troccadero at Surfers Paradise on Saturday and the Gabba Hotel on Sunday night.

Twenty years after the release of their debut album, The Celibate Rifles are still an invigorating live experience. Based on their most recent studio offering, A Mid Stream Of Consciousness, there’s little doubt the band are at the top of their game, and are showing little sign of slowing down.

Other than to throw a new slant on their stage show… Back in the mid nineties the Rifles released the acoustic record On The Quiet couple of tracks from this album, along with some other Rifles material will find it’s way into an acoustic performance.

“We’re doing about a half hour of acoustic stuff before we make a racquet,” guitarist Kent Steedman explains. “We did it a few years ago, and it’s time to have a look at it again after we got offered the Blues & Roots Festival.”

I don’t think the Celibate Rifles are really a straight up blues band…

“No, I think we’re more the ‘and’. It’s makes things a bit more interesting and a bit more of a challenge.”

I’ve actually seen the acoustic show billed as an Exile On Main Street kind of experience.

“Well there you go. I really like that record, so to be considered in the same league as The Rolling Stones, yeah I’ll take that comparison for sure. I don’t know if we’ll deliver or not. We might be slightly more together live than the Stones were at that point. Not all of us have Keith’s constitution, shall we say.”

Regardless, it looks like the Celibate Rifles may well come close to having the Stones longevity.

“As a band, yeah. The guys are troopers. At the moment it’s probably as much fun as it’s ever been. It feels to me that we’re playing better than we ever have. That’s the one way I feel we fit into this Blues Festival thing. A lot of the blues guys, even myself, I’ve been playing guitar 24 years, and after 15 years or so you kind of work out what you’re doing on it. So I figure I can actually play reasonably well now. The old days were fun, and that was all good. These days it’s still fun, so that’s all good too.”

“It’s always been fun playing music, I reckon. That’s why I’m still doing it. That’s what we do as a band. We kind of bash it around and do our thing. I don’t know that we set the world on fire, but we certainly enjoy ourselves.”