Why The Used Are Going To Shut Up & Play The Hits

Touring the globe constantly, playing your music across countries, continents and hemispheres must become a blur after a while. Most international bands who’ve been around for more than a decade and have visited Australian shores multiple times have no idea exactly how many times they’ve been here. Bert McCracken, frontman of US rock act The Used, really doesn’t know. And the strange thing about that is he has lived in Sydney for the past five years.

“That’s a really good question. I would guess, somewhere between five and forty times, but no more than forty,” he laughs.

He certainly does remember the first time, however. “That was in 2005,” he continues, “it was one of the most important moments of my life. I met my future wife, with who I’ve had two beautiful daughters. One of the big moments in life.

“Now I’ve built myself a beautiful home here, I feel so lucky to live here. I strongly suggest that if you’re American, consider basing yourself in Australia, to get away from the perils of the orange monster in the White House.” He laughs again.

The reason his band is coming out to join him in Australia shortly is for the Good Things festival - a massive line-up of international and local rock, punk, metal and hardcore acts that is touring the Eastern Seaboard in early December. One of the key drawcards of the festival is a headlining set by US punk act The Offspring, who absolutely took the world by storm back in the mid-'90s with their album Smash. Offspring will be performing that album in full on these dates, and McCracken seems just as excited about seeing that unfold as he is about his own band playing, both in terms of hearing the album itself and of it being a throwback to a very different time in our musical evolution.

“I think it’s such a cool moment for nostalgia,” he opines. “We were kids of the '90s, we get to experience something that only we did in its original form. It was really nasty, it was when music was still raw. 2000 to 2010 saw ten years of confused, digitally produced, dishonest stuff. I’m not talking about it all, there was a huge movement of music that went in the opposite direction. But overall, it was a bad time."

"Thank goodness grunge came along and killed that off.”

“Take Smash for example, it was a punk rock, rock‘n’roll record. That’s what’s cool about this type of music, and I think there’s a resurgence of this. People want to hear the human side of it, we want to feel the struggle, we want to be a part of something that’s not digitally perfect, let’s be human for a while.”

Another great thing about that era of music was that it was the main contributing factor in the downfall of the big hair movement of the '80s and early '90s, says McCracken. “Yeah that was the most misogynistic, most glamorously disgusting thing that could have happened to music,” he laughs again. “I like a lot of Kurt Cobain’s thoughts at the time, about just how disgusting almost every song was, being about trying to get a woman to sleep with you, trying to get the pretty girl to touch your weiner.

“I’m not going to say there wasn’t a lot of great singers in that movement, give credit where credit’s due, but yeah, thank goodness grunge came along and killed that off.”

Something else McCracken struggles with a little is remembering exactly how many albums his own band has released over the course of its 17-odd years of existence (it’s seven studio records), but one thing he does know is that The Used will cover as many fan favourites and as much of their recorded career as they can, even for a festival set.

“I can’t even remember,” he says, “we’ve got a lot. We’ve always been the type of band that is so proud of the entire catalogue.

“At a festival, everybody deserves to hear their favourite song. So that’s what we’ll do. But we’ll have to ask the band playing after us if we can a bit more time!”