Trashed Green Rooms & Karate Gone Wrong: DZ Deathrays Play 'Two Truths & A Lie'
"I think he was just trying to show us a roundhouse kick and I was just a doofus and standing in the way."
DZ Deathrays have kicked ass on stages all over the world but as irony would have it, one time drummer Simon Ridley got his own teeth kicked in. I guess what goes around comes around.
Having released their third album Bloody Lovely back in March this year, now the duo are gearing up to hit the Gold Coast’s Best Night Ever gig on 29 December. They’re headlining the show with their Dune Rats mates and Simon actually threw back to an insane, stressful day on tour with the Dunies back in 2016.
Truth
Simon: So one time, I must have been like six or seven? I got my two front teeth roundhouse-kicked out of my face on a tennis court.
Uppy: Holy crap.
S: Yeah.
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U: And they’re gone? Like you have fake teeth there now?
S: Oh no, they were baby teeth. I was pretty young. But they got kicked straight out!
U: Yeah, wow! So who did that?
S: A kid was saying he was good at karate, and my sister and I did not believe him. [laughs]
U: He was like, ‘challenge accepted!’
S: Yeah. Turned out he was really fucking good at karate!
U: So he aimed for your teeth and got your teeth and that was that.
S: I think he was just trying to show us a roundhouse kick and I was just a doofus and standing in the way.
U: Oh no, so did you have to go to hospital or anything? Were they ready to come out or they bled a lot?
S: Ummm… I think they were kinda premature but it was alright.
U: So how long were you missing those two front teeth before your adult teeth grew in? S: Oh man, like a year or so. Or maybe it was a few months.
U: So you have photos of you missing these two front teeth?
S: Yup.
U: Amazing. And did this kid get in trouble?
S: Umm he totally did, but I don’t think he did that much. We were kind of nagging him to do it.
U: You egged him on. And did you keep the teeth? Were they on the floor?!
S: I don’t know what happened to them! I think someone picked them up. I think my mum came and picked them up. It was like after school, at like tennis coaching?
U: So there were other people around?
S: Yeah.
U: I would’ve freaked out if I’d seen this, to be honest.
S: I was a little freaked out.
Truth
S: I used to collect beer coasters! There was an old lady that used to live across the street from me who had this pretty epic collection, and she ended up passing that onto me when she passed away. So I ended up having like thousands of beer coasters.
U: Oh wow.
S: Did that for a while as a little kid. Which was an odd hobby considering I didn’t go into pubs that much.
U: Oh, you were a kid! How old would you have been?
S: Probably like 15?
U: Oh that’s alright, you’re close to drinking age.
Truth
S: I have a story about the Dunies. We were all on tour together going through the US, and we had this big-ass sleeper bus, and our driver managed to get it stuck across Sunset Boulevard in LA for maybe like four hours.
U: WOW.
S: We were trying to go to a show. It was pretty nuts. It was literally this huge tour bus stuck. There was this really steep street he was trying to come down in this really long bus, and then it just ended up… like the head and the tail of it was stuck up on the road and the middle where all the wheels are, there was no road. It was just… he slid down this hill. All these crackheads and stuff started coming up and throwing shit under the bus to try and get it going and the driver just freaked out. We ended up having to leave him! When we put it on Instagram and stuff, it got picked up in Canada and circulated this footage of this bus stuck across all these lanes of traffic. Then the guy who owned the bus company ended up upgrading us to a better bus, because it started to get too much press.
U: Wow. I’m looking up this Insta now because I’m having trouble figuring out how it’s across two lanes…
S: So it was coming down onto a T-intersection onto Sunset, but he came down the hill too fast and the nose just dove into the bottom of the hill, the wheels were still off the ground. So the whole nose was just stuck over a whole lane-and-a-half of traffic. We couldn’t move it – it took two tow trucks to try and drag it down this hill.
U: That’s insane. How long ago was this? S: Like, two years ago?
U: Traffic would’ve been piling up! Sunset’s busy at the best of times.
S: It wasn’t too bad actually, it was pretty lucky for us. I think it was just before peak.
U: So you guys just stood back and watched for a while? S: Yeah we watched for a while then we had to bail for our gig, we had to hire all
these Ubers and stuff and a backline company to pick up our gear. We just had to leave the bus there and go to soundcheck.
U: Holy crap. That’s stressful.
S: That was a pretty funny day.
U: Everyone seems to have horror bus stories in America.
S: Well, that was just the beginning of our bus tour. We ended up getting [caught up in] a guy who rear-ended this poor lady’s Mazda in Philly. Grinded half her car away.
U: Geez, glad you guys made it out in one piece from that tour.
Lie
S: The very first tour we did in Australia as a support band, they thought we were really big party dogs because they’d seen the Jager video film clip. And after the very first show in Brisbane, we’d left and all these people ran in and trashed our green room. And the very next day on tour, we almost got kicked off it because they thought WE’D trashed it. That was pretty awkward. I don’t think they ever believed us that we didn’t.
U: So do you guys feel like you have this party boy brand that everyone thinks of you that you don’t necessarily live up to?
S: Yeah, I guess so. I guess when you’re in a band, some days you do wanna party, other days you’re keen to just chill.
U: So did you ever find out who did that? S: No, they just started letting people in. It was like a nightclub gig and they give you a room, that’s pretty much like a room you can hire if you wanted to bring your friends to a nightclub.
U: Oh yeah yeah.
S: So they just opened it up to the public and we had no idea, so when we went back the next day to get something we’d left, I think it was like a merch bag, the venue was FURIOUS at us. And the tour manager was very close to kicking us off the tour apparently.
U: Who were you on tour with?
S: Crystal Castles I think, 2008? It was our very first national tour.
U: Holy crap, 10 years ago!
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