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Interviews : “We really wanted to do something special” – An Interview with Kim Benzie (Dead Letter Circus)

By on March 1, 2017

Dead Letter Circus 2016

Brisbane’s favourite progressive/alternative rock sons Dead Letter Circus have released a selection of re-recorded and re-imagined versions of previously released songs before, when they did their Stand Apart EP back in 2014, so it will come as no surprise to fans that they are doing so again. However, what will surprise rock punters across the nation and around the world is the sheer scope of the soon to be released The Endless Mile. It’s an epic full-length release, featuring startlingly different versions of every track from their classic debut EP, which is celebrating its ten year anniversary this year, plus a selection of other tracks from their illustrious back catalogue given incredible re-workings. EP track Are We Closer even gets a full-blown reggae workover, and it works an absolute treat.

Enigmatic frontman Kim Benzie says that far greater effort was put into the new record than into the Stand Apart EP, and feels that it’s a greater representation of this side of their career.

“We’ve dabbled with the re-imagining before, but it was more as a quirky novelty than anything,” he explains, “we didn’t put our normal pressure on ourselves to go as hard as we normally would. This one’s a full studio album, where hopefully we’ve taken every song to the same point as what we did the first time we wrote it. To our standards, which are pretty brutally high, when it comes to songwriting.

“It’s mainly the emotional thing too, we’ve always been ‘chasing the goosebumps’, and our way to get that in the past was just to surge with intensity and pack all of the emotion into a bullet, basically, and take it like a shot. But in this more spacious environment, it’s a much different experience, and how you get there to evoke that same feeling, it took us a little while to get it right.”

On top of that, to do an album like this almost requires the musicians in the band to, to quote Yoda, ‘unlearn what they have learned’, and start all over again at the start. “To get that tone and that poetry, I had to learn how to sing in a completely different way, my lower register, I kind of had to find the key to unlock it I guess, and extract that level of emotion. Once it happened, I just loved it, it was an incredible experience. You can be intense without being crazy full-on, without going up to 11.”

There were a number of inspirations behind creating and releasing The Endless Mile: the tantalising taste of doing re-interpretations of their existing tracks that they had back in 2014, and the anniversary of the release of that debut EP. Plus there was a more philosophical and existential side to it, and the more simple idea of the pure challenge of it as musicians.

“Because the anniversary came up, we really wanted to do something special, a bit outside the box,” he recalls, “because we’d done the reinventing the songs thing before, we wanted to bring that concept forward. Because we’ve always wanted to do that, we thought it might happen after we got five albums in and we do a ‘greatest hits’ sort of thing.

“There was also a personal challenge, we were wondering on the theory of, can songs exist in two separate worlds? That was always in the back of our minds, if we could tackle these songs as if we were writing them for the first time and if we were a different band. And the actual practise of it is really hard, when you actually go in to do it. You don’t have any of your regular tricks, and as musicians it really pushed us.”

Benzie feels that the whole ten year anniversary thing has really crept up on him unawares, and that it simply does not feel like a decade since that release came out. “No, it doesn’t,” he states definitively, “it sort of feels like maybe five years, but definitely not ten. What I found interesting was that, when we got to the end and we were mixing them, every song was like a vortex we dived into and swallowed us up for a little while, when you hear the whole thing, the songs sit next to each other like they fit into an album now, even though some of the songs are from different albums.”

He promises that, when they play this album live (and the tour starts very shortly), he and the band will be far better prepared than when they last took a release like this out on the road. “Last time, we did a rehearsal in the venue, the day before the tour started,” he remembers, “people were still finalising their parts, and that was the only jam we had when we did it. This is going to be a lot more refined than the previous experience.”

Thursday 2nd March – New Globe Theatre, Brisbane, QLD
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Friday 3rd March – The Factory Theatre, Sydney, NSW
GET TICKETS FROM SEATADVISOR

Saturday 4th March – Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle NSW
GET TICKETS FROM TICKETBOOTH
GET TICKETS FROM OZTIX

Friday 10th March – Max Watts, Melbourne, VIC
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Saturday 11th March – Uni Bar, Adelaide, SA
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WA SHOWS ADDED!
Friday 17th March – Prince of Wales, Bunbury, WA
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Saturday 18th March – Badlands Bar, WA
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DLC

About

Rod Whitfield is a Melbourne-based writer and retired musician who has been writing about music since 1995. He has worked for Team Rock, Beat Magazine, themusic.com.au, Heavy Mag, Mixdown, The Metal Forge, Metal Obsession and many others. He has written and published his memoirs of his life and times in the music biz, and also writes books, screenplays, short stories, blogs and more.