Interview by Kris Peters
One of the most enduring qualities of music - or punk music more specifically - is that as a listener or musician you don't feel the obligation to grow up.
Ever.
It's actually expected of you that your morals and beliefs will differ from the rest of society, and your outlook on life and sense of humour practically remain the same thing. So why fight it? That would be more difficult than conforming, and we all know that's not going to happen.
Just ask the three Jeans that make up Mean Jeans - Billy, Houndy and Junior - a trio of friends/band mates who have stumbled through life since even before starting the band 15 years ago, and they couldn't be happier.
With a new album, Blasted, having recently hit the shelves and an almost completed Australian tour with good mates The Chats life couldn't be much better for Mean Jeans.
Just don't ask them if they are ever going to grow up.
Making a mental note to avoid that question, HEAVY sat down earlier today with Billy Jeans to catch up on things, starting with the reception for Blasted, which came out on February 9.
"Awesome," he smiled. "I feel good about it. I'm judging primarily from social media and whatnot, but everybody's sending text messages… I saw a bunch of reviews that the label sent that were all in German, so I don't even know what they said (laughs). It's been a good reception and I think while we were making this record I could tell that it had a little more cohesion and was more true to what Mean Jeans is supposed to be about at the core."
We ask Billy to go deeper into the album musically.
"We never have and never will stray from about a four-power chord progression structure," he offered. "We pretty much keep it Ramones simple and then see what we can sprinkle on top of there, but with this one we had… the band wasn't on hiatus per se, but we actually were living in three different cities when COVID struck. We had been touring in the US up until the end of 2020, so it was a week before the pandemic occured, and we had a support tour with The Chats on the books, and we had never met these guys. That got postponed and postponed and postponed and rescheduled, so we spent most of the pandemic anticipating the tour. We kept booking stuff, even though no one knew when it would make sense to be doing so. Ultimately, it took over two years for the tour to happen, during which time Mean Jeans were not really functional. So the stuff I was writing, I had to put out a solo record called Funky Punks In Space, but mostly because I knew there was no chance of the songs seeing the light of day with Mean Jeans. Then we hadn't played a gig in two years, and we did a six-week US tour with The Chats, and they took us to Australia a couple of months later and after that, after about 10 weeks of touring, we hopped off the stage, and we were like, okay, that was really fun. We gotta bang out another album."
In the full interview, Billy talks more about the songs on the album, addresses the press releases claim that Blasted is a "weird, wonderful and wacky album", which of the tracks is his personal favourite, the current tour with The Chats and how it has been going, the benefits of having time off between shows to be able to drive to shows, maintaining a sense of humour and more.