GAMBLING ON THEIR OWN TERMS
Blunt’s George Baxter rolls the dice with the Philly Jays’ Berkfinger.
Philadelphia Grand Jury burst onto the scene earlier this year with their outrageously danceable hit single “Going To The Casino (Tomorrow Night)”. With the release of their debut album Hope Is For Hopers, the group has been slinging their brand of indie pop soul about with a great deal of enthusiasm, often taking very strange detours along the figurative highway to hell that is rock’n’roll. Heck, they’ve not only mashed up funk, punk, rock and indie sounds, they’ve been getting their name out into the world in some very unusual ways – who else can you think of that has played seven shows in one day on the back of a truck with a petrol powered generator? Vocalist/guitarist Simon ‘Berkfinger’ Berckelman says that the band is always going to be doing things their own way, for a myriad of reasons, foremost amongst them, he explains is the fact that these guys are firmly rooted in not aping trends that are coming out of the US and UK.
“Because of our isolation, we have more time to develop our ideas,” says the frontman. “I think that living in Australia, if you’re going to try and get overseas and be an international band, you’ve really had to go through so much shit just to be in a band in the first place. I just want to be able to play music for a job, all over the world; I don’t need to be huge and I think that being huge involves making a lot of compromises that I don’t want to make – I’d just like to be a cool, small kinda band, all over the world, if you know what I mean.”
Berckelman and company have taken a long route to get to where they are in their ‘little band’, having spent time as slap bass playing funk fiends (in fact, Berkfinger and bassist MC Bad Genius first saw their new drummer, 54-year-old Calvin Welch at a funk gig many years ago, long before they gained his services for their own beat needs) and indie popsters – the singer explains that rock is now the obvious choice for the group.
“I’ve been in a really twee indie pop band and I don’t wanna do that kinda stuff any more. I don’t want to do things that I’ll regret. We’re just escaping from all of the demons that we have in our musical past. We’ve never played rock before and it’s been really exciting. Most bands and musicians, when you turn 18 or 19, you just start rocking straight away, but we’ve been in all these other weird directions before we got here. It’s a hidden blessing, you know.”
The singer says that at the end of the day, the band will always be staying true to their vision as artists, not as a simple single writing machine looking for the next big hit.
“We don’t write for the radio, but I basically just want to write songs that get to the point. I like to think that what we’re doing can make it on the radio, but we aren’t going to compromise ourselves. We love certain aspects of pop music and just experiment with that.”
