Better Lovers Kick Off Australian Tour This Friday: The Band Share Their Most Memorable Moments So Far

Better Lovers finally touch down in Australia this week, kicking off their first ever Australian tour this Friday in Brisbane.

It’s been a fast rise for a band that, on paper, reads like a heavy music supergroup, with Greg Puciato on vocals alongside Jordan Buckley and Will Putney on guitars, plus Steve Micciche and Clayton ‘Goose’ Holyoak holding down the low end.

Better Lovers have already built a reputation for shows that feel unpredictable in the best way, add in support from Split Chain and Blind Girls, and these rooms are about to get very loud, very quickly.

To mark the tour, we asked Will Putney and Jordan Buckley to dig into their most memorable Better Lovers moments to date, from massive hometown sets to craziness in tiny rooms, to a month long ‘sleepover’ recording their full length.

Will Putney & Jordan Buckley’s Most Memorable Better Lovers Moments To Date

Will Putney: I’ll start with a show we did in New York City with Poison the Well and Glassjaw, it was one of the last dates on the tour we did last Spring. We did the Paramount which is such a beautiful venue, and it was kind of just a perfect show. Every band rocked, Teenage Wrist was on that show too. But it was getting towards the end of the tour and it was the last Glassjaw show I believe. We had some shows with Poison the Well after, but that was the last day with everyone and the vibe in that room was just so good that night. The show was crazy, there were almost 3,000 people there, and we had an awesome set. It was so good coming home after the end of some pretty extensive touring and seeing a lot of friends and family. too It was just a really good show, a perfect show all around. I always kind of look back on that one like: “well, that was definitely good!”. Another memorable show would have to be Johnny [Muench] from Greyhaven’s onstage tattoo on our last tour. We played in Liverpool…wait, was it Liverpool? Liverpool or the day after.

Jordan Buckley: That one was in…what’s that place called…Huddersfield?

Will: Huddersfield, that’s right. We played Liverpool the day before, or two days before, there might have been a day off in between. And the bass player from Greyhaven had a couple of drinks and a couple scuffles through the night. We gave him the pet name “Tyson”. He had a black eye.

Jordan: He kept getting punched. He just kept getting punched.

Will: (laughs) I didn’t want to say it, but yeah…

Jordan: I’ll say it!

Will: I don’t think he won any of his quarrels that day. We were calling him “Tyson” and it was, again, kind of coming towards the end of that tour. We had spent a lot of time on the road with Greyhaven, and we had a buddy who was a tattoo artist who was in town. So we cooked up the idea that Johnny would get tattooed on stage. And while they played their last song that day, he got a pair of boxing gloves tattooed on his leg. It was just a really funny moment. It was a fun show for everybody. Kind of one of those perfect days you wish for where dumb and crazy shit happens, everyone has a good set, and I think that show was sold out too. The UK is one of our best places to play. Those two memories, for me, are just like: man, if every day was like this, I could do this forever.

Jordan: I think my favourite Better Lovers moment was the recording process of our full-length. When we recorded it we were snowed in, we were in this forest that had a reverse-Shining vibe, not a scary vibe. My kid is 10 years old, and he asked me when sleepovers end. He’s like: “when do you stop having sleepovers?”. I thought about that specific recording, because the recording studio and where you sleep is in the same location. And it just felt like a month-long giggly sleepover. I would wake up to someone saying something funny and I would fall asleep to someone saying something funny. And I remember telling my kid: “I don’t really think sleepovers stop because I think I just had a month-long one at Will’s in January and February”. That is truly my favourite Better Lovers memory to date. Touring is great. We have been very lucky, I’d have trouble picking out a bad show. There’s just so many good shows that sold out so quickly, and people were just so welcoming to us. And that’s what is actually kind of fun because then sometimes you do have the rare show that may not seem like it’s going to be great, but it’ll surprise you. I think we played Birmingham, Alabama on Easter and there were less than a hundred people at the show, but it actually almost became the most fun show because you’re like: “oh, I remember these! I used to do these for 20 years, this is cool!”. But all the shows have been great, you can just pick ’em out of a hat. I am actually literally looking at laminates right now because I frame ’em and I hang ’em on the wall. And it’s like: “oh, yep, that one was good! Yep, that one was good! Yep, that one was awesome, that one was awesome”. A standout one though I will add in here is the record store show, we once played in a record store.

Will: Oh, that was good!

Jordan: It was literally just a store, they had to move everything when you came in and you set up on the floor. And it was tiny!

Will: You could fit about a hundred people in there. It was Rough Trade in New York. Now they have a bigger room where you can have a couple of hundred people, but it was right in Times Square near Rockefeller Center. A hundred people get in, you get a copy of the record and then we played in the middle of the record store. It’s not like: “oh, we put a little stage up”. They just said to us, “yeah, you’ll set up here”. We’re looking around, and I’m like: “…are you sure? Have you seen a Better Lovers show? Do you have insurance? You don’t care about these records?”. And they’re just down for it! That was really good, it was awesome. I remember standing on the cashier’s desk, Greg is being crowd-surfed out of the building into subway traffic. And you know what was cool about that show too? That was the show right before our headliner started, and it was the first time we were gonna play so many new songs. So we were all stressed because we have, I don’t know, seven new songs that we’d never played before. It was a lot of new stuff to do at once. We only had a short set for this record store, but the show was just so fun and crazy that we kept calling out songs. We’re like: “you want another one?”. And then we’re just running through all of the new songs and old songs. We added probably 20 minutes to that set, and I left that just being like: “oh man, we just nailed all these songs!”. And because I wasn’t expecting it, it took the pressure off playing those songs, and we just did ‘em on a whim. I was like: “damn, our band’s pretty good!”. It was really fun. And leading into day one of our headliner after that, it was like: yeah, this is going to be awesome.

Jordan: Another one I also liked was our secret show in Buffalo. We had our Christmas festival last year and then we had a pre-show the night before at Rec Room, a smaller venue, but it was pretty much with all the side projects, End played, Greg [Puciato’s] solo thing played. And then at the end we just got up and played the four song EP. Nobody knew we were playing that night, and it was so fun. As soon as End finished, we just unravelled our banner and people were like: “oh, this is going to be fucking cool!”. That was a lot of fun too. Like I said, I could go through every show and be like: well, here’s why this show ruled, and this show until we went through all of them! But isn’t it weird how the smaller shows always end up being the most crazy and the most memorable? We have played good big shows too. The New York show that Will mentioned earlier was amazing. And Sick New World, that festival in Las Vegas, I remember we had an absolutely fucking insane show there. And our Christmas festivals are always just insanity from beginning to end too.

Better Lovers Australian tour