FRANKENBOK - A Show 25 Years In The Making
Words by: Tom Wilson @thetomwilsonexperiment - Sense Music Media | Wednesday 9th November 2022
“… FRANKENBOK wiped the floor with SYSTEM OF A DOWN that night.”
Well, the secret’s out. In the lead up to FRANKENBOK’s mammoth 25th anniversary show – which will see five different lineups of the band take the stage at a single gig – the Melbourne bruisers have revealed something special. The Ex Files Vol. 1 is a collection of songs from deep within the BOK archives (or Azza’s attic – I didn’t clarify) that have never seen the light of day, along with a live recording of their 2002 lineup absolutely flogging SYSTEM OF A DOWN at their own show. Vocalist Dan McDougall and his mighty beard joined SENSE for a chat …
You’ve teased on Facebook that you guys have a big surprise coming …
We sure do! We’re full of surprises at the moment! … It’s actually really fucking cool. I was, and have been, a huge FRANKENBOK fan well before I joined the band. My first band, when I moved to Melbourne, were playing with FRANKENBOK when they had a drum machine back in the real early days of The Art House and shit. I’ve been into the guys ever since. The original lineup of FRANKENBOK, to me, that’s the lineup that I love the most, right? After I joined the band, I kind of joined one of my favourite bands, so after that point it doesn’t really matter, but the original lineup, to me, is quintessentially FRANKENBOK. Because we’re doing this 25th anniversary show, I asked Azza … “Have you got any memorabilia? Just old shit. Stuff that I can put up online to help promote the gig?” So he brings over these massive boxes full of old photos and CDs and fucking fliers … Just old shit. He's got so much stuff.
So I’m going through it all, and I’m going through all the CDs, and I pick this one up, and I’m like, “What the fuck’s this?” I look on the back, and it’s got Demo 2002 – Recording at Cutting Edge Studios with Richie Poate, who is the guitarist for DREADNAUGHT. He had a studio back in the day. And then all these song titles, and it’s got the Roadrunner Records label on it, and there’s all these songs, and I’m looking at the song titles going “I don’t know any of these songs. What the fuck is this?” So that was the cover, and I managed to find the CD in amongst a whole bunch of shit, and I stick it in the CD player in my ute the next day when I’m at work, and I’m like, “What the fuck?” So immediately it starts off with a song that ended up on the second record, with the new singer. Basically [this was] a demo recording that they’d done with Hutchy, the original vocalist, not long before he actually left the band. So there’s all these songs, about half of them, that ended up on the second record, on Blood Oath, with the second singer. But these versions have got the original vocalist on it. Completely different – completely different lyrics, completely different everything. I’m like, get fucked. Then there’s four or five tracks that are completely new, no one’s ever heard them before. Songs that never saw the light of day back in the day, and it sounds amazing. It sounds great. I was like, “Fuck, this is like a lost album of stuff that no one’s ever heard before.” For dudes who are into the band from back in the day, and because we’ve started posting all this stuff, all these guys are coming out of the woodwork – guys who were into FRANKENBOK way back in the early 2000s. I know a lot of them are going to shit their pants when they see this and hear it, because it’s great. It’s fucking great … I’m listening to it as a fan of the band, like I’m privy to this album that no one’s heard, man. I’m like, “This is so cool. This has got to see the light of day.”
Pictured: FRANKENBOK in the early days.
On top of that, I also found a live recording that they did when they supported SYSTEM OF A DOWN back at the Palace in 2002, and the story goes – I wasn’t there – but the story goes that FRANKENBOK wiped the floor with SYSTEM OF A DOWN that night. Like, everyone said that they had an absolute blinder and SYSTEM OF A DOWN had a terrible fucking show. I’ve always heard this rumour, and then I put on this CD, and I’m like, “Fuck, there you go – here’s the proof!” … It’s the original lineup in full flight. There’s never been a proper live recording come out of the original lineup, so that’s coming out as well. So we’re putting together this CD that’s got seven unreleased tracks from the original lineup, plus eleven live songs. It’s cool, man.
The anniversary show is a big deal. You’ve got a lot of people that have made up this band over the years. Was there need to mend fences with anyone? Without meaning to get specific – we don’t do drama.
No, no, no. I guess it’s just very serendipitous that the 25th anniversary sort of coincided with some fences being mended relatively recently. Hutchy and Azza didn’t speak for many years, and they’ve just reconnected in the last year or so. I guess, yeah, this wouldn’t really be possible if that hadn’t happened. There’s never really been any major bad blood as far as I know – just that people have come and gone – but yeah, everyone’s been really keen and really on board with the whole idea, and the fact that we’re actually able to pull this off, I’ve never heard of a band being able to do that. A band that has five different lineups, and then getting them all back together again on the one night, is pretty fucking crazy. And the fact that trying to organise even four or five dudes to get somewhere, let alone twelve, and everybody be free, and no one said, “Sorry man, I can’t do that night. I’ve got something on.” … The fact that everybody – so far, anyway – has actually agreed to be there. We’ve started the rehearsals, and that’s been a full-blown trip, man. Timmy, this is the first rehearsal he’s done with us, so this is the first time I’ve played with Timmy since 2013, I guess – nearly ten years. And we just did Last Ditch Redemption, which is a song … it’s a very Timmy-driven song with the vocals, and that was a trip-out … Just hearing all these old sounds that we haven’t heard for a long time. When Hutchy first turned up, and Mick was playing drums, I was like a kid in a candy shop. I get to hear the original vocalist again, and he was fucking killing it. So far, what we’ve done has been a real trip-out.
How do you see how metal has evolved in the time that FRANKENBOK has been around?
Well, that’s the interesting thing. One of the things that I noticed about this recording – the new old one – is that this was recorded twenty years ago, and so, back then, there was no click track, there was no recording music to a grid, it was just in the studio, live. That’s what we tried to do – that’s what we did do – on the last record. We didn’t want any click track, we didn’t want any overdubs, we wanted to be as live as we possibly could, and I guess that’s the one thing that’s really changed in those twenty years, is that metal … it’s why I don’t listen to a lot of it these days … It’s almost more formulaic and unreal as digital and techno music, with what you can do these days and what bands sort of do in the studio. I think that’s one thing that has definitely changed in the last twenty years, you know? When you start putting music to a click track, when you start recording to a click track, that means that you can edit and alter and change everything, because you can take one part of the song [where] you didn’t quite play the part right here, but you’ve got the same thing gridded and in time, so you can cut and paste … There’s a lot of cutting and pasting and a lot of stuff done in post, not a lot of band. You can then do all kinds of crazy shit, right? So … yeah, that’s one thing that sort of puts me off modern metal. I prefer the old-school stuff.
FRANKENBOK’s 25th anniversary show will take place at The Tote in Melbourne on Saturday December 10th.
The Ex Files Vol. 1 is out November 30th on Fair Dinkum Records.
