INTERVIEW: Wheatus lead singer Brendan B Brown

BRENDAN B Brown, the lead singer of US Pop Rock band Wheatus, caught up with Quays News entertainment reporter Dan Willis recently and discussed their roots, favourite town to play in and… what’s next for Wheatus?

It was announced last week that Wheatus will undertake a UK club tour this spring as well as playing as special guests of Busted on their upcoming UK & Irish arena tour.

Brendan said even though they’re stoked to be supporting Busted, they’ve also got their sights set on releasing a new album very soon.

“We’re trying to launch ‘Album 7’ which keeps getting interrupted by tours,” Brendan said.

Wheatus are about to embark on a 35 day run of shows. However, the band has changed since it began in the late 90s – Brendan is the last remaining original member from the group which performed their infamous debut hit ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ back in 2000.

“We have continuously evolved since Teenage Dirtbag.

“The albums are done with the goal of reinventing the whole thing each time… which is why we don’t have a label or management.

“When you do it that way, it takes longer to make something you’re very interested in, something that reflects a discovery, you have to forfeit certain comforts. That’s always been the plan though.

“Had we wanted to be in the spotlight more I believe we’d have simply remade our first album as many times as we could before going crazy, but we opted for something more personally stimulating, having caught a glimpse of the other way early on. We’re still self contained though, DIY has been a constant.”

For an American band, you would expect with the amount of breathtaking cities they would have visited around the world that their favourite place to play would never have been in the UK – however according to Brendan, the band and his favourite place to play is right here in Britain.

“It’s a three-way draw between Glasgow, Milton Keynes and Holyhead,” he explains. The best gig he felt the band had performed was also in the UK, and said that Belfast ‘kinda took the cake’ when they performed there last autumn. So much for living the rockstar life eh?

When asked about how he feels music has evolved since he first began in the industry, Brendan said he was quite happy about the way it’s changed.

“It’s become more integrated, sonically and culturally. I’m happy with that. It’s pushed us to try to incorporate more diverse instrumentation.”

Brendan used the example how in their last record The Valentine LP (2013) Wheatus used three Japanese taiko drums and a six-pieced tuned chromatic Senegalese drum kit to lay the basic track for 32 other percussive tracks.

For the future, Brendan explains that Wheatus will be focusing on developing their new album, ‘Album 7’ and says it’s “the heaviest the band has produced yet, but contains a lot of jazz harmonic arrangement”.

Brendan said: “We may actually play one of the songs on tour this time, we’ll see.

The band are expected to announce a release date for the anticipated album sometime later in the year.

Wheatus begin a series of UK headline club shows on May 5 with a sold-out date at Leicester Cookie and will also join Busted on their ‘Pigs Can Fly’ tour which begins on May 11 – tickets are still available, so get them quick!