Avail

Richmond Virginia, hometown of Avail, is a long way from Australia, but even over the phoneline, band vocalist Tim cannot hide his enthusiasm. The guy’s have been mixing their new album, tentatively titled Over the James, and looking forward to getting downunder to support Lagwagon on tour. Here’s the result of the few minutes I got to quiz Tim about life on the road, their new recording and the upcoming tour.

I’m supposing that you will all be pretty hung over for the first date of the Australian tour?

I’m assuming!(laughs) New Years Eve, how could you not be. And evidently we get to camp out at that festival, and get to camp with all the bands, and they have a bar and everything. They have like, a ten man tent for us, and with fifteen hours of jet-lag and then New Years eve for the first time ever that any of us have been in Australia.

Copious amounts of alcohol?

I’d imagine. We’ll see what happens! Some of us are light weights and some aren’t!

There is a big buzz here at the moment about the tour. Are you looking forward to the shows?

My god. We’re totally excited! It’s almost frustrating, ‘cause we have so much going on trying to get the record finished, and the layout. And with the holidays coming up, we don’t really have much time to anticipate going over there. Which actually might be kind of cool, ‘cause suddenly, in nine days we’re just going to be, like, lifted off the ground and thrown over. But everybody is totally excited. It was pretty much a last minute decision to go with Lagwagon offering.

Is Australia the first stop?

Yeah. Australia is the first. It will be the beginning of about six or seven months of touring, starting over there, then coming back over here and touring the U.S and then Europe and then the U.S again and then hopefully going back to Australia and Japan for the first time.

So, have you toured overseas before?

We toured Europe twice before.

How did that go?

Great. You know, the first time we went over, a friend of ours set up the tour, by the name of Paula who lives in England and she was very sceptical, and we’d never played overseas. We were playing in squats and youth centres and shit like that. It just went extremely well, it was extremely exciting.

Could you give us a brief band history?

We all grew up in the suburbs of Washington D.C, and got the band together in the late eighties. We didn’t really do anything serious until the early nineties when we put out our first record on our own and just started touring in the really underground circuit in the U.S starting on the East coast and eventually making it to the West coast. We had line-up changes and shit like that, and eventually we got signed by Lookout Records who offered to re-press some of the stuff we put out on our own, and it just started to take off from there. It became more of an obsession from there than it did in the beginning.

What’s the strangest thing that’s ever happened to you while on the road?

Shit, I don’t even know where to start. All kinds of weird shit. I can’t think of one thing off the top of my head. Just give me a minute. Um, I don’t know, everything from being in a waffle house in a small town in North Carolina, the lady next to you drunk as hell, singing Bob Dylan songs and throwing up on your food. To playing a show in Phoenix Arizona, and the security guard after the show is drunk as hell and he comes up to the van with a gun in his hand, and he’s so drunk that he forgets that it’s there. He say’s "Where’s the singer?". Like, I go, "I’m here." He say’s "you remind me of Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden, and hands me a hundred dollar bill.

What are the main issues that AVAIL write about? Are they localised issues or Governmental or anything at all?

If something effects me personally, then I’ll write about it. You know, a girlfriend kicks me to the fucking kerb, for what ever reason, and we write the music. Um.. it may not be completely about that, but, I know it’s stupid to admit to writing about relationships but I don’t even care. If I’m in the park, say, and the police arrest a homeless guy, I feel that it directly affects me, it bothers me, it frustrates me. So I write about it.

Has AVAIL’s style changed much throughout their history?

It’s gotten heavier. Which is not the tendency for most bands. The new record is much heavier but it has more hooks in it. We’ve always been, like, a rock band, never like a punk band like we’re usually labelled. Shit, you could listen to Hootie and the Blowfish. You could take a Hootie song and add some distortion and play really fast. That’d be us. Shit, that’s embarrassing for me to say, but true.

What can the Australian punters expect from an AVAIL live performance?

Oh boy, I don’t know. The crowds here are …. rowdy, and we tend to be extremely rowdy as well. There is a lot of energy between the audience and the band. Hopefully we’ll get to do the same over there as well, unless one of us gets a hernia or something. We have a tendency to hurt ourselves a lot, and we’re getting a little older now and after all these years it’s a little harder to move as well as we used to. But we’ll give it our best. See you there.

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