King Parrot Fly the North American Skies!

Two years ago, Aussie weirdos King Parrot’s debut full-length, Bite Your Head Off, unloaded itself on that continent.  Candlelight Records then released the album Stateside late last year, and the band of screwy-grindy-thrash-loving dudes have been flapping back and forth between land masses to support their renewed new-act status.
We had a chance to ask King Parrot about everything tour related, just in time for their Pittsburgh show (tonight!), and check out the list of remaining tour dates below the interview.  If King Parrot head your way in the next couple months, support!

How big of a deal is it to tour North America?  How difficult is it to make the trip, have gear available, make travel arrangements to get to all the shows, etc?

For us it has been the next logical step.  We’ve toured Australia a lot off the back of our debut album Bite Your Head Off. It was only released in the US earlier this year so we are a new band in North America and its cool. It’s like starting out again, and because of the way we perform and our accents, people look at us sideways and confused. It was like that in Australia at the beginning too, we’re a weird band, its a pretty confronting show but at the same time it’s always light hearted and fun. The music is obviously pretty extreme so we just try and put on a great entertaining high-energy show, and not take ourselves too seriously.

Obviously a lot of planning goes into coming over here, so that’s why we’ve done extensive tours and made the most of our time here. It seems to be paying off. Visas and travel arrangements are always time consuming but essential, and we now have great people working with the band here in the US that makes it somewhat easier. We love touring and we just can’t do it this extensively in Australia, so we need to be here and hopefully in Europe soon too. We are focusing on the US and Canada right now though and hopefully Europe next year.

What have you enjoyed about touring with King Parrot?  What have audiences been like?

I think we all get along pretty well, we’ve had a few little line-up changes along the way, but the guys in the band now all loving touring. We are all good friends too, so that really helps. The fact that we get to travel around the world, play in a band and perform all the time is really awesome and is a dream come true for us. We’re very lucky and don’t take this opportunity for granted. The audiences have been great so far, we’ve played in front of 5 people and we’ve played in front of 30,000 people and I’ts always fun. We just try to be consistent every night. I’m hoping that once people know what to expect at our shows over here in North America, we can start seeing some really crazy stuff like we get in Australia. I’m pretty sure it’s not too far away; some of the audiences back home are insane. There’s been all sorts of injuries, ambulances, and blood. Lots of blood. Hahahaha.

How much preparation/rehearsal do you do before touring?

We rehearse a lot, and we tour a lot, so we are constantly working, writing or practicing. It hasn’t really been too long between shows in the last few years so that helps us keep the set pretty tight. Recently we’ve been spending time writing our second album so it’s been great to get some new material together. We haven’t had much time to do that over the last few years, so it’s been a lot of fun. I can’t wait to start playing some of it live.

What equipment (musical and/or personal) do you take with you on tour?

We take all the basics that we would need like amps and drums etc. I usually have a few microphones, We take a bunch of spare guitars, strings, skins etc. The way we choose to perform requires spares of everything!

How long are your sets, generally, and what songs do you really like playing?

It all depends if we are supporting or headlining, but it’s usually between 30 minutes and an hour. Usually the best received songs and the ones we enjoy most are “Shit on the Liver”, “Dead End” and “Bozo” as they are the songs we have videos for and the ones people know.

What does King Parrot do when you’re not touring?

Any job that will let us go on tour whenever we want! We’re lucky that we haven’t really had to work day jobs in the last 6 months. But the time will come when we have to do it again probably. Hopefully not for too long though, we want to go on tour as much as possible.

What would you say are your primary heavy music influences?  How much hip hop influence do you think is present in your music (I think I hear it in some of the vocal delivery)?

There’s maybe a little bit of hip-hop in there, lots of old punk, rock, and metal influences, I like older stuff like Eyehategod, Poison Idea and Napalm Death and anything in that vein, many of our influences come from there. We certainly like to listen to and be influenced by a wide variety of music. Our bass player Slatts was playing in a country band until recently, and we have all had varied musical endeavours in the past, so we’re not strictly a metal band.

After you get home from this tour, what’s the next step for King Parrot?

We’ll be home in Australia in November for a short 6 show tour to showcase some of our new material to the audiences back home, then we’re back to North America for the ‘Punk Rock But Kinda Not’ tour with Down, Orange Goblin and Bl’ast on the west coast of North America. We plan to record in January and make a new video too, hopefully the new record will be out in the first half of 2015… then I guess we go on tour for a long time!

King Parrot Tour Dates