Features

Banner Pilot joined us for a little chat at Groezrock 2015. We discussed Murphy’s law, talked about new material coming up, maybe even a metal ska album (?) and embarrassed new member Jeff Matika!

PRT: Hi! Welcome at Groezrock guys! How are you this fine day?

Thanks! We’re doing fine! It’s great to be here!

PRT: Well, third time’s a charm. I don’t know whether you know this, but we have already tried to meet up with you three times! Once at Groezrock two years ago, then at Fest in Gainesville and this time we finally managed to get a hold of you.
Is it always this hard to talk to Banner Pilot J?

No, well, I don’t think so… Normally we’re not too hard to get hold of. You were probably just in bad luck. (laughs)

PRT: Talking about bad luck! You’ve had some bad luck yourselves the last couple of days, right?

Yeah, this tour has been awesome. The first seven days we were able to hit up a lot of countries we hadn’t visited before. We got to see Italy for the first time, we got to see Hungary, Slovenia was awesome. Things went perfectly and then there was these 48hrs of just… shit!

Going into Austria and Germany there was this series of errors that happened. We’re in the van and we’re trying to edge our way into the next lane to pull off to exit to get gas or something and these two truckers wouldn’t let us in. So we kind of nudged in a little bit. And they kept moving and they scratched our van. So, we just pulled off, thought we’d handle it like adults. And then suddenly…
“DADADAAAA!!!” There were screaming Germans on both sides of the van, they ripped the doors open on both sides, holding up fists. It was really like in a movie where the villain was right there opening the door. And then… “No! There’s two of ‘em… Aaah!” They even ripped our mirror off of the car. It was pretty intense, we were really fearing it would end up in a fist fight or something. So, we pulled off and we thought they were gonna follow us, but luckily there was a cop there. So they kept going.

PRT: Wow, a little bit of luck was on your side then!

Yeah, that could’ve gotten a lot weirder!
So, that happened and we were like: “Okay, welcome to Austria, guys!”

Then we kept going and about twenty minutes later all of a sudden the van started making these weird noises, we pulled off and the van completely died. So we’re stuck on the Autobahn and there were cars ripping by at 110 miles an hour. We were sitting there and the sun was going down and we had to call a tow truck. It came and well…  We got towed and that was actually a kind of fun way to tour! (laughs) Luckily, we got picked up so we barely made the show we had scheduled for that night.

The next day we thought, okay now the van will get fixed. It’s at a Mercedes dealership, they’ll be able to fix it, that’s what they do… But, no. They couldn’t figure it out. Then we waited an entire day to finally get a new van, so we again barely made it to the next show. Afterwards we came back to Nuremberg again, thinking it was the third day and by that time it would ‘ve been fixed for sure.
It wasn’t. So we got yet another van and now we’re in the third van and turns out the engine was completely totalled and the van’s stuck in Nuremberg, with all of our backline in it!

So, all this shit was in 48hrs, but we made it to all the shows.

PRT: Cool that you got to play all three shows anyways!

Yeah, we even got someone to go by the van in Nuremberg and collect some of our merch. All the help we’ve gotten has been really great!

In fact, if you’d have asked us to do an interview 5 days ago, we still might not have been able to meet up! Then you’d have shared in our bad luck streak! (laughs)

PRT: I hope you’ll be in a good luck streak from now on! You deserve it!

PRT: Let’s go on and talk about positive things!
Souvenir has been out for about a year now. How would you say, 12 months later, the album’s been received by the audience?

Yeah, we did a tour on the East coast about a month after it came out and there was some recognition of it, but definitely it was not as much as with our earlier records. But it’s pretty cool over here, now that it’s been a year we do get a reaction from those songs, which is nice!

You never want to be that band where you’re playing your new album and everybody’s clapping politely, and then you play an older song and people start freaking out. It seems like it’s been pretty good with the new songs too.

PRT: You said yourselves that it was more of a refinement of the Banner Pilot sound than it was a reinvention?

That was definitely the idea! It’s always tough when you’ve been in a band for a while which direction you go in. There’s a lot of bands who keep doing the same kind of record over and over again, which can be fine. Or you try to do something totally different. And I think, for us at least, both those extremes would be bad. If we did like a ska record… That would be ridiculous.

PRT: Well, I don’t know… You could always try!

Well, actually, I think it’d be fun! Or maybe something new, like… metal ska!

No, well… We kind of tried to stay true to our sound, but not do a literal repeat of our previous records.

PRT: Cool. You also released 2 videos, for Modern Shakes and Dead Tracks. And what you did was you took some archival footage and made that into the videos. Not really the traditional way of making a music video, right?

The first one for Modern Shakes was this old footage of Minneapolis in the 50’s or 60’s. It was such great footage. There were like drunks and stuff like that. And the lyrics were written before that, but it actually fit perfectly! We really could find a piece of footage for every lyric!

PRT: Other than these lyric videos, you’ve never released any music videos, right? How come?

Well, we have had ideas in that direction before and talked about all kinds of crazy things we were going to do, but I guess the timing didn’t work out and we asked ourselves whether people even still watched music videos.

I think what we’ll probably do for the next video, is the four of us getting totally drunk in that same area and stumble around.

PRT: Yeah, Modern Times for real then!

PRT: In another interview you said you’d see whether you’d be able to write anything new in 2015…
How’s that coming along?

Yeah! We’ve got a few demos already going. We set up a computer in our practise space and we’ve been recording some stuff, ploughing through a bunch of demos. And as it always is, some things are kinda good, some things aren’t. So at the moment I think we’ve got like five songs that are pretty good.

PRT: So we should be expecting something new from you then?

Yes! Not this year though, but there’s definitely something in the making!

PRT: Talking about new things happening, Corey left the band last year, so how’s it been working with Jeff?

To Jeff: Do you wanna leave the room?

Jeff: No, these guys are complete assholes… I’m having a miserable time…

PRT: Okay, maybe you guys should leave the room!

Haha, yeah! You’ll have to put a little smiley face in the text next to that question! LOL!

No, it’s been awesome! It worked out really well. Corey had a lot of stuff going on at home and everything’s fine. We still get along well. So it was not a bad thing at all, but after that we just thought: “Okay, let’s just open it up to everybody and see what comes of that.”

PRT: Yeah, you posted on your website that you’d have to come and audition for Corey’s spot?

Jeff: Yeah! I had been following Banner Pilot on Facebook and that’s how I saw that one of the guys posted that Corey would be leaving and that if anybody wanted to submit a request… And I went and did that! So I flew up to Minneapolis, played with them for maybe 20 or 30 minutes. Then we went out, had some drinks and dinner. And then I went home thinking: “I think it went okay… I don’t know.” And about a month later they asked me to come along and do this with them and it’s been great! I knew all of the songs, so I was already comfortable with them. It was a smooth transition, I think.

PRT: And I hope you met all of the conditions? Because one of them was not to be a total piece of shit?

Haha, LOL again!
Yeah, he qualified. He’s not a tótal piece of shit.

PRT: I presume that means Jeff’ll stick around for further recording and songwriting…?

Jeff: I hope so! Depends on these guys… Well, maybe nów I’ll leave the room!

Yeah, we’ve already got some more shows booked in the States with Jeff, so…

PRT: Nice! I wish you all the best of luck and I thank you a lot for this interview!

Thank you so much!