with Alice Worley

Where were you when you heard your first Spiderbait track?

I was at Dad’s place sometime in my primary school years; he’d chucked on the Aussie share house love letter film He Died With A Felafel in His Hand. Those title tracks slid onto the screen, and Spiderbait’s Buy Me A Pony came with them.

The song kicked me in the arse, and I’ve been hooked on the trio ever since.

The ‘Bait’s third studio album, Ivy and the Big Apples, was on regular rotation in my first car, snuggling alongside the thundering Tonight, Alright in the zip-up CD flip book when not being thrashed in the car player. It is a wild thought to entertain that Tonight, Alright is 20 years old, especially if you’ve seen Spiderbait play in recent years.

They still have the energy and excitement of a band in their twenties. They still shout as loud, laugh as hard, and sweat as wet. The joy of performing radiates in their faces.

These three aren’t just a band – they’re family.

And the Spiderbait family unit has hit the road to celebrate the double-decade of Tonight, Alright, but more specifically of capital-H Hit single Black Betty. Instead of asking someone, ‘Do you know Spiderbait?’ sing “WoooooOOOAH Black Betty! Bam-ba-lam!” and yeah… they know.

So intensely has the track burned that it’s still heard on the radio, in movies, and at random parties 20 years on.

It’s lightning in a bottle, and the electricity continues to arc.

I chatted with Spiderbait’s legendary drummer/singer, Kram (Mark Mahar), about the song’s beginnings, what makes a great cover, and Australian music culture’s evolution over the last decades.

Big though Black Betty became, it was not the top pick at the time of choosing the album’s single releases.

“There was talk of another song going out,” Kram reveals. “Because Black Betty was a cover, the label was like ‘, Nah, we’ll do that later; it’ll be a good bonus’. I told them it had to go out first because this song sounded so different.

“I’ve got this theory,” Kram continues, eyes ablaze. “If you’ve got a really good song that sounds really different, and everyone’s really into it? That should really be your first track.”

Kram says insistence was also needed with the release of Buy Me A Pony as the first single for Ivy & The Big Apples. The success of that release gave him the historical backing for Betty’s boost.

“The precedent set with Buy Me A Pony’s success helped me go, ‘No, we gotta go with this’. We spent so much time, me and Whitt, on the mastering sessions in Sydney when we got back from America – finishing it off and changing the arrangement. We worked on that song probably just as much as the rest of the record because the rest is quite a raw, live-sounding album.

“It was a case of, if you’re gonna do a song like that, you’ve either gotta bury it or go for it, and we decided to go for it. I’m glad that we did.”

Looking back, I express my amusement that Kram had to fight for a cover so hard with Like A Version’s parallel popularity and proven chart-topping placements.

“That’s right!” he enthuses. “And if you look at the history of cover hits, there are many examples. Whether it’s Hazy Shade of Winter by The Bangles or I Love Rock ‘n Roll by Joan Jett…. all covers!

“You cover a song out of enthusiasm. When you first start playing in a band, you play covers coz you’re like,’ This is so fun! Let’s try this AC/DC song or have a crack at Midnight Oil’. And so that was a big part of it, too.

“It’s the same today,” Kram continues. “When we play Black Betty live, it’s a great joy coz we love it so much. That it’s not our song actually contributes to that enthusiasm.”

It’s been well documented that Kram believes that if Black Betty/Tonight, Alright had not been so successful, the band may have come to a conclusion.

“I think at that time, before the record, we weren’t as successful as we felt we deserved to be,” Kram reveals. “This happens to a lot of bands, the ups and downs. You exist mainly on the group’s personal relationships, which have always been vital for us.

“But then there’s the professional side. Are you filling these venues? Are you headlining these festivals that you used to?

“It wasn’t from a point of view of sadness,” Kram adds. Things weren’t going as well as we’d have liked, so we saw it as a sign that we should do something different.

“We would have done other things and come back eventually,” he hastily continues. “It’s just one of those things where there’s an arc in a band’s journey – there’ll be forks in the road.

“It’s a trip coz now it has hundreds of millions of hits on YouTube. It’s great to have an international hit, but it’s even better when you really need one,” he laughs.

Aussie Music Culture…

The 20th anniversary of Black Betty got me thinking about the Aussie music culture of the ‘90s and into the 2000s. With the shift in modern media and the disappearance of shows like Recovery and Countdown, does Kram feel that Aussie music culture is as celebrated as it was 20-30 years ago?

“Actually, I think it’s stronger than ever,” he asserts. “The difference is that there isn’t the same portrayal of musicians and music as there used to be.

“You don’t get TV programs like Recovery anymore. You don’t get that singularity of radio play. Back when you only had a few TV channels to choose from, good things had more of an impact.

“Now, the myriad channels and mediums make it extremely hard to focus on one thing, so everything’s become more niche.

“Everyone had heard of something if it was successful. Now, there’s these huge artists selling out massive gigs you’ve never heard of.”

Kram also reflected on the environment of a musician living as a young person today compared with 20-30 years ago and how that could hinder someone’s growth as an artist.

“Australia is a lot more expensive to live in now,” Krams says. “It’s so much harder for a young musician to just be on the dole, work a part-time job, pay the rent, and then rehearse the rest of the time. Now they have to work three jobs, pay their HECS debt, and hope they can make ends meet.

“So there’s a bit more desperation in the business now, more business orientation than the chill I-don’t-give-a-fuck aspect of the ‘90s punk rock idiom, and that’s restricted artists’ ability to completely lose themselves in the music. They have to be more stressed about things working out.

“I know we’ve also lost a lot of festivals in the past few years,” Kram reflects, “but we still have a lot of really great ones, and the live aspect of music is as strong as ever. We did a show with Dom Dolla last year, and it was huge. People still wanna come out and embrace music. I don’t think that’ll ever change.”

Music is a beautiful thing

From Kram’s point of view, music is this beautiful thing that will always endure, despite the recent issues like mass venue closure and festival cancellations.

“It’s my favourite artistic medium. It always has been,” he enthuses. “It’s the most accessible, transparent, and emotional, and it’ll survive no matter what happens. We owe it to ourselves to check it out, keep believing, and let it invade the soul. There’s great bands everywhere; always have been, always will be.”

There’s no understating Black Betty’s impact on Spiderbait’s career; it may have even saved them from a hiatus at best and a conclusion at worst. So, if you’re a Spiderbait fan and haven’t seen them live, do yourself a favour and get to this show. Witness the sweat, embrace the grit, feel the overdrive, and lose your voice in the crowd as you scream every word of every amazing song.

Spiderbait: Black Betty 20th Anniversary Tour hits Ngunnawal/ Canberra on Friday, 25 October at the UC Refectory with primary support Adalita and locals Box Dye to open the show. Tickets are $84.90 via Moshtix.