Bowling For Soup played Brisbane RiverStage 9 April 2008.
Perennially known for their hilarious hijinks, Texan pop-punks Bowling For Soup are offering their fans a take home bundle of laughs with the release of their first DVD Bowling For Soup: Live And Very Attractive.
Premiering at the AFI Dallas International Film Festival last week and set to hit shelves later in the year, the DVD follows the four-piece as they galloped across the UK on their October 2007 Get Happy Tour.
“We’ve actually had this idea in the works in one form or another for several years,” bassist Erik Chandler admits. “We’d been trying to get it pushed through and when we started the tour we didn’t know for sure that it was gonna happen. Then one day we got the phone call and two days later there was a camera crew there.
“They spent three days on the road with us gathering documentary-type footage, then it all culminated with one of the best shows that could’ve been taped at The Apollo in Manchester. The show ran about 75 minutes and the DVD in its entirety is an hour and 45 minutes, so there’s about half an hour of backstage, in the dressing room, on the bus and stuff like that. It turned out better than I’d hoped.”
The realisation of Bowling For Soup’s first DVD comes after an increasingly successful run of albums kick-started by their 2002 breakthrough fifth effort Drunk Enough To Dance. That album delivered the Texans a Grammy nomination and new levels of exposure both at home and across the pond in the UK and propelled the release of three albums in consecutive years, the last of which being their 2006-released latest album The Great Burrito Extortion Case. It’s no surprise then that the band as yet haven’t found time to turn their focus to their next album.
“The biggest difference right now is we’ve quit writing on the road,” Chandler concedes. “A lot of bands like to do that, we just don’t tend to make the time. I think the process is pretty cool now – without having been on the road and playing these songs live, once you take them in the studio they have the opportunity to go anywhere that we wanna take them ‘cos we don’t have any preconceived ideas.”
Some of those ideas will materialise when, following their first-ever tour of Australia this week, Chandler and co reconvene to begin work on their 2009-slated eighth studio album.
“One thing we’ve talked about is maybe backing the production up a little bit and trying to get a bit more of a raw feel like some of our earlier albums had,” Chandler reveals.
“The thing we’ve always said is Bowling For Soup is not gonna take a major direction change with the music. It’s like when you buy a Bad Religion CD – you buy a Bad Religion CD ’cos you want it to sound like Bad Religion. Or when you get an AC/DC CD you know what it’s gonna sound like. That’s the approach we’ve taken too. The songwriting has definitely developed over the years and what not, but you’re still gonna get that same Bowling For Soup sound.”
