Sauce

With their Tasmanian tour on the horizon, Guitarist Rob Maric from Dead Letter Circus went into detail for SAUCE about the incredible story behind the name of their band, and the complicated process of finding their current line-up.

So are you travelling around on the tour at the moment? How’s it all going?
Good, yeah. I just literally stepped out of the tour van. It’s going fantastically. The shows are going really good, We’re doing some Karnivool shows at the moment. We were meant to be doing a bunch of New South Wales shows right now for our own tour, but Karnivool ended up booking a tour which clashed with a bunch of shows, so instead of trying to compete with them, we just jumped on a couple of shows as main support and it’s worked out really well! It’s kind of like a big Karnivool beast has sat on us.

Yeah, well I guess as the saying goes, if you can’t beat them – join them.
Exactly. And it doesn’t get better than joining Karnivool. We absolutely love them, they’re an amazing band, so… yeah. In many ways we’re actually happy about it, even though it’s not really the best for us. [Laughs]

Yeah, so I just want to go straight to the most obvious question that comes for me when I talk to bands for the first time, and that is; Dead Letter Circus… what’s that about? Did you guys have a bit of a run-in with the post office? Or what?
Oh, it’s actually an old story about my grandmother in Croatia. Her husband basically died, but she kept sending all these letters out to the circus… this travelling circus, trying to chase it around, and they never make it because the address book is actually… not real. So all these letters pile up around the country… and it’s actually a bit of a legendary story, and we thought it was kinda cool, so [that’s what] we named our band. It probably doesn’t suit us anymore, but oh well, it’s too late. [Laughs]

So… just let me understand that for a bit, she didn’t realise her husband had died, and…
Oh, she was in denial that he had died, but she thought that he went and joined the circus. That’s what she told herself, because she couldn’t handle the fact that he had passed away. But she kept sending letters out to what she thought was a travelling circus, but those letters wouldn’t make it, so they became dead letters. And… yeah, that’s sorta where it came from.

That’s rather beautifully romantic, isn’t it?
I know, it is! It’s kinda sad, and a story of …

Tragic…
Tragic.

And you’re saying that you didn’t believe it was totally suiting the band, in terms of… what way? In what way do you guys think it doesn’t describe you, or suit you anymore?
I don’t know! I guess we started off as a heavier kind of a band … and then our songs got a bit less obscure, a bit more… I don’t know. It feels less dark, and more… I guess positively in our songs as well. I feels like a negative kind of name. Well, it’s got the word dead in it. And in a lot of our songs, if you check out the lyrics, they’re positive. And there’s not much positively to that story, really.

Yeah. Oh, well, you know. It’s a beautiful story anyway.
Oh, I’m glad you think so.

So how did you guys form, and what have been the milestones in the band’s development so far?
Well the singer Kim, and the bass player Stewy, they were in a Brisbane band … They rose about the same time as The Butterfly Effect in Brisbane, and they were kind of like a Cog [style] metal band. With a lot of really … They had a bit of a following up here, they were going really well for a while, neck and neck with the ‘Butters,’ until they broke away nationally. They had a phenomenal drama, they spent the next year or two trying to replace their amazing drummer, and no-one could… and they kinda just fell apart. And around that time, when they finally fell apart, that’s when I met Kim, and at the time he was singing and playing guitar. And I said I was a guitar player, and he was into it, and yeah, we just kinda bonded to each other musically. From there we just started the band, and the problem was that we didn’t have the right drummer at the time. We used the drummer that I was playing with, and we went through all of these really depressing phases where for about six months, we had no drummer working for us. Then we put an ad in the street press, and we got like, two responses. One was from like a seventeen year old kid, and one was from Scott, saying “I’m a full time drummer…” and this and that, and we thought it was a prank but we had one jam with him and it was phenomenal. And then we started.

Dead Letter Circus play Devonport’s Spurs on the 27th, The Republic Bar in Hobart on the 28th, and The Saloon in Launceston on the 29th of September.

Listen to the full interview Below