With a career that has achieved so much, New Zealand punk rockers The D4 return to celebrate their sophomore album “Out Of My Head” being released on vinyl for the first time the band are about to embark on a whirlwind run of east coast Australian shows this February to coincide with the release. Never ones to shy away from delivering an absolutely incredible live show, these shows are set to be some of the most exciting, energetic and talked about gigs of the year.
The D4 have a checklist of playing some of the most iconic festivals in music history. This tour is a rare chance to see the band in an intimate setting and feel that energy up close and personal. Chatting with Jimmy we get a chance to talk the vinyl release, touring, the early days of the band and what it was like to take on the world as a pretty much independent artist amongst other things so without further ado check it out.
Andrew: Today, I have the extreme pleasure of catching up with Jimmy Christmas, the frontman from D4 the iconic New Zealand punk band who first came to light in 1998. Welcome to The Rockpit, Jimmy, thanks for your time and chatting with us.
Jimmy: Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be in The Rockpit.
Andrew: There’s some big news we’ve got to talk about today and some of that news is that D4 are heading to Australia for a three-day tour of the East Coast this February. It’s been quite a while between drinks on Australian soil. Why now?
Jimmy: Why now? We are currently in a touring phase to celebrate the release on vinyl of our sophomore record ‘Out Of My Head’. That one never came out on vinyl back in the day, it I guess it was just something that never got pushed through because the album got turned down by the big American record labels and we lost momentum with it. There wasn’t really a push for it at the time to get it out, it came out on CD but the vinyl never happened. It was the time too where vinyl had become overtaken by CD.
Over the years, we’ve had lots and lots of requests to put it on vinyl and the planets finally aligned. We managed to get all the back-end stuff sorted and received some backing and support for its release. There’s been a real good appetite for it, so we decided that we tour around it and we had an opportunity through a good friend of ours in Australia, Niam to come over and do a good three day run.
Andrew: And it’s quite an intense little run. It’s Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney all in the space of three days, but given the history of the band and I guess your reputation for touring so hard back in those early days it’s a bit like putting an old pair of boots on, isn’t it?
Jimmy: I think it’s putting on a new pair of boots. Like a better pair of boots, but maybe, yeah, we’re in fine fiddle and I think everybody’s kept themselves fit and focused and we only ever want to do this if it’s going to be as good as, if not better than it was, we are a bit longer in the tooth for sure, but I think we also have some perspective that we can bring to this now because it’s, as I’ve said before, it feels like this is a gift. Honestly, it feels much more of a gift and an opportunity to create with people that you really care about and to go and spend time and perform for people that care about you. Back in the day, there was a lot of trying to impress people and you’re trying to build something, you’re trying to do something and sometimes the lines can get a little bit blurred, but it really feels authentic, pure and really exciting.
Andrew: If we go right back to the beginning of the band, can you guys remember the first gig that you played as a band?
Jimmy: Yeah, I think so, it’s a point of contention. I think it was one place Dion thinks it was another, but it was pretty much, I think it was in Hamilton and sort of 1998. It was at the jazz and blues club. I’m pretty sure. I think Dion might think it’s the gig that we played the next night, but maybe the course of time has blurred that those lines, but yeah, we’re pretty connected to where it all started and how we did it. I remember a lot of that early period. I think one of the first. Earlier gigs were when The Hellacopters first came to town through Auckland and blew the place apart, I remember that one distinctly.
Andrew: Through the course of the band’s history, you guys have played just about every iconic festival known to man, Glastonbury, Reading, Fuji Rock, South by Southwest, Pukkelpop, and obviously Australia’s Own Australia Big Day Out.
Jimmy : And Livid.
Andrew: And Livid, sorry, I forgot that one. Is there a festival that you would have loved to have played either in the past or that you would love to play today?
Jimmy: That we didn’t get to play? I think I’m just going to go back if it was to come around again. I want to see little Stevie. The best festival we ever played was Little Stevens Underground Garage Festival on Randall Island in New York, 2004. I’d like to play another version of that. Steve Van Zandt plays and is obviously in the E Street Band and he has a great radio station called Little Stevens Underground. He had his Garage Festival and he was a fan of the band and he booked us to play this gig. The other bands on the bill were Iggy & The Stooges, The 34th Floor Elevators, The Pretty Things, Bo Diddley, Nancy Sinatra, it was unbelievable. The Dictators played; they reformed for it. The Strokes were playing. It was just unbelievable and it was just crazy.
We had people that we had grown up on, really formative influences for us saying, “Hey man, we really like your band”. It’s just what, where are we? This is insane.
Andrew: That must have been one hell of an experience, to be in the midst of all of those artists, icons and people that just shaped music as we know it in one way or another. Whether it be emerging or established they’re all, when you look back at it, such important parts of musical history as you guys are too. For a band to come out of New Zealand and I’m not dissing the New Zealand music scene in any way, shape or form, but to have the global impact that you guys did must have been incredible, in that first eight-years of the band you really did take the world on and were winning. In reading about, your touring cycles and how relentless they were in that first eight years, how did you guys do it? You were pretty much, independent and did things your own way. How did all of this become possible?
Jimmy: I think we were lucky, like we were a good band, we were influenced by things that were important to us and we had a synergy that helped us to put together some stuff. We found the right guys to do it with and we were very driven very early to see that our horizons were beyond just playing New Zealand and Australia.
We went to Japan before we got to Australia and I think we were always very focused on wanting to just to go out there and experience what was happening with these bands that we were so enamoured with and seeing where they come from. When the opportunity came, we’d taken ourselves to Japan and then we had done a cover of a band, a song called ‘Northshore Blitz’ by a band called The Devil Dogs, a fantastic rock and roll band out in New York City in the 90’s as a single. We sent one of these seven inches to the guy that wrote the song, the bass player Steve Bass, who was in Virginia, and he said, if you ever come to the States, I’ll book some shows for you. Pretty soon after that a friend of ours, John Baker, had told us about South by Southwest Festival. This is a long time ago, in 2000, and said, you guys should apply for this; we applied for it and we got accepted for that. Suddenly we found ourselves in Austin, Texas, and then with some gigs in Virginia and a whole space in between. We just got in the van and showed up at venues and asked for shows. Eventually we arrived in the top of America, and at that stage, someone had taken a single to England and they wanted us to go and play shows with Fu Manchu.
I think we were just like, I guess where I was going with this, we were ready when the door opened, we were ready to leap through it. We gave, we just sacrificed everything, quit everything, quit the jobs, said right on, let’s do it. We had a collection of guys that were, keen and willing to go and put it on the line and I think that allowed us to get into a place where suddenly it could become a reality.
Andrew: With that aggressive first eight year block before the hiatus was announced in 2006. Do you attribute, that relentless spirit and ethic as a part of why you needed to take a hiatus?
Jimmy: Potentially. I think, no regrets, and you did things the way that you did. I think we should have probably given ourselves a bit of a break between the cycles to recoup a little bit, but we didn’t, we just went continuously. Maybe we made some decisions creatively that were driven by other people’s influences, less than staying relentlessly true to what we thought we were but that’s a story in and of itself really. I understand exactly why we ended up where we were. We were in the bright lights and hitting the heady heights of things. I think it just ran its course of that at that time. We needed to step back really for our own sanity. I think probably our health as well.
Andrew: When you’re spending 24 hours a day seven days a week with four other people it’s got to be pushing it every emotional limit to a certain degree. We all saw what covid to relationships and marriages when it forced people together in a confined space and in each others faces constantly. You have to feel trapped and almost suffocated at times; add the outside influence of industry people to that and it can’t have been an easy ride, but what you guys achieved in that eight year span is just mind blowing and the success was so well deserved.
Jimmy: Yeah. Thanks. I do. Yeah, I think you summed it up well there. There was a time, I remember when I was young, I went to see I went to a Big Day Out in Auckland and there was a band on the bill that I really wanted to see who I can’t remember who they were now. But they withdrew from the festival because of nervous exhaustion, and I remember at the time going, what the fuck, like, how can you pull out of this? Look what you get to do. This is incredible. How could you possibly not want to get up and just do this? I don’t get that. That makes no sense to me, then I remember it so clearly, sitting on a bus at about week nine or ten of another outing, another tour where we were playing every night with days off scattered if around at all and just going, fuck. I thought about those guys and went, yeah, I get it now. I got how you get to that stage and I get how you get to the point where perhaps you could just say, Oh, I can’t do this.
Andrew: Yeah. That’s it. Hearing you say that phrase nervous exhaustion, I completely understand that it’s got to be one of those things where everything just gets on top of you. It’s let me breathe and have space, get me off this crazy ride for a bit to a certain degree.
Moving forward to 2018 where the band reforms and does an eleven-date run in New Zealand. How was that? How was the reaction of what brought that back together at that time? What made that time right?
Jimmy: That was hinged around a really iconic venue in Auckland called The King’s Arms. The King’s Arms was right in the centre of town, Newton Gully was the oldest pub in the town and was a live venue that we had grown up with and we used to rehearse around the corner, literally around the corner, and we’d play gigs at The King’s Arms, we would carry our gear down the street in Loden to The King’s Arms. We had some unbelievable shows at The King’s Arms. It was our stomping ground, and really correlated to all the major things that we did, EP release parties, album release stuff. We had some nights there where the PA literally caught fire while we were playing. It was pretty memorable. The Kings Arms had been sold and was going to be turned into apartments. So, I rang Dion and I said, Hey man, they’re going to close The King’s Arms and we should be there to do that and he was interested. We hadn’t talked about playing up until that point. There was a festival happening around the same time, City Limits and a friend of ours, we approached him and said, look we want to come down. He offered us a slot, a good slot at City Limits, which underwrote getting Dion down and doing the dates.
Suddenly a reunion could happen and that’s what happened. That was the driver. We got together and it sounded fresh and exciting; we all got on really well and we had a really great time. Then we parked it and then did it again a few years later for the 21st anniversary of the first record. There was a vinyl re-release, we played some shows and enjoyed that. Then we got called up to go to Japan for a friend of ours Seiji from Guitar Wolf, who put on some shows and wanted us to come and play his festival up there, which is called Shimane Jet Festival.
If anyone ever gets the opportunity to go, you have to go. It’s the best festival I’ve ever been to actually. That’s the answer to the question. And I’d forgotten that. I’d go back to Shimane. Shimane Jet Fest was the best festival I’ve ever done in my life. Equal with the little Stevens, but for different reasons. Now here we are the vinyl for “Out Of My Head” is coming out and people want us to play, so we said we come play and then there was an opportunity to come back to Australia and do it properly. We did a little hit and run on Melbourne on that last tour, and with a few day’s notice our friend Niam organized a run of three shows; and this time we’re coming in guns blazing.
Andrew: Just touching on the vinyl release of “Out Of My Head” on the seventh of February, there’s a few unreleased gems added to the track listing. Where did those songs come from? Are they from a third album that should have been ?
Jimmy: Yeah, it’s a bit of a mixture, they were written around the time of the album. Some of them were album demos that we had done for the record. We ended up demoing a lot of stuff. Dee and I went to Bangkok for writing and took ourselves all over the place. We had a basement studio, we recorded a lot of stuff and these new tracks are the outcomes of that self-recorded processes where we’re trying to twist things up a little bit. Some of them just got left behind when the album had to be slimmed down and we started doing other stuff back in the UK.
Andrew: With the album coming out on vinyl, obviously there’s a slightly different mastering process to vinyl versus CD. Has the album been given a full remaster treatment?
Jimmy: It’s been remastered by a good friend, Mikey Young for vinyl. He did a great job on “6Twenty” too. I just got the test pressings about a week ago. I got a message saying that the records are alive and they sound pretty good. We have a really good friend who follows us around to everything and he got his hands on a test pressing and he’s been texting me to tell me how good it sounds. I think the final process has done us some favours, so I’m hoping people like it.
Andrew: Fantastic. I think you just answered my next question was how does the test pressing sound? That’s one to really look out for and get ones hands on. On this run of shows through the east coast of Australia, there’s a little bit of history, there’s a little bit of something new. You’ve got the Hard-Ons on the bill in Sydney and in Melbourne and you have one of my favourite local bands The Stripp .
Jimmy: We have been talking with the promoter Niam, kicking around ideas of bands that were available and bands that would work. The Stripp we played with last time in Melbourne. I love those guys. Mach Pelican are perfect. Toshi, I know him and he’s been promoting his stuff in Melbourne and there’s a connection through Guitar Wolf so that just aligns beautifully, and playing with the Hard-Ons in Sydney is just a killer bill and it’s all come together perfectly.
Tape/Off in Brisbane is it’s going to be a good gig. We have just been relying on, connections and people that are keen and up for it. I think that’s extremely important for us that people want to be part of the bill.
Andrew: It’s such a great opportunity for so many bands. I’m super excited that you guys are back together and doing this run of shows. Now, the band has such a notorious reputation of just being an absolute powerhouse live. As you said, there have been a few years since 1998. Is the show still as electrifying, as energetic and as full on as it’s ever been?
Jimmy: Yeah, I think so. That was pretty understood and made clear by all of us that if we’re going to do shows, we have to pick up where we left off. We have to be better or different, and I think I might’ve talked into this before, but I think it’s, there’s an authenticity to it.
One of the things that I think got in the way sometimes and can get in the way sometimes was an objectivity that disconnected you from the music. If I was thinking, Oh where were you in the tour cycle? What was happening? Are we getting more people than last time? What’s going on in the room? Are they liking it? What’s going on? Sometimes it’s the tendency to think too much and really work hard, but to impress, whereas this time. It feels like a gift to be able to do it. It’s a gift to be able to hang out with these guys that I really love; to play this music that still stands the test of time, to be given an opportunity to come out and do this stuff in some cool venues and turn it up and kick it out.
There’s something freeing and fresh that comes with that with that perspective, I think.
Andrew: In the media release around these shows it mentions that the set will contain a slew of never before heard material. Where did these songs come from and is there an album number three?
Jimmy: I don’t know if there’s an album number three, but these songs are part of that process. Part of the stuff that we had written and recorded and stuff that was kick starting work towards the live set before we went on hiatus. As an edge for us, like we’ve done it a few times now, so I don’t want to just stand still doing the old stuff with the classic hits again, there needs to be another thing to reach towards. It’s really interesting, we could talk about the idea of flow state and if you can get into flow in music you have to be pushing against your boundaries a little bit and trying. Concentrating to really get to that state where you can lose track of what’s going on in a good way, be in the moment and I think having new material to wrestle with and express will really helps that experience.
Andrew: Are there plans to tackle the rest of the world again? You’ve already done New Zealand already. You’re taking on Australia again for the celebration of the sophomore album. Are you ready to take it around the globe again?
Jimmy: I don’t know. Dion’s got his solo project that he’s really busy working hard with. We have been offered stuff in Europe from people that have noticed that we’re a bit more active now. There are opportunities, we’ve all got lots of things on the go and lots of things to keep us busy. The D4 is one of those things that when it comes around, we give it our full attention. I don’t think it can be a lifestyle thing anymore, it’s just got to be a smash and grab. And when I mean that, not in a financial sense at all, but just more an experience sense. So who knows? I’d like to go back to Europe. I’d like to go back to America. I’m easy to see where the road takes
Andrew: All right, Jimmy we are pretty much out of time. you again so much for your time. We’re really looking forward to these three Australian dates from the 13th to the 15th of February, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane. I can’t wait for the vinyl of “Out Of My Head” and hopefully it will be a double win with the vinyl being available at the shows. If you haven’t seen The D4 live or are unfamiliar with their music I urge you to go and check them out. You’d be mad to miss them. Again, thank you so much for your time. I really do appreciate it. And yeah, we’ll see you very soon here in Australia.
Jimmy: Yeah, I look forward to it. Thank you very much.
Andrew: No worries.
Jimmy: Thanks. Take care.
