[INTERVIEW] The Bon Scotts, ‘It’s good to be back and doing it'

The Bon Scotts are back on the road again, and they’ll be bringing their happy-go-lucky sound to Geelong in November. “The tour’s been lots of fun. Lots of driving, there’s been lots of gigging,” shares front man Damien Sutton. “It’s really nice ‘cause we’ve had a bit of a break, so it’s good to be back and doing it.”

Back with their infectious new single ‘Good Times’, the six-piece are touring the east coast of Australia for the fist time in five months, and they are ready to put on a show that will get you dancing.

“We’re pretty rowdy…We like to put on a good show and get people singing along and dancing and clapping and what not. Yeah, we’re pretty flamboyant,” Sutton says with a laugh.

With an upcoming album out early next year, their set list is a mix of new and old, or as Sutton says, “Catchy old songs”. “You’ll hear the new single and a couple of other new songs, but we’ll be playing a few of the older songs as well.”

In itself, ‘Good Times’ is a song reminiscent of what we love from The Bon Scotts. It’s bold, quirky, and slightly raucous with a pop edge, but dig a little deeper and you’ll find out the origins of the moving track.

“I had a very good friend from when I was very young – we met when we were five. We went all through school together and so forth, and I left the town I grew up in, and my friend kind of got into drugs and so forth,” shares Sutton.

“A few years later we drifted out of contact, and I found out that he’d actually been killed. It was really hard because I was trying to track him down at the time.”

Instead of crafting a sombre melody to match the horrific circumstances, he purposely chose to write an upbeat song.

“I’m not very good at writing serious songs, so I wrote a song about it to try and, I don’t know, understand it, I guess,” he shares. “I remember the good things about him, and the fun we had, and not so much the sadness surrounding the circumstances.”

Turning his feelings into music is a continual process for Damien, and he laughs as he likens it to therapy. “I think I deal with most of my frustrations, my personal frustrations and the frustrations of the world and government, and even things like friendships and enemies I guess, they’re all sort of worked out in music,” he says.

In itself, The Bon Scotts is made of vastly different people. So much so that Sutton concedes, “Most of us are kind of strangers outside the band”. This though, simply gives them the recipe for a lot of fun on the road.

“When we get together we have a lot to catch up on, and there’s a lot of storytelling. I guess we end up talking so much that the time flies in the car driving eight hours from Byron to Sydney,” Sutton says.

With the intensity of rehearsals and press, touring is more relaxing for the diverse group. So what is their favourite part of the adventure? “I would say eating food.”

“We’re all kind of foodies so we eat a lot, as you can probably tell when we play and we jump around and our bellies kind of wobble.”