Most recent release: A Prayer for the Loud
Label: Mermaid.
Site: www.d-a-d.dk
Tour: https://metropolistouring.com/d-a-d-2022/
Danish rock band Disneyland After Dark aka D-A-D, and prior punctuation variants, are the quintessential no-nonsense band. If not for the pandemic, their 35th Anniversary World Tour would have landed on our shores in late 2020. However, the postponements are finally coming around on the calendar, in time for their second ever Australian tour, a mere thirty two years ago since their first memorable visit here back in 1990.
No Fuel Left for the Pilgrims was a sensational album release in 1989, and those who can recall will attest just how great that album was, both then and now. To make up for lost time, D-A-D will perform all their greatest hits, alongside a selection of material from subsequent albums. Loud Online caught up with lead guitarist Jacob Binzer to discuss the tour, and all things music related, including how that glorious guitar sound was achieved.
D-A-D are coming back to Australia after 30 odd years.
Absolutely, yes. It’s been a while although I feel like it is very present in my memory even though it was that long ago. I am looking forward to it, definitely.
What are you recollections of that 1990 tour? I recall you were on Hey, Hey, It’s Saturday and played in packed clubs such as at Centrepont Tavern in Sydney.
Yeah, you know, I don’t recall the name of the place we played but the last time we were there it was only Stig [Pedersen – bass] and myself but we were there on promotion. We went around Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne, but then I went up to Cairns for a holiday. I walked down the main street and there was this sign with motorcycle safaris so I just went into the shop and the next morning I was off on a motorcycle safari and went around the Great Barrier Reef. That was a big memory for me.
Indeed. What can we expect from the set list given your back catalogue?
It is sort of like, we will have one or two songs from each album that wants to be played and then we change the set list a bit, depending on where we are going. This time we are going back to Australia and the big record there is No Fuel Left for the Pilgrims, so we’re going to play quite a few songs from that album, and from that period. I’d say that Australians will want to hear some of the newer stuff too. We will mix it up like that.
Have you found any of the older songs have changed in live performance over the years?
Some songs change a bit, sometimes some of the songs have gotten longer, or maybe we have put a drum solo in the song, or we’ve had a longer guitar solo, or a key has gone up or down, or the song has gotten faster or slower. The ending of a song might get longer so some of the songs do develop. But some of the songs just stay exactly the same.
Can you discuss your reflections of that time? You signed a seven figure deal with Warners and soon after, grunge appeared.
Yes, exactly, that was what happened really. We were part of that, for lack of a better term, the hair metal scene, at least in that space, they would look at us that way and we did not feel quite at home in that genre. Anyway, we got signed as being one of those bands and so we went around the world on tour and when we were about to release the next record on Warner Brothers, I remember we were sitting in Copenhagen watching MTV Headbangers Ball and we’d met Vanessa [Warwick], who was the host at time, in person and she had promised us, ‘Yeah, we are going to show your new video, we are going to put a premiere on it, and it will be on Headbangers Ball.‘ Well, yeah, we were very happy that she would do that but when we were actually sitting, watching the show, but before she showed our video, she showed Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, and it was like, I was sitting there going, ‘Okay, we are on the wrong track,’ ha-ha. That video and that song was just so great and you could feel that there was a ne thing coming and essentially that meant that all of the bands like Skid Row, Cinderella and so on – people just lost interest. But we were in Europe and people in Europe who weren’t so concerned about that, especially in Scandinavia so we kept our following and that record which came out in 1991 [Riskin’ It All] was our biggest record in Scandinavia. But Nirvana changed the scene of rock’n’roll worldwide.
You released a lot of singles in the ’90s but just for the Danish market. What was the thinking behind that?
There was no thinking behind that and it wasn’t a strategy. Maybe you guys down under felt a bit neglected but I think it was because nobody knew how to do it, or how to get it out, or how to push our records in that area.
You still had your witty titles such as Helpyourselfish, and the live album being Psychopatico.
I think that live album was pretty good. We made another one in 2005 [Scare Yourself Alive] from the Roskilde Festival in Denmark, and I think we could do another one just about now, because some things have changed in the show, and yeah, maybe it is time to do another live album, actually.
How does the song writing process work in the band? Has it changed or is it mainly between yourself and Jasper [Binzer – lead vocals, guitar]?
It is pretty much the same. Our new drummer [Laust Sonne], who is the new guy even though he has been with us for twenty years, he participates more in the song writing than Peter [Lundholm Jensen – ex-drummer] did. Peter didn’t play an instrument other than drums, but Laust plays guitar, and piano, so he chips in with melodies and riffs. It is basically that we come up with ideas and then we try them out together in the rehearsal room.
Subsequent albums after the big hit album of No Fuel Left for the Pilgrims, in some ways, got progressively heavier. Is that a fair comment?
Yes, that is true, apart from the one called Everything Glows from 2000, but it did tend to get a little heavier. I don’t know why actually.
I thought it might have been a reaction to how grunge was directing music at the time?
Yeah, and I think that heavy metal back in the 80’s used to be some kind of a sub-genre or some kind of sub-culture but now the whole sound of metal has come into the mainstream.
Initially, on one of your very early pre-signing Eps [D.A.D. Draws a Circle], you did a cover of America’s A Horse with No Name. What did American audiences think of a Danish band doing that?
Yeah, well, honestly I don’t know because we made that one cover song and we thought, ‘Okay, that was it,’ because it was not our deal to make a cover song. We never played it live so we never really got a reaction to it, really. In my mind, it was a mistake to record that song, just between you and me, ha-ha.
These are the kinds of things that probably got you some attention though. Was there any plan in doing it?
Well, I can tell you honestly, we worked with Mark Dearnley, who was our producer, and he was the [recording] engineer from AC/DC’s Highway to Hell album. It was his suggestion, really, because he thought that this song would song good with this band. We had fun doing it and it seemed like a good idea at the time but it really did nothing for us.
Speaking of AC/DC, that influence is clear in the rhythm guitar figures in your music. Is the Gretsch guitar that you’ve used a result of that influence of the late, great Malcolm Young?
Actually no, my Gretsch guitar which I have hard for years and years, is a Country Gentleman model and it is more the country vibe as the reason that I got it. I listened a lot to Chet Atkins, and all that fingerpicking stuff. It was more from that interest and the twangy sound, and just the clean sound. That is the reason that I play the Gretsch. As you know, there’s Tommy Emmanuel, from Australia, who plays acoustic guitar but he is a great finger picker. I enjoy listening to that and trying to be inspired by that style.
It also has a great clarity and biting tone that you brought to No Fuel Left for the Pilgrims. At the time, in the late 80’s, everyone was trying to be Eddie, Satch or Vai, and then, of course, Slash. I am reliably informed you played a Fender Jazzmaster for more country and western infused styled sounds. Did you consider playing a Telecaster for those types of guitar sounds you needed?
Yeah, but I do play a Jazzmaster, and for the twangy songs, I play on my Jazzmaster now. That is a great guitar for that sound. I have played the same one for more than twenty years now. But the guitar sound on No Fuel Left for the Pilgrims, Girl Nation and Sleeping My Day Away, you can call that the twangy styled Hank Marvin and Duanne Eddy guitar meeting the rhythm and riff guitars from Angus and Malcolm. It is sort of like that, if you need to explain that sound to someone new. That was quite intentional because we listened to that at the time.
Can you remember the specific guitars and amps that you did use on No Fuel Left for the Pilgrims?
Yes, I still have the guitar that I used for Sleeping My Day Away. You know, the guy who made Fender, Leo Fender, left the Fender company in the 80’s and by the he was an old man. He started his own company called G&L and they made some kind of a Stratocaster copy, with it being a Strat styled guitar with three single coil [pick-ups] and a whammy bar. I got that guitar and it was quite good for that twangy kind of style. That was what I used, on that record actually, so most of the guitar parts were done with that guitar, and a Marshall [JCM-800] amplifier. I also had a Gibson semi-acoustic which was sort of like, the Malcolm guitar, ha-ha, and we used that quite a lot.
Do you bring a lot of guitars out on the road or do you go digital and travel lightly?
I am very traditional, I play my Fender Jazzmaster, I play a Gibson Les Paul, and I have a pedalboard, with not too much stuff in it, and then I just rent Marshall amplifiers wherever I go. I never really got into the digital amplifier modelling because it doesn’t feel real to me.
Where did Stig’s two string custom-made basses with altered necks and embellishments such as wacky headstocks come about?
Yes, the two string bass is just a consequence of, well, you know, in rock’n’roll, you play on two strings. I mean, for instance, all AC/DC songs and all Mötley Crüe songs are on two strings. So there is really no need to have the other strings on the bass, it is just the E and A string, and why not, for the hell of it, make two string only basses? That will get you attention and I thought, ‘That’s pretty cool,’ and then they’ve come up with all this stuff, making weird basses, all the time. That is his [Stig’s] hobby.
Travelling them around the world must be challenging as I’d imagine that they could get easily damaged?
Yeah, I mean, on this tour to Australia, he can bring two or three basses and they are in these huge road cases. It is a problem to bring them on the plane.
What was it like in Denmark back in the early days when your band started to see real potential for success? By that point, more European bands were succeeding internationally on a large scale, such as Germany’s Scorpions, who had a huge hit track [Winds of Change].
Yeah, back then there was Mercyful Fate, and a couple of other hard rocking bands, but there wasn’t a band like us and we were going into the mainstream. We weren’t this obscure, shock culture band from somewhere way out in the suburbs. We wanted to be for everybody so that was a new thing for us and we didn’t feel like we were a part of the hard rock community, and we weren’t and we didn’t want to be, because we came from the punk movement but we wanted to do something else. We used the videos, the media, and the press, everything to be just getting it out there and getting it going. Sleeping My Day Away is basically very catchy and a very poppy song so it is not like this, you know.
Certainly, looking back on that album, is there a certain song you’re happiest with to this day?
Yes, now that the years have passed, and when I look back, I am very proud of that album. I really am very proud of Sleeping My Day Away because I think that it’s essentially what D-A-D was, so I mean, that is an original song with an original sound that really captures who we are. It has the spirit or sense melodically that sounds like us, you know, guys from Denmark.
Also, from the other albums, is there any track that you’re most proud of, over the years?
Something completely different would be Reconstrucdead from the Helpyourselfish album. I think that is original in a different way. I also think that a song called Nineteenhundredandyesterday from Everything Glows is a very catchy song that is full of something else, that is completely say, warm and light, maybe. Then there are a lot of songs that we never play or listen to anymore.
What song do you think that entire band work consider a masterwork, or at least agree that you collectively nailed it on record?
Well, I think we can agree on Sleeping My Day Away, at least, for me, I think that is the one, because that is the one that is our song and is our most original contribution to world music history. Ha-ha.
What do you see as the future of the band at this point?
It has changed but we could play all year round if we wanted to, and could tour all the time. So, we have to take time out to right new stuff and we are writing right now and we are trying to get a mini album or EP ready for next year, but there is always stuff to do. That is the future of the band; there is always stuff to do.
