Airing Your Dirty Laundry With BILLY JEANS From MEAN JEANS

Interview by Kris Peters
One of the most enduring qualities of music - or punk music more
specifically - is that as a listener or musician you don't feel the
obligation to grow up.
Ever.
It's actually expected of you that your morals and beliefs will
differ from the rest of society, and your outlook on life and sense
of humour practically remain the same thing. So why fight it? That
would be more difficult than conforming, and we all know that's not
going to happen.
Just ask the three Jeans that make up Mean Jeans - Billy, Houndy
and Junior - a trio of friends/band mates who have stumbled through
life since even before starting the band 15 years ago, and they
couldn't be happier.
With a new album, Blasted, having recently hit the shelves and an
almost completed Australian tour with good mates The Chats life
couldn't be much better for Mean Jeans.
Just don't ask them if they are ever going to grow up.
Making a mental note to avoid that question, HEAVY sat down earlier
today with Billy Jeans to catch up on things, starting with the
reception for Blasted, which came out on February 9.
"Awesome," he smiled. "I feel good about it. I'm judging primarily
from social media and whatnot, but everybody's sending text
messages… I saw a bunch of reviews that the label sent that were
all in German, so I don't even know what they said (laughs). It's
been a good reception and I think while we were making this record
I could tell that it had a little more cohesion and was more true
to what Mean Jeans is supposed to be about at the core."
We ask Billy to go deeper into the album musically.
"We never have and never will stray from about a four-power chord
progression structure," he offered. "We pretty much keep it Ramones
simple and then see what we can sprinkle on top of there, but with
this one we had… the band wasn't on hiatus per se, but we actually
were living in three different cities when COVID struck. We had
been touring in the US up until the end of 2020, so it was a week
before the pandemic occured, and we had a support tour with The
Chats on the books, and we had never met these guys. That got
postponed and postponed and postponed and rescheduled, so we spent
most of the pandemic anticipating the tour. We kept booking stuff,
even though no one knew when it would make sense to be doing so.
Ultimately, it took over two years for the tour to happen, during
which time Mean Jeans were not really functional. So the stuff I
was writing, I had to put out a solo record called Funky Punks In
Space, but mostly because I knew there was no chance of the songs
seeing the light of day with Mean Jeans. Then we hadn't played a
gig in two years, and we did a six-week US tour with The Chats, and
they took us to Australia a couple of months later and after that,
after about 10 weeks of touring, we hopped off the stage, and we
were like, okay, that was really fun. We gotta bang out another
album."
In the full interview, Billy talks more about the songs on the
album, addresses the press releases claim that Blasted is a "weird,
wonderful and wacky album", which of the tracks is his personal
favourite, the current tour with The Chats and how it has been
going, the benefits of having time off between shows to be able to
drive to shows, maintaining a sense of humour and more.