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by BRIAN GIFFIN
IT’S been twenty-four years since The Datsuns released their first album and seemed to take over the music scene. Over the next few years the Kiwi four piece went Number 1 in their home country, conquered the Australian summer festival circuit, played Ozzfest, toured with Metallica and made a record with John Paul Jones. Now with members scattered around the globe and their eighth album done, The Datsuns will finally return to tour Australia again after an absence of eleven years. Guitarist Christian Livingstone filled us in on things from his current home in Japan.
HOT METAL: So, firstly – what’s taken you so long to finally tour Australia again?
CHRISTIAN LIVINGSTONE: “Haha yes it really has been a long time. You know, we were supposed to come down in 2020 but obviously COVID put the brakes on that. We can’t wait to finally be back in Australia again. We love Australia, it was the first country that really took to us and really got into what we did. It will be so much fun to be playing there again!”
HM: With all of you living in different parts of the world, when do you get together to rehearse for a tour?
CL: “We don’t. We all know each other so well now and know how we work together that we don’t really rehearse much at all. We’ll meet up a day or two before the tour starts wherever we are and run through the set, but that’s really all we do.”
HM: What about when it comes to new material? Do you need to get together and work on that at some point?
CL: “We kind of do all that remotely. The technology now makes it easier to do that, than in the past. We’ve all been living in separate parts of the world for a while now, and so we’ll write the songs… Dolf and I will send each other demos all the time. A lot of the songs on this record were written quite a few years ago and a lot of it was written during COVID and in England we had a lockdown with nothing to do, so we did a lot of songwriting over those two years and managed to get a whole album’s worth of stuff done then. It’s just taken us a while to get the actual recordings done.”
HM: That must be quite frustrating to have so much stuff ready to go and then, for whatever reason, it was pushed back.
CL: “Yes, of course.”
HM: It sounds like that’s something that you’ve sort of had to become used to.
CL: “Not used it… resigned to it, maybe! It would be nice if we could get things done a little quicker. I guess, because of the distance involved and other things going on on the planet, it just takes us a while to get it done. I’m hoping that the next time we do a record it’ll be a lot quicker than this, but it’ll be famous last words!”
HM: Will you be sharing some of those new songs with us on the tour?
CL: “Yes! We are hoping… as I said, we’re kind of terrible at deadlines, but we’re hoping to get a single out the week before we hit Australia and we’ll be playing that and two or three other songs from the record at the shows as well, for sure.”
HM: Some new songs from The Datsuns will be welcome, certainly, because it has been a long time between drinks. In one way that can be a good thing, because it gives the audience time to really get familiar with the songs before you play for them!
CL: “(laughs) Oh that’s good! I always like to think that because we’ve been around for so long, when we play a show we can draw from such a wide range of albums that the show’s a retrospective of everything we’ve done. There’s something in there for somebody who likes whatever phase of the band, because we’re playing something from all across the records. Which makes for a balanced kind of rock show, I think, for us.”
HM: And there are always songs that you can’t get away without playing to, of course.
CL: “For sure. There’s two or three off the first record, and there’s a couple from the second record that you have to play. That’s the same for any band. People will riot if you don’t do. We’ve got those, like everybody else. We always do them, so rest assured we will be playing things that people expect to hear. But I kind of realised recently that we don’t play a lot of the singles. We play songs that people know, but they’re not always the singles. Oddly enough when we look back at what people… but that’s quite interesting, if you look back at us at some of the things, like streaming services, a lot of the songs you’d expect are in the top things but there’s a few that aren’t necessarily what people expect to pop up in the ones that get played the most.”
HM: Are there any that you perhaps wouldn’t expect to be as popular as what they are?
CL: “Yeah… I’m not really OK with what’s popular, I just know that from what other people tell me from the metrics. I’m not really across that. I guess because I was involved in creating them all.”
HM: I guess in that case, you’d be happy that people liked any of them
CL: “Exactly! It’s kind of like if you asked a parent, ‘What’s your favourite child?’ Even if you’ve got one, you can’t actually say!”
HM: If not a favourite song, which song or songs do you really enjoy playing to people?
CL: “It kind of depends. I think if you had to ask me what my favourite songs were from a record, it would be a different list of songs that are favourites to play live. Some work better live and some work better on record. I still really enjoy playing songs from the first record, because that whole record was built from playing live. Those songs all worked and are still fun and exciting to play. And there’s a song from the third record, “Waiting For Your Time to Come”. I like that record. I think it’s really good and we don’t play it live anymore but I really enjoy it on the odd occasion when it comes on the radio or TV or somewhere where I’m hearing things.”
HM: It’s going to be great to have you back here in Australia after such a long time! I hope it’s not going to take eleven years to get you back here again!
CL: “Same!”
THE DATSUNS AUSTRALIAN TOUR 2026
MARCH 25: The Gov, Adelaide
MARCH 26: Crowbar, Brisbane
MARCH 27: Crowbar, Sydney
MARCH 28: The Croxton, Melbourne
