D-A-D's Jacob Binzer: "The best AC/DC songs are like monoliths of rock"...

Denmark’s D-A-D first entered my life in about 1989 back in my Newcastle days when I found the absolutely brilliant No Fuel Left For The Pilgrims. A seriously great album with a number of classic songs such as Girl Nation, Point Of View, Jihad and the amazing Sleeping My Day Away. After that, with the tyranny of distance and the olden days of records and CDs, D-A-D seemed to disappear from my market. A few years back I had a yearning to listen to No Fuel.. and looked them up on Spotify. Lo and behold they were bringing a new album out at the time with a typically cheeky lyrics on the new single “And tell me something I don’t know, and maybe I’ve lived too long, but I got a bad case of I told you so and it’s hard to hold my tongue.” The song was Burning Star and the new album was A Prayer For The Loud. It was more than enough to rekindle my interest in this amazing band, and I had a lot of catching up to do. What I found was a bevy of outstanding songs that I had missed out on until then. Another new album, Speed of Darkness, emerged last year, which held some more classics and then I found out that D-A-D were heading back down under next month and I’m getting to have a chat with the lead guitarist Jacob Binzer to ask him all about that and other things in the world of D-A-D. After some trouble with chat room links, we finally get to chat about the upcoming tour, and D-A-D history.

Hi Jacob, how are you? “Okay, okay, very good. I’m sorry. I think I got the wrong link or something”.

No, that’s okay. It’s all good, yeah. How are you doing? “I’m doing good. It’s, it’s, it’s early in the day in Denmark. It’s just about noon in Denmark. Where are you located?”

I’m in Canberra, Australia. It’s about seven twenty in the evening here. I’ll kick off as I know you have a lot of interviews tonight and will need to get on to them. “Yeah, I’ll get there. That’s fine”.

I had No Fuel Left for the Pilgrims back in the early nineties. So that’s how I first come across D-A-D. Loved it, and then because back in that day, we didn’t have the internet or anything like that as you do now. D-A-D sort of, they disappeared because we didn’t get any more albums or anything, but found you again a few years back again, and yeah, it’s been great coming back and listening, knowing that you guys are coming. It’s awesome. “Yeah, we’ve been lucky to be shared on the internet, because we, we kind of disappeared, it seems. But then when the internet came, we all, we also got in contact with Australian fans again, and, but it took us. It took us quite a while to get back and do shows”.

I was going to say, thirty years since you did that gig back in the early nineties. But this time, it’s just been a couple of years, you must have had a great experience, and Australia left a great impression on you. “Absolutely. It’s like it was really amazing to feel the crowd and the people that were there. They were happy. They were singing along. It was just like, yesterday. I mean, it was really great”.
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From punk-like stylings back in the mid eighties to your last effort, Speed of Darkness – over forty years of playing guitar in a rock and roll band and that’s quoting some classic Aussie lyrics there. But did you ever picture that when you first started out? “No, and, and I think that’s one of the benefits of starting so young that you don’t count in the consequences. I mean, you just go ahead and you don’t think too far ahead. And I think you need that to get going, because you know that you can never tell then. And I mean, if you can just take one a day at a time and one project at the time thing, and that’s the way we did it and always done it. I think it makes no sense to think too far ahead and obviously, when we started working really hard and being professional about it, we had something. Then we started to have ambitions and then we started to have disappointments as well”.

I was going to ask, the ambitions. Did they help or hinder? ” Yeah, both and I mean, they get you going, but after a while, I think that your reason for being in music is if you focus less on your achievements and focus more on the music. I mean, that initial passion for music. I mean, that was what can stay for you. Paul, if you take care of this, if you take care of the music, it would take care of you actually”.

Well, it’s got to be very cool being able to do something that you love and have that feedback and that experience of people all around the world loving it just as much what you actually do? “Yeah. I mean, it’s great to be able to go to Australia, and we have people there that we haven’t seen for twenty five years, that they come back and they say hello to these songs. Or we go, we go to Portugal or, or to Finland and it’s the same. That’s great, yeah”,

It’s just got to be a buzz, I could imagine. But like you said, you started out young. When did you first actually know that you wanted, like, this was the life that you wanted to live, and what was it like to get started in those early times in Denmark? “It’s that I don’t know. It wasn’t a conscious decision for me personally. For me, personally, it sort of happened that I started to play guitar, because when we were kids, we were skateboard kids. You know, and yeah it was cool to be skater, and it then was cool to have a band, and then we formed the band. And we found all kinds of paints and then, and that got me interested in actually playing. And within a few, very few years, then I started to play, play all the genres music. And then, then I found out that I had this it was like I had a passion for that and I followed it. I realised that making music, creating music was my thing. It could’ve been a lot of things but I always like to dig deep into the music, the craft of composing. But I also wanted a rock band that has more than just being good band, it had to have more. It had to have a story, like a way of life, like a whole of other things – like a cool rock band”.

I really enjoy your guitar work, to me it is at times understated, it’s not over the top but it really drives the songs along. It’s one of the things that sets D-A-D apart from other bands. Is it a conscious decision as you are writing, or it just works out that way? “Thank you. Yes, I try to make it, for instance a guitar riff, has to be simple. Has to be groovy, and you can never tell what works. You could put the same four notes together in one way and it works, you just change it slightly and it sounds like everything else. That little difference that makes it stand out, that’s something you can’t explain, it’s something you feel”.

I get it and it really comes across in your playing. The ways the song works, I said your songs are unique, it’s got blues, it’s got rock and your acoustic work on songs like Laugh and a Half, it’s beautiful. I suppose you’re going to be here soon and it’s billed as a Greatest Hits tour, for me it’s going to be hard to put together a set list that doesn’t go over three hours from your back catalogue. Is it going to be hard to cull songs for the set list? “Well for Australia, we need to play a lot of songs from No Fuel…, but we’re fine with that. We can easily play for, as you say, three hours even if we play a fraction of the songs. I think that making a greatest hits list for Australia, it shouldn’t be too hard. We are going to play a lot from No Fuel... and then some highlights from newer stuff and then there’s some records that Australians have no knowledge of, so we’ll just leave them out. I think it’ll be good”.

For the uninitiated, like me who have never experienced D-A-D live, what can people expect to see? “Well I would like to think that if you have never seen us live, or you’re not a rock fan, even if you don’t know anything about it, then I hope you will get that the energy and the presence is contagious. You will be drawn into the show, I hope it will move you and make you smile”.

You’ve got such an impressive back catalogue, but we touched on Speed of Darkness earlier, it just shows that you are still going strong. How has it been received around the world? “We’ve had a really good reception for this album and we are really happy about this. It feels really good, especially when you are a band this old. You can’t expect the press to fall head over heels or anything, but actually here at home they gave really good reviews all across the board. We also received that in the neighbouring countries up here. The songs we play live on the album, the audience has responded really well. We haven’t played too many in live shows yet, but that is going to happen a lot this year and then we will see what songs sticks with the audience”.

What is your favourite song to play live? “Haha, from the new album my favourite is God Prays to Man, because it has that like we talked about before – the Riff. The groovy riff, that has that feeling of rock, you know you can’t explain it, you just feel it. You just want to stand there in the middle of the audience and throw your beer up in the air, that’s just the feeling…”

Haha, you’re in Australia, they don’t like wasting beer… “Haha, yeah”.

Who’s been your biggest influence as a guitarist? “Um, it’s not the combination of a lot of things, but I can mention my hero’s for you. Obviously Eddie Van Halen, though I try not to emulate him. His feel, his riffs, the brutality he plays with, he’s really, really groovy. People talk about his tapping and the flashy stuff he does, which is great and original, and innovative but he really has a great groove playing his riffs, amazing. And then Django Reinhardt, then there is this one guy called Alan Holdsworth, he’s a jazz rock guitar player. Obviously AC/DC“.

So is that both Angus and Malcolm (Young)? “Yes and the best AC/DC songs are like monoliths of rock. It’s so well made and so simple and so efficient. That sound and groove is unique, it has that rock beat which is great”.

Alright, thank you so much for your time, Jacob, it was great having a chat. I am really looking forward to seeing you guys next month. “Thank you so much for doing this and hopefully see you in Sydney”.