“We’ve done the one tour in Australia and it was fantastic,” he says. “Australia was the place where early on, when the first record came out, we had a lot of people saying ‘Come to Australia,’ and that kind of stuff. We were just surprised at how receptive everyone was. We were with The Smith Street Band – all the shows were sold out. Great shows.”
Joyce Manor’s style has notably changed on each of their three albums. 2011’s self-titled debut contained a mix of short, heartfelt power-punk songs with lyrics that covered themes of social letdowns. For their latest effort, last year’s Never Hungover Again, the band adopted a more mature approach, departing from their typical short song format.
“It’s weird because we never set out to try to write shorter songs,” Johnson says. “Usually we’ll come in with something that’s mostly written or all the way written and we’ll kind of work on it and arrange it. Usually at practice we’ll play it and time it and ask ‘How long is that one?’ ‘It’s only about one minute forty.’
“For whatever reason though,” he continues, “with Never Hungover Again we made a conscious effort to make some of the songs longer. A lot of the songs, there were versions that were shorter and we actually added parts. So at the end of the album, it’s us consciously making songs longer or expanding on ideas more so than we did in the first place.”
Late last year, Joyce Manor found themselves embroiled in a social media maelstrom after Johnson stopped a crowd-surfer from crushing a smaller audience member during a show in Houston, Texas. The event spawned widespread debate regarding stage diving and other actions that could potentially injure show-goers; leading many old school punks to say that these shows were about expression and freedom, while others argued that people shouldn’t be getting injured at shows. Interestingly, stage diving wasn’t an issue for Joyce Manor until recently.
“We had energetic shows, but there wasn’t as much stagediving,” Johnson says. “With a lot of bands in the same scene as us, the stage-diving thing got really crazy. If you go see Tigers Jaw or Title Fight, big melodic bands, [they’re] constantly bitching about stage diving to a point where you’ve got to wonder how many people are there for the band or there to stage dive. We never had a problem with that kind of stuff – we were really used to it. But last tour it got to the point where every single show, someone was getting hurt. It was never someone who was stage diving; it was someone who came to see us.”
A lot of the online debate centred on what punters should expect at a punk show and thus attempted to define punk culture. Johnson weighs in with a strong, though not infallible point: it’s good to have fun at shows, but it’s also important to know when you shouldn’t be too aggressive.
“On the internet you have people saying ‘Joyce Manor hates stage diving.’ ‘Oh, end stage diving.’ ‘Oh, don’t stage dive or Joyce Manor…’ I don’t have a problem with stage diving. I don’t care. I’ve done that shit, gone to hardcore shows and stuff, and it’s great. But there’s a time and a place. We’re a pop punk band. You know, it’s not necessarily the kind of place to get out that aggression.”
BY THOMAS BRAND
