AAA Backstage Archive

Interview: Sam Margin from The Rubens

It’s been an extremely productive year for our favourite guys The Rubens. They toured a lot, written a lot, released a lot of incredible stuff. Now guys are touring again, having with much more to come and we’re glad to say, we had a chance to chat with The Rubens’ frontman about all these heaps of things they’ve accomplished and have yet to come!

Hi there! So glad I got to chat with you, Sam, how’re you doing?

I’m good, thanks!

I must say, you did a fantastic job on your album ‘Hoops’, no wonder why it’s been receiving heaps of attention lately! The tour must be a blast as well. How’s it going so far?

Oh, thank you! It’s really fun, actually, really busy and wild, we didn’t do the biggest shows yet, like Melbourne, Sydney, but the tour is great so far, yeah. We love hanging a lot together and with friends, who we are touring with, so this is going pretty amazing.

It’s a pretty tricky question, but anyway, what was the best city to play in this half of your tour?

It’s a bit hard to say, but if I had to choose, I’d say Hobart was the best so far, yep. The crowd was so welcoming, lovable, we enjoyed it a lot, they we really really sick. Surely, there’s Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane still coming up, so it’s sort of hard to make the ‘final’ choice, but Tasmania was really wild, we loved it a lot.

As you’ve said before, your new album is pretty much focused on the ‘live’ type of songs. As fun as it must’ve been working on the album, there must be some ‘favourites’. Do you have a certain pick of songs you personally love to perform live?

Yeah, that’s right, we thought to focus on the energy of life performing, as it’s what we love and enjoy most. Well, most of our tracks had their time on triple j, ‘Hoops’ in full rotation…But not only triple j, on other commercial stations too, so we’ve been getting a broader audience into it, so…’Hoops’ is good, and it’s crowd’s favourite, our personal favourite’s also includes a song called ‘The Fool’, which is our last song of the record, That one live is probably one of the funnest songs, yeh.

Both ‘Hoops’ and ‘Hallelujah’ are hitting media extremely hard now. I, myself, really love them, and, honestly, the video on ‘Hoops’ is really sick… A good neck exercise. How did you come up with its idea?

We just… We really made two videos for this record so far, and the key thing for us is like to show things we’re interested in, which are interesting to look at, visually appealing. Oh, I had another music video to try and tell a story within three minutes and sometimes it’s really really hard to do. We’ve been just trying to make stuff interesting and with ‘Hoops’ the concept was actually given by the director, and it all’s mainly based on visual effects, you know, post-production kind of stuff. It was really simple, I think it’s all about effects, the song really goes just about 2,45 sec, so the idea was to keep people interested for that amount of time, not…confuse them. I think we did a pretty good job, you know!

What about a sneak-peek to the upcoming stuff? Are you going to release some new videos anytime soon?

Yea-ah! We got a new single coming up soon, so I’m shooting a new video for that one, this Monday, I guess, so just wait and you’ll see what’s the video and the song are!

Alrighty, so back to the tour! Tours are always a rousing thing, how would you describe yours in about three words or one sentence?

Uhm…Our tour includes…support acts Saskwatch and Winterbourne, and Saskwatch have been around us for a long time, so it’s just like a party with so many friends. So yep, it’s good! Just hanging out.

Like you said, you’re touring with Saskwatch and Winterbourne, so how did the all touring together idea came up and how’s it like to tour together?

Well…We’ve met Saskwatch through Saskwatch’s guitarist. I think he started on being a guitar tech for our stage manager, he was working on us, with us…and then we got introduced to the rest of his band, and became friends with the rest guys! So when we came to choosing someone to support us, we figured you’d like someone to enjoy being around with, to love hanging with them 24/7, and um…yep, it’s just a bunch of friends touring together. We love watching both bands live, so this is a win for everyone.

Alrighty, and what are your plans for upcoming 2016? Any exciting surprises?

Yeah, I think so. I think the next big thing we’d wanna achieve will be to tour America or Europe, or both. If it’s possible…ideally. We’d love to spend a lot of time overseas, travelling, meeting new people. So, yeah, this is definitely the next thing we want to achieve!