Interview by Kris Peters
Melbourne metal legends Frankenbok celebrated their 25th anniversary at The Tote on December 12, 2022 in the most positive and emphatic way possible by assembling every one of Frankenbok's many line-ups from over the years to perform songs from their era.
It was a unique and highly ambitious project that could have gone off the rails at any juncture, but, to their credit, the Bok boys smashed it out of the park and the couple of hundred lucky fans who converged on The Tote that evening were left with a lifetime of memories.
BUT, if you missed out on that one-off performance, fear not!
After 12 months of painstaking editing and quality control, the good folk at Fair Dinkum Records have finally put the finishing touches to not only an audio CD, but also the full video concert, with both out now for your viewing and listening pleasure.
Current Frankenbok vocalist Dan McDougall sat down with HEAVY to tell us more.
"It was a killer night," he recalled, "and we got it recorded and filmed, and we have just finally put it out. We've got it as a live album and also the full show can be watched on YouTube as well."
The album is called 25 Years Of Noise In One Form Or Another, which perfectly sums up what to expect, and we question Dan on who actually came up with the title.
"I did," he smiled. "I was just trying to think of a name and that just popped into my head. It's the truth. The band has been through many different changes over the 25 years, so with each different line-up it's brought something… it's changed every time, but there's been a running thread through the whole thing. I was in the band twice with two of those line-ups, but there's been four different singers. With every different singer you're going to have a different sound, but, like I said, there's a thread running through the whole thing and that's Azza who has been there from the start. His riffs and his music runs through the whole thing, so it's quite an eclectic bunch of songs when you put it all together."
In the full interview we discuss that night, go through what each line-up contributed, his highlight of the concert, the singles released in the lead-up and why they were chosen, getting the sound right on the live release, the new line of merchandise, new music and more.