We've all been there: you're playing a rock show, you leap off the top of a PA, badly dislocate your shoulder in your process, and then play another two songs regardless... wait... no... that's unusual. Unless, of course, you're Brad Marr - frontman of Aussie rockers Massive.
"All I remember is trying to play guitar with my hand facing the wrong way!"
"I couldn't swing my arm back into place," he recounts. "So I'm holding the guitar at an angle, just playing through the pain. A song and a half later I took my guitar off and swung my arm back in. I don't know if I sang well, or I played well... all I remember is trying to play guitar with my hand facing the wrong way!"
Such events, it appears, are not enough to halt the rise of Massive. This is a four-piece who are on a dogged mission to win the hearts and minds of the classic rocking faithful.
"We're all at that level now to say, 'Let's do it right, from the start'," reckons Brad. "Our first gig was to a packed house, we recorded the album in a couple of months and we toured to America within the first four months of being a band. We'd done the homework this time."
This is not idle boasting from Brad, merely illustrative of his aim to spend less time on "fucking Facebook" and more on the road.
"Don't get me wrong, it was a shit tour!" he says of their early US trip. "But we knew we had to survive out there in order to do this. We had a thousand CDs and that was our mission: to get a thousand people into our music. Putting it all on the line really made us a stronger band."
It also led to the band catching the attention of Earache, which released their debut album Full Throttle earlier this year. It's a record chock-full of Appetite-era Slash-y leads and, inevitably, AC/DC-influenced riffing, while Brad and lead man Ben Laguda's Gibson SGs/LPs and Peavey/Marshall tones leap out the speakers. It's easy to see next year's rock festival bookings rolling in. Meanwhile, you can catch Massive on tour with The Treatment this October.
"Massive is the kind of band where, if you're having a shit time, you come in, you leave it at the door and have a good time," says Brad of their shows. "That's what we encourage and that's what music should be about."
For fans of: Guns N' Roses, AC/DC
Hear: One By One
