Jaret Reddick
By Neale McGeever
In 2013 punk-pop icons Bowling For Soup
anounced they would be saying goodbye to the
UK for a while. Since then their vocalist and guitarist, Jaret Reddick, has released material with
his other bands People On Vacation and Jarinus,
as well as working on a few other projects. Last
year BFS released a fan-funded, re-recording of
their greatest hits (or at least the first ten years
worth) known as ‘Songs People Actually Liked
- Volume 1’ and more recently announced they
would be returning to UK for the ‘How About
Another Round’ tour in February 2016. Hooray!!
We caught up with Jaret Reddick himself to talk
about their return to the UK, rock music for kids,
fan-funded music and a certain ‘cheeky’ chicken
chain.
You said farewell to the UK a couple of years ago,
why are you coming back now?
We were pretty open about this on the ‘Farewell
Tour’, that ‘farewell’ wasn’t necessarily ‘good
bye’. We knew that at some point that we would
come back. At the time we didn’t know what
the future of BFS was so, for no other reasons
than personal ones – Erik was going through a
divorce, so was I, Gary was a new Dad and just
started his own business, so there was no way
we could keep this up.
We’ve been coming
here [the UK] every
year for 15 years, sometimes more than
once. There was no
way we could keep
the schedule going.
It’s been a couple of years now and everything
has smoothed its way out, so we found a new
way of figuring out a lighter touring schedule.
And we felt the fans wanted us to come back, it
was a constant thing on the internet. We knew
there would be people who thought we would
be ‘taking the piss’ as you guys say, but by no
means is that true.
But I can understand why you
would feel that
way. For example
I saw KISS on their
‘Farewell Tour’ in
the frickin’ ‘90s! And
they’re still going!
Sincerely I really had
no idea what was going
to happen with Bowling For
Soup or what we were going to
do. This isn’t us saying ‘We’re going
to be back every year from now on’ this is
more like: ‘Hey, we’re back in business and here
we come!’
even bringing their teenage kids to see us now,
it’s crazy. Maybe that’s an oversite but you guys
do a lot of ‘shagging’ early so… (He laughs) let’s
be fair!
That’s only a good thing, right?
There were definitely some haters at first and
those who went to multiple shows with it being
a ‘farewell tour’ in mind but if you look back at
the press –even then – we weren’t saying ‘goodb 嗊d