Superheroes, self-consciousness, and the Steve Miller Band: an interview with Ben Parker from My Best Unbeaten Brother.
Ben Parker, guitarist and vocalist for the UK-based rock trio, on the band’s new “mini-album,” Pessimistic Pizza.
photo by Tony Robertson.
Ben and Adam Parker’s musical journey has been a long one. The brothers played together in the band Tempertwig from 1999 to 2004, before going on to form indie rock act Nosferatu D2, and, later, the Superman Revenge Squad Band. After years of dormancy, the Parker brothers are back with a new project, joined by bassist Ben Fry.
Pessimistic Pizza, My Best Unbeaten Brother’s debut “mini-album,” is a collection of seven songs exploring anything and everything from sincerity to Spider-Man.
I had the opportunity to chat with guitarist and vocalist Ben Parker about the new album.
Evgenia: My Best Unbeaten Brother springs from past bands like Nosferatu D2, the Superman Revenge Squad Band, and Tempertwig. How is this new project different from previous ones? And, maybe, how is it similar?
Ben: I think when I first played the songs to my brother, who’s the drummer and was also in Tempertwig and Nosferatu D2 and played with Superman Revenge Squad as well, he said, it feels like it's a combination of everything brought together. So it's kind of a return to Tempertwig, which is the three-piece indie rock band, but it's also informed by all the stuff I've done since. But also how it differs, as I've sort of said before, I think it's less self-conscious in some ways.
[Now, we are] not really thinking about the audience and not really overthinking things, in the way that I was quite self-conscious for Nosferatu D2.
E: How did My Best Unbeaten Brother form?
B: My brother and I hadn't played together for a long time. So my son's now seven, he's going to be eight soon, and when he was born, I sort of stopped doing music for a bit.
I was in a band called the Jonbarr Hinge back in the day, which was a collective of people, and I was just a part of it. And in that band, for about six months, was Ben Fry, the bassist in the band. And then when my son started primary school, I bumped into Ben, whose daughter is in the same class. And prior to that, in the lockdown, I'd kind of picked up my guitar again to learn other songs, because I've never learned anyone else's songs in my life, really. It's always just been about playing the guitar to write songs. So I picked it up and I thought, well, I'll learn some songs that my son seems to like, just to play differently. I learned “Riff Raff” by AC/DC, which he quite liked, which is very different to anything I'd normally play. So I was playing that, and then I just started writing songs on it. And then when I was talking to Ben in the queue to get into primary school, I said I'd written some songs. He had sold his bass seven years before. So he said, “oh, we'll have a practice, and I'll have to buy a bass.”
He bought a bass. After a few practices at home, we thought, “oh, this sounds OK. I'll see if Adam is willing to sit in on drums for a bit.” I wasn't sure if it was his sort of thing.
Adam's music is a lot heavier than mine. I think there was always a bit of conflict, in some respects, when you look back at something like Nosferatu D2. I was always a bit more indie and he was a bit more technical in terms of his drumming, so I think it didn't really hit any audience, because it was too indie for a metal audience and too metal for an indie audience. I thought he might not want to do it, but we had a practice, and he hadn't been in a band for a little bit, so he was quite pleased to do it and it seemed to gel quite well.
It was already called My Best Unbeaten Brother before my brother was in it, so that had no influence on the name. “I See a Darkness” by Will Oldham is where that lyric comes from.
E: How did you land on that as the name?
B: Before Superman Revenge Squad Band, there were three CDs that I just did myself at home called Superman Revenge Squad, and they were on My Best Unbeaten Brother Records, which I made up, so it's been around for a long time, so I always quite like that line from it. I was originally going to call that project My Best Unbeaten Brother, but I didn't, so it's been lingering for a long, long time. I really like Will Oldham, so if you don't know Will Oldham, check it out.
Pessimistic Pizza album cover.
E: That’s so interesting that you started learning the songs your son liked during the pandemic! Do you think that kind of experimentation had any influence on the sounds you ended up with for your new work?
B: Some of the lyrics are very inspired by my son. There’s a song about listening to the lyrics of Steve Miller Band, which was influenced by my son’s Toniebox. It’s a little box and it has stories on it, and then you could get a plain one that you could put MP3s on, and so his favorite song for a bit was “Bad Medicine” by Bon Jovi, which he would sing quite a lot. And then we had the radio on and he really liked “Abracadabra” by the Steve Miller Band and so I, before putting it on there, was analyzing the lyrics online to see if it was appropriate to put on it, because a lot of lyrics, when you look into them, they’re not, and I didn’t think that was.
He also got really into superheroes, so there’s a mention of Spider-Man in the first track of the album, which is kind of about fatherhood. When I was young, my favorite was Superman, which is where that came from.
E: What’s it been like bringing Ben Fry into the band? How has the change in line-up influenced the direction you’ve taken?
B: I think he brings in melodies that I don't envision. Adam seems to really like playing with him. Nosferatu D2 is me and Adam and no bassist, and I think he likes having a bassist there now. I think there's a bit more going on rhythmically than there was on that, which he quite likes. The main thing about Ben is he's first and foremost a music fan and not a musician, which is what I would call myself. He's got a massive record collection—he used to be a DJ in Croydon where he used to do an indie night—and so he knows quite a lot about this sort of music and stuff, and he's a good audience. I think the main thing when you're writing songs, it's quite a vulnerable position to be in. You're sort of bringing a song in for the first time, and him and Adam seem to be quite good at listening to it and adding to it, and you feel comfortable doing so, which is more important than you think, when it comes to things like this. The other thing is Ben's a lot more outgoing than me and Adam, so I keep joking that we could have done with him in past bands, because he probably would have been better at networking than we are—we're terrible at that.
E: You're going to be playing gigs, right?
B: We've got very infrequent gigs, but yes, we're playing at the Dublin Castle in Camden next month. We're not connected to anyone. Back in the days of Nosferatu D2, I self-consciously turned my back on anything and just had these goals. Me and Adam would just make the goals, writing the music and recording, and if people asked us to play, we'd play, and we wouldn't pursue gigs. I think when we were in Tempertwig, we had these dreams of getting signed or whatever, and it was all about getting the acclaim of people, and you just spend time chasing people for gigs. With Nosferatu D2, we didn't bother doing that, so we just got asked to play. Now we're similar to that, but we don't know anyone. Everyone I used to know is no longer in the promoting game or anything. So we're back at the Dublin Castle next month. Prior to that, we played a few gigs in Croydon, which is where we are, so we can headline there, because we know people. I didn't want to play loads of gigs. Unless someone says, “yes, come play this,” then we can certainly do it. I'm more focused on writing the second album, so I've got 10 songs that I'm just trying to finish off, and then show to the other two. About half of them we've finished as a band, and then the other half I'm writing at the moment.
E: That’s so exciting. When would you expect the next album to be finished?
B: I'd like to have it written and, hopefully, recorded by the end of the year, would be the plan. As long as these things keep coming, I'm gonna keep doing it. That's the bit I love about making things up. When you sit down and you get an idea, and it turns into a song, that's the best bit, rather than playing live. I quite like getting messages from people that have heard the songs, and it means something to them.
E: Do you have any music recommendations for anyone reading this? What have you been listening to lately?
B: So we got asked that recently and a lot of the stuff we sort of went back to on this was all stuff from the 90s. The one band that me, Ben and Adam all agree on is Dinosaur Jr. We went to see them when they played Where You Been at the Garage in London. We all went to that, the three of us.
The two records I always say are like my favorite records ever come from that era, one of them is Minx by Leatherface and then the other one I always talk about is Arise Therefore by Palace Music, which is Will Oldham. They're the two I always point to, but the other two wouldn't like them at all. Adam doesn't like “I See A Darkness,” so he didn't know where the band name came from until someone in an interview asked us, and then he said he listened to it, got to the bit where it mentioned the band name and he turned it off, because it wasn't his sort of thing.
E: Thank you so much for talking to me. I really like Nosferatu D2, so this was a lot of fun.
B: I think the new album's probably a bit more palatable to some people than Nosferatu D2. My dad came to the first gig and he said, he seemed to think, “oh yeah, it's a bit more together.” Nosferatu D2, because it was just the two of us, and it was very angry, I had to get myself in a certain place to do the gigs with Nosferatu D2. The last gig we did with Nosferatu D2, or one of the last ones, was with Los Campesinos!, if you know them. We played with them, and that kind of killed it off for me, because they were all jubilant. It was like the first time they played and they were getting quite big, and then we came off stage, and I just couldn't talk to anyone, because I was just there, in this very dark place, I'd have to go to this angry place. So after that, I thought, “okay, I'll just try and be me,” so that's what turned into Superman Revenge Squad, which I think continues into this.
photo by Tony Robertson.
edited by Jake Harvey.
photos by Tony Robertson.