Offspring Discusses Live Album

The Offspring's Dexter Holland tells us the band has recorded a number of shows on their wildly successful tour of Australia for a possible live album.

"We thought that it might be kind of cool to do that," says Holland. "We've got a few albums out now and we just wanted to pick a place [to record live] where it made sense, and really, Australia was it. We're going to record three in a row and take the best takes from each night."

The band has long been a huge audience favorite down under, and on this most recent visit were selling out 13,000 seaters with ease. Recording in that sort of enormously receptive environment simply made sense. The Ramones had tentative plans at one point to do an Australian live album for that very same reason.

"We figured if you record a live record you'd like it to be a good show," Holland laughs. "You don't want to play your dud town or whatever, and Australia's a really strong place for us. It's really one of the strongest in the world, I think."

The proposed album will, however, probably be a little less theatrical than one of Holland's all-time fave live recordings. "I don't know if this is a bad thing for me to say or not, but Kiss Alive was a great live album. That was one of the things that got me into rock music, actually, back when my older brother bought it and brought it home. I was really into it."

From Allstar - June 28, 1999