An Interview with Brendan B. Brown of Wheatus

It’s been 25 years since Wheatus released their first album, featuring the hit single ‘Teenage Dirtbag’. That record went on to sell more than five million copies worldwide. To celebrate this milestone, the band are playing the album in full at a series of gigs in the UK and Ireland, starting this November. David Schuster chatted to frontman and founding member of the band, Brendan B. Brown about the tour, guitars and where to get a decent pie…

Congratulations on the 25th anniversary of your platinum-selling debut album.
Thanks, man. 25th anniversary? What a thing to say! I hadn’t really considered what a thing it is to say that out loud.

Twenty-five years on, are you still a ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ at heart?
Ha ha. All but the teenage bit, sure. I’m 52 now, and I’ve been told that I’m looking all right for 52 But it’s the parts on the inside that you can’t see that are breaking down, you know?

Do you still enjoy the whole touring process?
Very much so. I just have to be a bit more careful physically. We do our own work out there, loading, unloading, setting up. We’ve always crewed our own shows. In fact, every time we’ve ever played an arena, or the big venues, or anything like that, you can see us physically setting up our stuff before we play. That’s tough.

I thought you got Leroy to do that?
Ha! No, Leroy got a better job. He’s off making tons of money somewhere in crypto or some sh*t like that.

Brendan B. Brown of Wheatus

“On the cutting edge”

You famously give Iron Maiden a namecheck in ‘Teenage Dirtbag’. Have you ever had a chance to play alongside them or with them?
Indeed, I have! We were very lucky in August 2001. We had sort of sneaked away to re-record our third single, ‘Wannabe Gangster’. There was a bit of — I’ll call it — an A&R debate happening at the label. One guy thought it should sound like Limp Bizkit. The other guy thought it should sound like Gorillaz. We were kind of like, “Hey, you know what? We did the first two and they sound like us. What do you say we do that again?” And that was not something they were interested in.

So, we secreted away to Abbey Road Studios. We got lucky and got Room Two there. [The iconic recording room, used by The Beatles, Kate Bush, Oasis, Adele and many more]. Bruce Dickinson caught wind of it. I think at the time he may have been living just outside London, perhaps in Chiswick. Anyway, he rode his bike down to meet with us and sing on the record. So, suddenly I was producing one of my favourite artists in the holiest of holies!

If you could have been in any other band through time, who would you have been with?
Oh, that’s a fascinating question. I speculate sometimes that it might be an awful lot of fun to be in Biffy Clyro. Oh, yeah, that seems like a fun band to be in. Also, I think that anything Richard Ashcroft was ever involved in would be really interesting because he’s so very, very talented. He’s always ten years ahead, at least, of what people are paying attention to. He’s been on the cutting edge since he started, I think. No one even comes close to him, as far as I’m concerned. He’s just a genius and a poet, and I’m up for anything he’s putting out.

We’re looking forward to welcoming you back to the UK in November. Is there anything peculiarly British that you like to do when you’re over here?
Well, it’s not all that peculiar, it’s quite standard, actually. A full English breakfast really checks all the boxes, typically. You don’t get that sort of standardisation here in the States. Depending on what state you’re in or what city, you can have different local specialities. In Kentucky, for example, you can have what’s called a Hot Brown, which is a fantastic sandwich that’ll blow your socks off. But I digress. The standard breakfast in the United Kingdom, Ireland as well, for that matter, is something that we quite look forward to because it’s just so damn reliable. So yeah, that’d be us.

“Fielding requests”

Unusually for this tour, you’re playing two nights at my home venue, Leeds Brudenell. Is there something about it that you particularly like?
That little room is fantastic. First of all, it feels so old school, right? It’s not really… It is a rock club. It has the function of a rock club. But what it really is, is a bit of a men’s social club, isn’t it? An after-work pints sort of place, where they watch the horses or something. And they also have a nice assortment of pies. The last time we were there, we had some lovely pies!

It’s a nice place to hole up for a day or two as well. Leeds has always been good to us, and in particular, the Brudenell Social Club has been a spot that we look forward to and had the opportunity to do two in a row. They’re both sold out, by the way.

So, it was a wonderful opportunity because we don’t play the same set twice ever. It’s all request, you know? But for the fact that we’ll be including all of the first record, not necessarily in order; everything else is up for grabs. These shows have been anywhere from an hour and a half to two hours long, depending on what the crowd wants. So we’ll have two unique sets.

I was going to ask you about that. It’s one of Wheatus’ unique things: playing sets based on requests from the fans. Can you identify a point where it started?
‘Teenage Dirtbag’, of course, was the big thing that started everything. And then we went a little quiet for a while. In the quiet time, we started making records that didn’t sound anything like that first one. And by and by, an audience was gathered that wasn’t necessarily a ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ audience, if you will. So we had these other people, the people who came to us on the third record or the fourth, then the fifth and the sixth.

It was around the release of the sixth album, the Valentine LP, which was 2013. We had been fielding requests since maybe 2006, here and there. It always added an interesting little bit of spice to the show. If somebody shouted something while they wanted to hear it, we responded in kind immediately to perform it. It changed the vibe. We noticed that moment had a lot of power. So we started toying with the idea of having all-request sets in the United States, because so few people knew ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ and quite a lot more knew the other stuff. So we didn’t want to approach the audience with an agenda, a set list, if you will, which made it stodgy.

It was around 2013 that we switched over entirely to all-request sets at headlining shows. And it changed the map. It definitely made for a much better evening for everybody. Because, of course, you don’t know what mood the audience is in until you’ve communicated with them. I can’t tell you how many bands I was in before Wheatus, where we would have this set list that we worked so hard on. And, you know, it was just perfect in our eyes. Then the audience would be a bit muted. It was because we were trying to force the mood on them, and audiences don’t really work that way. They have their own minds, based on the type of day that they’ve had, or week that they’re having.

So, whatever my preconceived notion of what was going to happen every night would seem to be less and less relevant. More and more of what was relevant was taking the pulse of the people who were actually in front of us. And what better way to do that than to have them shout things at you that they want? We do have an enormous challenge of learning and rehearsing a much, much larger repertoire than any other band that does set lists would have to face. And I think at this point, we’re up to about 54 titles that we can pull out of a hat should we need to!

“Employed some spies”

On that subject, let’s test your memory. Last time you were at Brudenell, a couple of years back, you treated us to the ‘Yorkshire Song’. Is that something we can expect again?
Oh, that? Ha! That’s had a few different titles, that one. Well, we might have a bit of a jam, it all depends. We have this urgency to squeeze in as many songs as we can. The set has been anywhere from 17 to 25 songs, which makes up the better part of an hour and a half to two hours. I desperately want to make sure that everybody gets what they want. We’re planning something a little different this time, because some of the venues are a little bit bigger than we’re used to. Immediate vocal contact with the band might not be possible for people who are a little further back. So, we’ve employed some spies to travel through the audience and ask people in the back, or in the wings, what they’re interested in. If they have a firm answer, then that spy will let us know that so and so wants something for Christmas, or whatever. That’s very exciting.

Do you have a favourite guitar that you take on tour?
I apprenticed under violin and cello makers long enough to get myself into trouble with stringed instruments. So, I design and build guitars myself. And just now my friend Eric is upstairs doing the final sanding on a third iteration of this design that I’ve come up with. That’s exciting. However, if you saw me perform with Ed Sheeran in Germany this summer, I was playing a custom Brian Neville guitar that I heavily modified myself. That 17-inch Brian Neville was finished just in the nick of time for that performance. That one is a special one. That’s my number one these days.

Going back to your eponymous Wheatus album. You recorded all the takes at home, and the final cut was engineered by the legendary George Marino.
Yeah, well, he was the mastering engineer, and boy, did he do a fantastic job on that record. I think he heard the album somewhere in the Sony building, which was very close at that time to Sterling Sound in Midtown Manhattan. He wanted to master the record, and he just hit it out of the park. It still feels very cohesive to me. All these years later.

Wheatus 2025
image: Gabrielle White

“Evolved the music”

In 2020 though, you went back, reimagined it and re-recorded it. Is that something you wanted to do because there was stuff that you’d evolved and thought, actually, I wish I’d done that differently?
Well, we didn’t have copies of the masters, so a remix wasn’t possible. We knew that we needed to re-record it to fill that void, because it was all this hard work that we were told just didn’t exist any more. So, rather than being sad about having lost something so precious, we decided to redo it. However, the process became very forensic because obviously, it’s no longer a sort of inception creative moment. Now it’s to recreate, right? So finding the good mistakes, understanding how they occurred and recreating the circumstance was really pretty tedious. Something I’ll never do again! It was a laborious process, but it was worth it. In particular, ‘Love is a Mutt from Hell’ and ‘Leroy’ both came out much better than the originals. I also think that’s true of ‘Pretty Girl’ and ‘I’d Never Write a Song About You’.

It’s been a few years since the last studio album. Do you feel the need to do another?
One hundred per cent. I’m busting at the seams with songs! We actually have quite a few of them in the repertoire, ‘Lullaby’, a song called ‘Tipsy’, which was inspired by a conversation I had with Liam Payne [of One Direction] and another one called ‘Michelle’. We’re just waiting to come off the road long enough to record these 13 or so tracks that we have, which are basically finished. We just haven’t had a moment to do it because it’s been tour, tour, tour.

We kind of tumbled out of the pandemic into a 20th anniversary tour. Then before we knew it, it was the 25th anniversary and all this. So we haven’t had the opportunity. But we’re ready. We’re definitely ready. In 2026, the idea is we’re going to record an acoustic album, because myself and Gabrielle have been touring acoustically in the down periods. That’s kind of evolved the music in a direction we didn’t expect. So we want to capture some of that. We just released an EP of acoustic versions, and we’re going to do a more fleshed-out version of that.

Then, we’re working on a covers record, which we’ve really been looking forward to for quite some time. After which, we’re also going to finish the seventh studio album. That’ll take a little longer. But 2026 is looking like it’ll be a year of popping in and out of the studio to get this stuff done.

It’s a wonderful problem to have. But, we have to pump the brakes for a second and get some new material into the tin, you know?

For more information see wheatus.com
Top image: Jodi Cunningham

David Schuster( Writer )

David Schuster describes himself as an “adventurer, collector, musician and writer. Not necessarily in that order.” Growing up west of the Pennine hills of the UK and living his adult life east of them, he’s inclined to think that the Wars of the Roses were a mistake. David loves discovering new bands and musicians and is happiest listening to live music. He has travelled extensively in the UK and is fascinated by the variety, history and landscapes of the thousands of islands that comprise the British Isles. David is always reassured when online shops confirm that he’s not a robot.

You do not have any posts.