FUNERAL FOR A FRIEND may be a post-hardcore institution, but drummer Pat Lundy will be keeping his feet on the ground for the band’s upcoming Australian tour.

“We’re just going to show up, plug in, and jam, it’s all we know how to do,” he says. “We’re not into any crazy production or anything like that; even at home we tour in a van and we do that because we choose to. Hotels are overrated, man. Bus touring, the smell of ammonia, piss, engines, and vomit; I kinda like that vibe. We just plug in and play, and get really sweaty in a bunch of kids’ faces.”

The band’s Australian tour will consist of ten shows in eleven days, and Lundy is excited by the prospect of the busy schedule.

“It’s the new dynamic of the band and it’s pretty normal,” he says. “I’ve just got home today from five shows in five days, so we’re into packing as many gigs as we can and playing to as many people as we can in whatever country we’re in. We wanna keep it busy man, and keep it punk rock! It’ll be a much more intense, more intimate vibe, played in places the band have never been to. I’ve only done Soundwave before, so getting to play the Gold Coast, Canberra, and places that we’ve never been will the best part of the tour I imagine. Now I’m home for five days, then I’m off for a secret Converse show in Berlin, then flying home for shows in the UK, then it’s the Silverstein tour, then our own headliners in Europe, then shows in Australia, then after that more shows in the UK and Europe. So, the whole year is a touring year for us.”

Lundy joined the band in 2012 after the departure of long-standing sticksman Ryan Richards.

“I joined a year ago this month,” he says. “I toured with the band a number of times with my old band. We supported them on four different tours and I knew their management really well. We were with the same management company, and we were always at the same parties and shit like that. They asked me not to join, but to audition, and I did that in March 2012.”

The band has just released their sixth album Conduit, and he reaction so far has been generally very positive.

“It’s a bit funny, when you work on something from inside it’s hard to tell,” he says. “I mean it’s hard to conceive that we have fans to be honest, and trying to guess how people are going to see our record is an alien concept. Even for the guys who have been in it from the start – we’re talking about Matt and Chris, obviously – for them I think it’s even harder to fathom how people are going to take it, but I can tell you for free at this stage that they don’t care. They’re just doing selfish music to make us happy, and the fact that people are vibing it is a really good buzz. We’re the happiest we’ve ever been as a band, and I can say that safely as we’re such a good line-up. It’s really nice and a rare thing when everyone engages musically; writing and playing is really exciting and it’s not work, it’s all fun, like when we were little and were in bands, kind-of like that vibe. It was slightly different for me, as the record had been recorded before, so I re-recorded the drums. I went in and took about three days to re-record my parts, and the producer is a really good friend of the band, so it all turned out really well, and at the end of it everybody was really buzzing.”

Despite having a wealth of material to choose from, the band won’t just be rolling out the hits on their upcoming tour.

“I think there are over 120 songs or maybe more, so to get that all into and hour and a half set means you don’t get the best demographic that you want to get off all your records, so we’ll play four or five songs off Conduit, and still leave room for all the classics and range of shit between; a great mix.”

FUNERAL FOR A FRIEND PLAY THE REV ON MAY 8th