By Sam Brimacombe
Australian punk band Frenzal Romb will play in Geelong as part of an Australian tour coinciding with Good Beer Week.
The quartet has teamed with Sydney brewer Young Henry to ceate its own brew in commemoration of the week. Frenzal Romb: The Beer, is due to launch this weekend in tandem with the band’s Geelong show.
The ingredients of the beer, a Belgian pale ale, will mirror the wheat-free, vegan intake of the band members.
However, the band joked on Twitter that the beer might also contain old Frenzal Romb T-shirts, “baby vomit” or frontman Jay Walley’s dreadlocks.
The band, which has toured with the likes of Blink 182, The Offspring and Bad Religion, now sit alongside acts such as You Am I and KISS as groups with self-titled craft beers named in their honour.
The beer branding follows a blow to the band’s ill-fated tour last year when singer Jay Whalley suffered several seizures, leading to surgery for suspected brain tumours.
During surgery doctors discovered Whalley was free of a tumour but infested with a parasitic tapeworm egg that he contracted four years earlier in South America.
The band has courted controversy over the years for its members’ activities as political activists and animal rights campaigners.
Last year the band publically slammed the ARIA awards via Twitter for having too many American guest stars and for awarding recent reality TV talent.
In 2004 Austereo radio network blacklisted the band after purposely drowning out radio presenter, Jackie O, at a Darwin music festival. The incident led to a heated on-air argument with Jacki O’s on-air shock jock partner, Kyle Sandilands, who told the band to never expect to hear its music on Triple M or Mix 101.1.
Frenzal Romb plays the Barwon Club on Saturday.
