The Beards

So far, so average – playing warm-up duties is a rite of passage that almost every band on the planet has gone through – except for one small detail: Beardraven and McMillan were the same person.

“We were actually supporting ourselves,” Beardraven/McMillan explains. “We had another band at the time and this was a gag. It was our other band’s CD launch. We kind of threw together this gag band, The Beards, as a bit of a laugh to support ourselves. We played the set, then went backstage, shaved, and then came back onstage and played the other gig. A lot of people didn’t realise we were both bands. A lot of people came up and said, ‘Who were those first guys?’ … It was the most ridiculous idea that we’d come up with.”

Such bizarre beginnings might mean McMillan is one of the few people in musical history who has managed to upstage himself. “It was just a bit of a gag, a bit of a joke, a goof … for our own amusement really,” he admits. “Happily, we discovered there was a ferocious public appetite for songs about beards, so we were forced to play more than one gig.”

Oddly enough, to describe Australia’s desire for beard-related content as “ferocious” might even be an understatement. The Beards are now an undeniable force – an award-winning band with one of the most devoted fan bases imaginable. Over the course of their career, they have released five albums and a live DVD, pumping out bristly hits like ‘You Should Consider Having Sex With A Bearded Man’ and the plainly titled ‘Beard Related Song Number 38’, all while inspiring both rapturous adoration and puzzled bemusement in equal measure.

Not that McMillan is jealous of Beardraven’s success, mind you – he has adored every minute of his time as The Beards’ hairy frontman. However, after rising to the very top of the beard-related novelty song business, McMillan and co. have decided to bring the project to its close. All good things must come to an end, after all.

“It was hard [to end the band],” says McMillan. “We’ve been touring pretty heavily for a long time, and we knew we either needed that break or we needed to go out with a bang. It’s going to be a little bit sad, but we will certainly be keeping the band together as a core entity. We’ll certainly be looking for other ways to spread our pro-beard message, so that might mean releasing more material down the track, but the touring stuff is done … at least that side of it.”

So far The Beards have spread both love and hair across a series of rural venues, and though at this stage the tour is still in its early days, by the time it is all done and dusted the band will have hit up more than 50 locations across the country. But despite the melancholia-tinged nature of the tour, McMillan says the full significance of the farewell shows hasn’t hit him emotionally – not yet, anyway.

“It’s not as [sad] as I maybe thought it would be, but I do think it will get there. So far it’s been fine – pretty cruisy at the moment. Just a few festivals, a few headline shows. We played [South Australia’s Blenheimfest] in the Clare Valley recently and we got to sleep in our own beds afterwards, which is a rare treat on tour.”

The guiding ethos behind the shows was a simple one – give back to the people who have shown so much love for the group over so many years. Indeed, The Beards have gone into full payback mode, even going so far as to auction off some of their most prized possessions on eBay, meaning some lucky fan now owns John Beardman Jr’s used beard brush. They paid over $50 for the privilege.

“We’ve been lucky to just build up followers over a time,” McMillan says. “We have a really loyal fan base. And I guess this last tour is a way of getting out there and saying ‘thank you’, and having one last beard party before we call it a day.”

Of course, the conversation turns to the future, and McMillan’s post-Beards plans. The musician remains adamant the band will survive in some form or another – after all, you don’t give up on your facial hair so easily, and it would be hard to turn your back on a subject matter that you have effectively explored for so many years.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he sighs. “It’s going to be hard to perform songs that aren’t about beards. And I worry about the backlash from our bearded fan base if we start doing something else. We’re hopefully keeping the beard message alive. I guess it’s sort of open for us to move on to other projects as well.”

There’s only one more question to be asked: the single, burning query that has been rattling through the head of every Beards fan the world over. Namely, will the band’s lead singer be shaving off his own face-rug now the party is at its end? “No, I won’t,” McMillan laughs. “I look like a real chump without a beard.”

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