It’s an unseasonably beautiful afternoon in Sydney as Philadelphia Grand Jury bassist Joel Beeson – AKA MC Bad Genius – skips work to spend some time in the sunshine ahead of the band’s upcoming tour.
The concept is simple: Philadelphia Grand Jury will be playing at tiny venues across the country, handing the mic over to audience members to sing some karaoke with the Philly Jays as their backing band.
Beeson explains karaoke has become a bit of a tradition for the Sydney favourites when they’ve been on tour lately. “Normally it’s after we’ve all packed up and we’re still a bit wired and we’re like, ‘Let’s try and see if there’s an all-night karaoke bar somewhere round here,’” he says with a laugh. “It usually ends pretty poorly.”
Recently, the Philly Jays took to their Facebook page to ask fans for suggestions of songs they’d like to cover. Although Beeson admits some of the requests were odd, and not quite as classic as they’d anticipated, he confirms they’ve got “ideas of [their] own” that will hopefully keep the party going all night.
“There were some really good suggestions as well. One that I think we’re going to try and learn that will be really cool to do will be ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Kate Bush. I think it’ll be a stretch for us to learn a lot of the other ones that people suggested, but we’re going to give it a crack and see how many we can have ready for people to do. We’ve got a few ideas of our own that will be fun as well.”
The Philly Jays have a reputation for both brilliant and insane ideas, including once playing a show on the back of a moving truck, hosting a listening party for one of their albums on a bus riding around the city, and now the karaoke tour, So You Think You Can Philly Jays. This particular concept dates back to last year, when Beeson and co. had hoped to pull it off, but realised they couldn’t at that point in time.
Between then and now, the Philly Jays have been worried that another band was going to beat them to it – though Beeson laughs that he didn’t think anyone else would be “stupid enough to try it” anyway. Now, as the bassist reassures us on behalf of his bandmates Simon ‘Berkfinger’ Berckelman and Dan ‘Dan W. Sweat’ Williams, “It’s going to be great fun, no matter what happens.”
Beeson looks forward to airing some Philly Jays tunes and a few covers with the help of the fans, and he’s particularly excited for what he deems a staple of Australian karaoke: ‘The Horses’ by Daryl Braithwaite. But it certainly won’t be the band’s first public rendition of an Antipodean classic.
“There’s one [karaoke story] that I wasn’t actually a part of, but there’s footage apparently of Berkfinger singing ‘Love Is In The Air’ by John Paul Young at a karaoke bar in Berlin, completely naked,” Beeson says. “I’m not really sure how that all eventuated, but yeah, apparently there’s video footage of it somewhere. I’m yet to see it and I’m not sure if I really want to, to be honest.”
Philadelphia Grand Jury play Brighton Up Bar on Friday June 10, with Jai Pyne.
