The Band From Wellington, New Zealand, DARTZ are a pub-punk four-piece that deliver plenty of beer-swilling, irreverent tales that you get from being at the bottom of the ladder with a distinctly Kiwi flavor. Formed initially to open for our old mates The Chats, their discography of speedy, in-your-face, and utterly hilarious songs has taken them to the very top of the NZ Charts with their sophomore album A Dangerous Day To Be A Cold One peaking at #1.
I’ve seen DARTZ quite a number of times and with song names like theirs, I knew that there had to be some great stories behind them. As luck would have it, they were due to tour with some other old mates of ours, Australian riff-lords DZ Deathrays. Sitting on the steps at the back of the Crowbar, we decided to finish off the last few left in the pack and light them up with the sparks from our Five Quickfire Questions!
DARTZ are:
- Daniel “Danz” Vernon: Vocals
- Clark Mathews: Bass guitar
- Hakopa “Rollyz” Kuka-Larsen: Drums
- Christan “Crispy” Pianta: Guitar
1. This first question is unfortunately not an uncommon story nowadays. After a week straight on the bender, you’re flat broke and don’t get paid until the end of the week. What do you make to eat with ingredients that you can Steal From the Supermarket, but only by shoving them down your pants, in your pockets, or under your coat?
Danz: Uh, the honest answer is, you can make a pretty good stew. You make a pretty good stew by getting the Wattie’s cans of stew. They can go in anywhere, and they’re pretty bulky. That’s a pretty good meal. So I’m gonna go Wattie’s can of stew.
Crispy: Like these two can definitely get away with putting a can of stew down their pants. I don’t know if I could pull that off. But there was a beautiful time where we didn’t have to worry about that where uh, Clark Matthews here won a year’s supply of instant noodles. So we were pretty lush in our slumming days. Not that we’re not also still slumming it but we had options. We had options. The stealing from the supermarket came later when I didn’t have money for blue cheese.
2. What’s the absolute worst vehicle that you could be in when Learning to Drive With Dad?
[Everybody laughs]
Rollyz: It’s gotta be the Toyota Corolla that we did the Toyota Corolla tour in. Beautiful specimen of a vehicle—listen, you drove it. You learned how to drive manual in that. And we remember how that went, all right? Her name’s Candace, she’s beautiful, we love her. But that thing is fucking hard to drive man. You’re going up a hill, you stop there, someone’s up your fucking arse. It’s no good.
Danz: Uh, the true story is I learnt to drive, when my dad did teach me to drive, it was in a Nissan Ute thing. And it was manual and it was just… he was nervous, I was nervous. He got short tempered. It was yeah. So (the answer is) any sort of Nissan Ute. And he was like “You have to learn in a manual cause that’s the only way… no one’s gonna hire you if you can’t drive manual.” And then two, literally two years later that man bought an automatic. And he was like, “Oh you should learn to drive an automatic, it’s so much easier.” And I was like, well I have the trauma now from learning to drive in a Nissan.
3. Sometimes a free drink is just what you need when It’s a Dangerous Day To Be A Cold One but other times you need to Earn The Thirst. Where’s the furthest you’d travel for unlimited free beer?
Danz: Any distance, any time.
Crispy: Dan and I have cycled over a hundred kilometers to not get free beer. So, I think we have like… we might have got two free drinks each when we did that. So, a hundred kilometers or more. On a bike. On a push bike. But yeah, I don’t think there’s really a limit on that. We also like, we don’t make any money when we tour overseas. We loved going to Germany for the free beer. That’s pretty far away. Uh yeah. So, I don’t know. I don’t know how far away that is but…
OB: So Europe and across the world?
Crispy: Yeah, we’ll travel anywhere for a rider!
OB: Let it be known these boys will travel anywhere as long as they get the unlimited rider.
4. We all have things in life that we’ve got a rubber arm about. But can you tell me a time where you’ve seen someone else take it to the next level and you were like “Shit, I might actually Sit This One Out?”.
Rollyz: This one time in Queenstown or Wanaka on a late night out drinking, I was loudly complaining about how I’ve never been bungee jumping before. And this guy at the table next to me, he goes, “Hey bro. My fucking uncle was the inventor of the bungee jump. Do you want to come bungee jumping tomorrow?” I’m like, “Fuck yeah I want to go bungee jumping tomorrow!” We… we forget this, we’re too fucked up. The next day we wake up, we get the call from the bro. He’s like, “Hey. You guys can go bungee jumping today for free, you just gotta do some media promo.” I’m down to do it. The other boys are silent, man. They were silent. But, they didn’t Sit This One Out. They went through. Dan got a- like he popped a blood vessel in his eyeball and we said that he had pink eye for the rest of the tour and he wore glasses for the rest of it.
Crispy: Yeah. There are eight rubber arms in this band.
Clark: [Laughs] I was thinking like eight? Oh yeah.
5. Now I’m very keen to hear, what’s the furthest you’ve ever had to go to pass a Flat Inspection and get the bond back?
Clark: One time we were moving out of a flat and I don’t know why, but for some reason we had decided to build a little tin shed in the back of the flat to practice drums in. It turned out that you couldn’t practice drums in there. You could, but it was so noisy. You couldn’t fit anyone else in there, there was no power. It was really hot and for some reason we put carpet up around the walls? Which made it kind of incredibly…
Crispy: Sound proofing.
Clark: Yeah for sound proofing purposes, but it made it… incredibly gross and moldy. So what we did when we were moving out of that flat. We just chucked all the rubbish we had in that tin shed. Locked the door, put a padlock on it, and just bounced. So, to this day, I think until the whole building got demolished about two years later, like the entire collective rubbish of about five young, disgusting men was locked in a shed in the back. And we got the bond back I’m pretty sure, so. There you go.
Misadventure perhaps characterised many of the stories told in this interview, but I’m glad to say that their set went a lot better than their attempts at bungee jumping and soundproofing. DARTZ had the crowd ready and riled up for DZ Deathrays within moments of hitting the stage while delivering plenty of classic pub banter straight from the battered front bars of Wellington, New Zealand.
A huge thanks to Harrison Hay (@hay.stl) for all the shots in this article, make sure to check out more of his work!
Listen to their latest single Moving to Melbourne and the rest of their discography below:
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