Less Than Jake step right up for Circus Down Under tour

American ska-punk mainstays Less Than Jake return to Australia this October and November for their Circus Down Under tour, stopping at Metropolis Fremantle on Friday, October 30. The Floridian five-piece will be joined by new wave rock band The Aquabats! and Detroit ska-punk band The Suicide Machines for all Australian tour dates. KAREN LOWE sat down with Less Than Jake guitarist and vocalist Chris DeMakes to chat about touring Australia, Warped Tour survival stories, and encounters that no one will forget.

Less Than Jake have toured Australia more than a dozen times since 1999, and you’re returning again for the Circus Down Under tour and bringing The Aquabats and The Suicide Machines with you. Are you looking forward to the tour? And what are some of your favourite memories of Australia? 

Oh my gosh. Are we looking forward to it? Yes. I look forward to coming to Australia every time. To be able to… I was telling somebody this earlier; when you start a band, there’s no crystal ball. No, “Oh, we’re going to be around in a year.” There’s just “Who’s going to give us beer this weekend and let us play in their backyard?”

To be able to do it this long—34 years—and to be able to come to Australia and get paid for it; it’s a paid vacation, and I get to play songs. Sign me up all day long. It’s amazing.

What’s one Aussie ritual, superstition, or inside joke you guys have developed over the years?

I’ll say this happens in other countries too, but not to the extent. It doesn’t even start when we get into Australia! The minute that we get on the plane to start going, the whole band starts speaking in terrible Australian accents. So embarrassing.

Your early years were shaped by relentless touring and the Warped Tour ecosystem. What’s one moment from those days that you’ve never told because it seems too unbelievable to be true?

Oh my gosh. I don’t have too much of a filter. I kind of think I told them all, but wow. I have a couple. I can tell one real quick. In 1997, the tour was a much smaller operation than it is now. Maybe the total bands and crew might’ve been 250-300 people. It wasn’t huge. They ran the catering out of the equivalent of what was the size of an ice cream truck.

It was just two guys back there sweating their asses off in 37 degrees weather every day. One day I went cruising by, and you had two choices for a drink. It was either Kool-Aid or water in these big cups. And I go by one day, and the cook has the Kool-Aid in there, and he’s pouring the sugar in, and he takes his arm up to the armpit. He’s stirring it with his arm! So… needless to say, I didn’t drink the Kool-Aid after that day.

Even if he washed his arm, dude’s arms are hairy!

Matt Yonker joined after Vinnie Fiorello’s departure, marking a major shift in the band’s internal chemistry. What’s one subtle musical or interpersonal change that longtime fans may not particularly have noticed but has changed how you operate as a band?

Wow, that’s an interesting question. I mean, I started the band with Vinnie all those years ago, and he wrote the lyrics for the band, so we lost a big part of the history of the band in terms of where the lyrics came from. Certainly the rest of us always contributed and whatnot, but he wrote the bulk of the lyrics live. Matt is a different player than Vinnie is.

He can play punk rock, but he can also play a little bit more of the rock stuff, so it’s opened up the door for us a little bit there. I don’t think any band ever wants to go through personnel changes, but just like anything else, I think things ran their course. Vinnie didn’t want to be on the road any longer, and, luckily for us, we have these songs, and we are able to still go out around the world and play those that have resonated with people. They have these memories attached to them, so I think we’re right where we are supposed to be. All the other people… there have been a few other horn players that have come and gone in this band over the years too, and they’re all part of the family.

You’ve talked about recalibrating your life as you got older. What’s one belief about punk rock you’ve completely reversed since becoming a father?

Well, I definitely thought that my voice was more heard as a younger person and felt like I was really doing something as a young punk, getting out there and marching for causes, doing canned food drives, and doing this and that, and I still believe that is important. I’m not taking anything away from that, but I think it’s so much more than standing up and doing those things. It’s every action in your life, and I try to teach that to my kids.

We can’t just go do one canned food drive a year and call it a day. It’s got to be ongoing, and just little things like holding the door for people when you’re out at the store or if someone is by themselves… an older person might need help with their groceries. That’s kind of how my worldview has changed a little bit. You can’t just have a cause and run with it, and when that cause is done, wait for the next one. You kind of have to live it.

You’ve spent your whole life writing songs that helped other people get through theirs. Do you have a moment in your life when you wished you had a song written for you? If so, what do you think it would’ve said?

I’ve never been asked that. I have no idea. If someone were to write a song directly about me, I would want it to be one of those celebrity roasts. Just throw it at me, make fun of me, give it to me, and tell me I suck. And that would be probably the best gift.

You guys recorded Uncharted with Bill Stephenson of Descendents. What’s one lesson that you learned recording with Bill that stuck with you the most? 

The lesson that I picked up over the course of all the years doing this is to respect the producer. Not only do I have respect for Bill, he’s in one of my favourite bands. For instance, what I’m getting at is my first time in the vocal booth with Bill… I’d known Bill for years; we’ve had lunch together. He is a friend, but to be in the studio, I got out of the vocal booth. I was there for about four hours.

And I mean, he was just take after take, and I got out, and our drummer, Matt, says to me, “He’s just like, ‘Oh my God, man, I thought you were going to lose it in there at some point.'” And it couldn’t have been farther from the truth. I was as cool as a cucumber because I’ve learned that if he’s not hearing what he needs to hear, then I’m going to keep doing it until he gets something, and my vocals sound pretty good on there. I’m pretty proud of it. I’ve been whipped, so to speak, in the vocal booth before in the studio. I’ve been around for a minute, and I’m proud that I’ve been around. If that would’ve happened when I was 25 years old, it might’ve been a way different. It would’ve been a way different story.

You have a podcast called Chris DeMakes a Podcast where you dissect songs with a level of detail most musicians never apply to their own work. What’s one thing you learned from analysing other artists’ songs that permanently changed how you write your own?

It’s that you never know that weird idea that… for whatever reason, you can’t get out of your head, but you’re like, ‘The guys wouldn’t like this.’ That weird idea may end up being your most famous song. These guys, they write songs that they’re like, ‘Yeah, it was just another song on the album.’

And to me as a fan, a lot of times, and I know you can relate to this, the single more often than not isn’t our favourite song on a record, as music lovers, you know? And I guess what I’ve learned the most is that the song is ours until other people hear it. The minute other people hear it, then it becomes whatever animal it’s going to become, and as the artist, you have no control over that at that point.

What’s a question you hope no one ever asks you on your podcast—not because it’s too personal but because the answer is too weird?

Oh gosh, that’s another really good question. You’re volleying up some good ones. You might want to get up at 5.30 in the morning all the time. You’re pretty spot on right now.

Do you like this song that I wrote?

Because it’s crazy. I can honestly say that there isn’t really a song that’s come across my podcast that I don’t like. My appreciation for it is just the fact that somebody else wrote it and I did it. Just the fact that I didn’t write it is enough for me.

But really, if they were to ask me if I liked the song, it’s neither here nor there. I’m covering the song because it’s interesting. Sometimes, I didn’t realise how interesting a song was until I got it. I’m a fan of the band Smash Mouth now. They were a band in the US that had a pretty big career in the nineties, and I’m sure you know who they are. I went back and discovered their first record after having their guitar player on my podcast a couple times. I absolutely love it. I’m like, how the hell did I miss this back in the nineties? It’s such a fun record.

So yeah, that would probably be it. Don’t ask me if I like your song. Sometimes it’s not my favourite, but I still love the production of it all the time. I hear things that come on the radio. It could be Taylor Swift or Billie Eilish; it could be whoever, and I’ll be like, “Wow!” That’s undeniable; that hook!”

You often ask guests about the moment a song “clicked.” What’s a moment from your own career where a song didn’t click until years later and only made sense once you analysed someone else’s work on the podcast?

Well, the first part of this question I can answer doesn’t really relate to the second half. Things like… We did this soundtrack for a movie called Good Burger years ago, and it was just this silly song, and it didn’t really do much at the time. And wouldn’t you know it? It became a cult classic amongst our fans that were 11 to 15 years old when that movie came out.

And all the time they’re asking us to play, but that’s kind of like a head scratcher. It’s like, ah, it’s the wolf in the closet that you don’t want to parade around. It’s like, yeah, we’ll leave him there. But yeah, things like that. A lot of the video game soundtracks that we were on… we wrote those songs at that time, and then later on they took on a whole life of their own.

The second part of your question… I don’t really know how that relates too much to songwriting. I know that we have definitely written songs, and I’ve talked about this on my podcast that we’re certain, like, “Oh, I can’t wait to play this live.” It’s going to be great,” and you go out and play it, and the whole audience goes and gets a beer. It’s like, “It just doesn’t move me, buddy!” You’re like, “Okay, maybe that was a fluke,” and you go play it the second night. There are no flukes.

You’re famously associated with Pez. If each album era had its own fictional Pez flavour, what would they be, and which one would taste terrible but still sell out instantly?

Oh, geez. Well, can we go with the decade era? I think we have too many albums. Ok, so we’ll go to the nineties; it would be cherry-flavoured Pez. The 2000s would be Coca-Cola-flavoured Pez, and then the 2010s—we’ll go four decades here—would be peppermint for our breath, as we’re still trying to date at that point. And then the 2020s… well, they’re no longer… they’re shaped as Pez, but they’re actually antacids. That’ll be the ones that sell out instantly.

As a lifelong Floridian, what’s the most Florida-Man thing you’ve witnessed on tour that made you think, ‘Okay… maybe Gainesville wasn’t that weird after all’?

This is before everyone had a camera in their pocket. This was 1994. We were going the back roads of Gainesville, Florida, and you get into some just… it’s like on your way to the outback in Australia. You’re like, ‘There’s a house every 20 kilometres.’ Nobody lives out here. Right before we were going from Gainesville to Daytona Beach, Florida, and we were riding along in the van, we stopped at this gas station that had a Taco Bell combined with it.

We would always stop there. We would get gas, we’d get some food, and then we’d make our way the other 40 minutes to Daytona. Well, as we pull in that day… I’ve never seen anything like this to this day, but we see this guy walk in, and we’re horrified! He’s completely filthy. He’s barefoot but he has a box on his head. It’s made out of duct tape. All you can see is his face but a box of duct tape. Then he had hockey or soccer pads on his knees and his elbows that were duct taped. He had these gloves on with these claws on the gloves, and then he might’ve had feathers or something hanging off his legs too by the duct tape.

We called him Duct Tape Man, and we walked in the store, and you could smell him from 10 feet away. It was just that offensive. Oh! He was also in a diaper that was made of duct tape, or it looked like a diaper. So yeah, there was some serious mental illness. It had to be. I can’t imagine somebody was just doing that for fun. So that was pretty up there, Florida man-wise.

What bands do you currently have on rotation in your CD player? And are there any bands that you just didn’t get until you saw them live?

Yeah… I was not a fan of the Stone Temple Pilots in the nineties. I saw them in 2001 at a festival in the Netherlands, and Scott Weiland blew me away. He was one of the best, if not THE best, frontmen I’ve ever seen. He was incredible. And the band was just absolutely amazing, and it totally turned me around and made their live show; it made me a fan, which was pretty cool, as at that point, I was still kind of a little bit punk rock-close-minded.

A band now. I just found out about these guys two or three days ago. They’re called Rebelmatic. Check them out. They have a song called… Blood and Gold. It’s the first track on their Spotify. It’s killer!

Less Than Jake will bring their Circus Down Under tour to Metropolis Fremantle on Friday, October 30, 2026. Tickets are on sale from teamwrktouring.com