Interview with Bobson Dugnutt

Our chat with metal punk band Bobson Dugnutt who just released their new album “Sell Me lies”

In today’s interview we get to know a little better the metal punk band with members scattered between Berlin and Emilia. They have recently released their second album titled “Sell Me Lies” in 12″ colored vinyl format, thanks to a DIY conspiracy involving our label!

Radio Punk: Hi guys and welcome to our ‘zine. Tell us a little bit about yourselves, how and where did you meet since some of you are based in Italy, in Emilia more precisely and others in Berlin? How did you come up with the idea of starting a band with so much geographical distance?

Bobson Dugnutt: Bobson Dugnutt formed between 2017/2018 in Correggio. When we started writing we didn’t have a singer, so we wrote most of the songs without the voice, it was basically an instrumental band. In Fall 2018 Jack moved to Berlin and we paused the project to understand how to manage it. In a few weeks he met David and they listened to our music. David enjoys the music a lot and asks if he can sing on it. There were some weeks where we talked about if it was possible to run a band this way. In the end we were all convinced after hearing David’s demo of our first 2 songs. I remember it was the end of October when we all met in Berlin, and really began to work together on this. Ok we didn’t work 12h a day as you think, we rather get wasted every day and the workflow just came naturally between us. In December 2018 we spent the Christmas holiday recording our first EP “Be The Change (Or Whatever)”.

Radio Punk: Let’s start by saying that we hate asking this question, but we haven’t found any great answers out there, so perhaps those who read us will also be interested in knowing the answer to this question: who or what is Bobson Dugnutt and why the choice of this name?

Bobson Dugnutt: Bobson Dugnutt is a fictional character based on various known assholes and our collective worst qualities. A stupid, vulgar, mean person that will do all sorts of cheap tricks and use low cunning to achieve his base desires. That is the channel in which we deal with our themes, through the eye of the monster, so to speak. The name came from a meme that made us laugh a lot, about the “American” names of some of the baseball players in an 80s Japanese baseball video game. Bobson Dugnutt was the funniest name there so we chose that.

Radio Punk: We were just saying that one of your peculiarities is this scattering between Berlin and Emilia. How do you practically carry on a band, compose, record and organize gigs while being so far away?

Bobson Dugnutt: Let’s start by saying that the strength of Bobson is to play live. We consider ourselves a live band that gives 110 % on a stage, and of course we enjoy spending time together. So most of the organization goes into touring and gigs. Composing and recording process is harder of course but we developed some skills to deal with it. We record demos in our rehearsal rooms, sometimes in Berlin sometimes in Italy, with MIDI drums if needed, and then work on it until the song is finished. To start a band with these premises is really hard. We really miss sometimes the rehearsal room, hanging out together and all the other band related activities that we should do. We had 8 or 10 rehearsals all together in 5 years. There are songs that we played for the first time together on stage. But hey… As long as we have fun we actually don’t give Shieeet!

Radio Punk: Tell us a little about your latest album “Sell Me Lies” in general. Both on a musical level but also tell us what themes you tackle, who created and what the splendid artwork represents and also tell us about all the people and realities involved behind this work…

Bobson Dugnutt: Sell Me Lies was recorded in Nebiolo Record Studio, a fabulous DIY reality right in our rehearsal room in Italy. About sound we can say that it’s much brighter than our previous EP and we defined better the way we want to compose, blending Metal and Hardcore both fast and slow, always trying to find the nastiest riffs mixed with some peculiar vocal lines. This contributed to create our Motto: Heavy, Fast, Rock’n’Roll.
About the lyrics we deal a lot with toxicity, hero worship, ignorance, and all of these good stuff, but I think a major connecting thread is the lack of capacity to self-reflect and how poisonous that could be. We really enjoyed trying to write all the lyrics from the perspective of the person who is absolutely wrong about the issue. And of course, vulgar childish humor.

Radio Punk: Do you plan to take this album far and wide with tours around the world? And more generally what do you have in the works?

Bobson Dugnutt: The Goal is to play as much as possible as long as the album is available for buying, when it will be sold out we will retire to waste all the money until the next album will be out. Do you have any suggestions on where we should go?

Radio Punk: Tell us a little about yourselves outside the band: hobbies, passions, jobs…

Bobson Dugnutt: BD Love: to deal with computers, hack programs, shooting videos of something we actually don’t care, running in the city, seaside, oriental food, Secret of the Sphinx, painting trains, small province bars, rehearsal rooms afterparty, gardening, floor stages, house party, horror movies, being drunk in public, cartoons, Twin Peaks, painting canvas, building stuff DIY, to curse every god, big stages, Cold Beers, Hot Beers, free train rides, Backstreet Boys, being drunk at home, steal in the highway station (Autogrill <3), Italian comedy movies, Lino Banfi, Sandwich AFTER the gig, grappa, graffiti Tags, B-side Movies, take the Shit BEFORE the gig, hiking, mountains, Tony Montana. But the thing we love the most is weed.
BD hate: Jobs, nazis, punk police

Radio Punk: You have played in different places and cities, in which situations do you feel most comfortable and which are the concerts that you remember with most pleasure?

Bobson Dugnutt: We are the most comfortable when we can sleep on a mattress and pee in a toilet.
There were a lot of unforgettable moments in these 5 years playing together, but if we have to pick two, I would say Monteparadiso 2023 and a gig we had in Barocchio Squat in Torino. Those were extremely wild shows.

Radio Punk: Still remaining in the field of cities and places, what is the scene like in the different cities where you live? What differences do you find between them?

Bobson Dugnutt: We are not the kind of band that cares much about the “Scene” and actually most of the time we don’t see it. We see friends and people we love to spend time with and create something together or have mutual help.
The only significant difference between Germany and Italy is the amount of places where to play and organization of the people inside these places whether these are clubs or squats.

Radio Punk: How important are DIY ethics and the political aspect understood as values such as anti-fascism, anti-sexism, anti-capitalism, anti-racism, anti-militarism and so on to you?

Bobson Dugnutt: Very important, I mean, that’s what our audience likes to hear!
Jokes aside, we can say DIY ethic is very important to us both for growing ourselves as a person and both to connect with people that share the same feeling of fulfillment by building something on your own. We think that Bobson is proof of this and we’re proud of it. For sure is important to us to create a better world, and we try to do it in our everyday life and we totally stand for everything you mentioned.
But we don’t want to just repeat what everyone else is already saying, we like to deal with more granular, class related, personal-is-political subjects, rather than general concept like “bad thing is bad”.

Radio Punk: What future do you foresee for our scene? Unfortunately there is little generational turnover and there is a constant increase in repression, which reduces aggregative situations to the bone and takes away physical places. What can be done to reverse the trend?

Bobson Dugnutt: Even if these genres of music, and i’m referring to punk metal hardcore etc, don’t seem to attract the next generation i was pleased to notice, in these last two years after the pandemic, a little increase of young people at gigs and some young crews organizing also in some squats so this is nice. But at the same time as you said there are always less places and situations where extreme music can be done, not enough for the amount of bands that the “scene” has to offer at least, and I honestly don’t know how to reverse this trend.
In order to survive punk and hardcore need to adapt and evolve, and i don’t know if it can.

Radio Punk: We thank you for the chat and we leave you a free space to say what you like! Bye, friends!

Bobson Dugnutt: We’d like to thank our families, all the promoters that organized us a gig and all that didn’t until now, the labels that believed in us and that made possible releasing “Sell Me lies”, and of course all our friends and all the bands that shared the stage and partied with us, you know you are. See you in the pit!

Heavy, Fast, Rock’n’Roll. FY