Skegss Are Not A Surf Band

Skegss bass player Toby Cregan and lead singer Benny Reed were standing in an alleyway in Hamburg screaming at each other.

They’d been touring Europe for months, sleeping in dingy hostels, playing shows and drinking every night. There was nothing in particular that sparked the fracas, just too much time together and too little sleep. Toby lost it in the restaurant and flipped a table before he and Benny took it out onto the street. 

As the close friends and bandmates were telling each other exactly what they thought of the other, they were interrupted by a string of local sex workers. Warding off the unwanted advances was enough to keep it from turning physical, although the atmosphere remained frosty when they re-joined drummer Jonny Laneway on the top floor of their hostel. There was a large hole in the floor of their room, and Jonny described it as, “definitely the sort of place where you needed to wear thongs in the shower.” 

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Perhaps we should get to know the band, first. 

Skegss is made up of three lads in their twenties from small coastal towns in rural New South Wales. Toby Cregan hails from Sussex Inlet, Benny Reed and Jonny Laneway are both from Forster. The towns are six hours apart, but they’ve got good waves and non existant music scenes in common. From these unlikely beginnings six years ago, Skegss have topped the ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) singles charts numerous times, reached number two in the album charts (being nominated for an prestigious ARIA award in the process), toured the world multiple times, and their debut single “LSD” is currently sitting at over 22 million plays on Spotify, recently went platinum.

Skegss are contemporary coastal Australia. In appearance and outlook. Sun-kissed unruly locks (apart from Jonny, who rocks a hat atop his dark curls), vintage clothes, band tees from friends’ bands. Tongue in cheek and a DIY attitude. Toby drives a red Subaru Outback that he and Benny pulled up in the first time we all meet up at the Ocean Shores Tavern, a sterile pub in the Northern Rivers. Toby carts his valuables in a “Shoalhaven Libraries” tote, proudly representing his regional beginnings.

“I think sometimes it’s better to go to a public school in a regional town and be creative and not fit in because it fuels that angst,” Benny tells me over the noise of trivia questions that are being amplified throughout the pub. “If you went to a Steiner school I can’t imagine you’d be sitting there going, ‘Fuck, I just want to go home and play the guitar.’”

Benny’s got big bright eyes and speaks slowly but profoundly in thick Australian drawl. He uses lots of slang, and often pauses after I ask him questions. He admits that, despite being the lead singer of a successful band, he rarely has to explain things like his songwriting process in any depth (“I usually wake up, have a coffee and then try and write songs all day.”) But I push him, because I’m genuinely interested. 

“As you get older you constantly learn things,” Benny continues. “One day things just click, and that happens with lots of songs. Sometimes there’s things I want to say, but I can’t find the words to say it right. You have 150 attempts and you think it’s whack or cheesy then you finally find the words that sound the most honest to you.”

Starting with Benny’s songwriting is fitting because Skegss starts with Benny’s songwriting. With Jonny playing the drums in accompaniment.

Benny and Jonny grew up in the same town but weren’t close mates, Jonny being a few school years older and spending part of his time at school in Sydney. Benny, who’s also a handy surfer, is one of those people who dedicates large amounts of time to tricky things, and spent hours throughout school locked in his room strumming his guitar and scribbling on notepads. One scribble being the aforementioned “LSD”. When he finished school, Benny, relocated to Byron Bay with aspirations of being a musician. He needed a drummer and when the traditional method of putting a “Drummer wanted” ad in local paper, The Echo, failed to produce any suitable bandmates, Benny’s mum offered a suggestion. She knew via Jonny’s mum that he was living in the area and played the drums, so connected the two.

“When Benny first played me the songs I knew it was a thing,” Jonny says. “I was like, ‘Yep, I want to devote myself to this,’ and, ‘Shit, I better start practicing the drums!’ Just because I loved the songs so much.”

Benny and Jonny mastered a short setlist of Benny’s songs and started playing gigs at the Northern, a famous live music pub on main street Byron Bay. 

“We were like, ‘we can get free beers every weekend they’ll have us!’” Jonny says. 

Benny was living in a garage at the time, but fateful dampness shuffled a few things into place. After a brief stint of living on a balcony, a spare room popped up at the share house that Toby was living in. Benny moved in. 

Jonny was coming over to jam and Toby played the bass, so naturally they all began playing together. But very impromptu and non-seriously at the beginning, although it obviously planted a seed in Toby’s head, as it wasn’t long before he decided to join the band on stage (“It was quite forceful,” Jonny remembers) one night when they shared the bill at a local pub, Toby playing with another band called Phil and Dave.

“I was on MDMA and feeling so euphoric,” Toby tells me at the Brunswick Heads Bowling Club, another unassuming Northern Rivers watering hole. “I remember trying to play some of the songs and looking at the buttons that Benny was pushing.”

Toby writes the odd riff and the occasional song, but it’s mainly Benny. His songs are beautifully simple — catchy riffs, rarely more than four chords, relatable themes and stories. He’s a masterful storyteller, a grungy beach poet blessed with the rare talent of being able to explore and make revelations about everyday occurrences through song.

Got myself a coffee shot
But the caffeine made me edgy as fuck
I thought this place looked nice last night
But I was just lookin’ straight through the smog
Way too many people and too much shit goin’ on
But it all seems alright, at first sight

Benny tells me that his songwriting inspiration comes more from stand up comedians and movies than from other songwriters. This fits with his back catalogue, which is a chronicle of the experiences that have led him and the band up to this point. Lots of bands that rely on a frontman to eloquently convey growing pains peak early, or are forced to change direction, early in their careers (Alex Turner, lead singer of the Arctic Monkeys, could never write a better album about trying to sneak into Sheffield nightclubs underage than “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not”). Others have the ability to keep churning out engaging songs based on the infinite source of daily living. Benny Reed is in the latter category.

“I reckon the themes of your songwriting have become more complex over the years for sure,” Toby says to Benny during an open discussion at the pub. “When I first joined you’d have one theme in a song, and now you have like three or four, and they swap back and forth and all seem to come together and make sense.”

Toby Cregan eventually became a fixture, and significantly, not so much in the trajectory of the band, but in terms of their early visibility in the surfing world. Toby would hate his name being mentioned in the same sentence as “marketing” or any of its associated buzzwords, but he’s a master at it. He started out as a filmmaker, negotiating the surfing landscape beautifully, convincing big companies (and Stab) to fund him making films with his friends, bringing some much needed Australian roots back to surfing with his narrative-driven surf films like Real Axe. Noa Deane, on the cusp of reaching the level of surfing fame he currently enjoys, joined around the same time. He was a friend of Toby’s and played guitar. 

A pivotal moment for the band came during one of their first gigs as a foursome at the Sands Hotel in Coolangatta. Aaron Girgis, who was dipping his toe into the music business in a similarly DIY fashion, had come up to the Gold Coast to watch the show. Skegss sold it out, played a raucous show, and Girgis offered to manage the band. 

Toby and Benny welcomed Girgis’ help, but Jonny was sceptical. He couldn’t understand why someone would want to manage a band that called up pubs and asked if they could play for free beer. He thought that Girgis only wanted to be involved with the band because Noa, a surf star on the rise, was playing rhythm guitar.

“I didn’t trust him,” Jonny says. “I thought he was only interested in us because of Noa and if Noa bailed, then he’d bail too.”

Once your band starts generating interest, you tour. A lot. In Australia, a country that spans 7.692 million kilometres, that means time in the van. Skegss paid their dues, making a concise effort to play out of the way towns and venues, gaining a cult following in the process. Especially amongst young adults in regional Australia, who are largely neglected by popular culture. 

Noa was in the van for the duration, but eventually had to choose between a certain surf career and a potential musical one. He chose the healthier option, and in doing so proved Jonny’s suspicions incorrect. Girgis stayed.

“After Noa quit and I told Jonny, ‘I signed you guys because your songs are awesome,” Girgis tells me on Zoom. “Benny writes really good songs, Toby’s got crackers and you’re a legend, Jonny.’ I didn’t even know who Noa was. I was just trying to get this band going, and next thing I know Noa’s sponsors were calling me and being like, ‘We’re paying this kid a lot of money, he’s not going on that tour, he’s got to go on this surf trip. But Jonny was right to have been skeptical, I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing.”

The personalities of the Skegss members mirror their roles in the band. Whilst Toby and Benny are the lofty creatives, Jonny’s solid. Older than the other two, he keeps time on the skins and keeps them grounded in the real world. Ironically, Jonny — the band’s rock — was working as a stonemason whilst Skegss was in its infancy. Operating as a full time tradie and simultaneously touring in an emerging rock n roll band — which by then was frequently driving to Sydney and Melbourne from the Northern Rivers to play shows — was a grind that saw Jonny nearly quit on multiple occasions.

“I was like, ‘This is crazy,’’ Jonny tells me at the Brunswick Bowlo, where he was wearing a “Bay Area Stoneworks” T-shirt. “We’d go away for a week, then come back and be so shot and go straight back to work. But I was working for these full old rocker stonemason dudes, and they were so supportive. If I was working for some hard arsed dude who didn’t let me go away I probably wouldn’t have done it, but they used to have a band in the ‘90s and just let me come and go, which was such a big thing, because not many people let you do that with a full time job. I’ve never really thought about it, but they’re probably hugely responsible for me sticking with it.”

To make it as a musician in Australia you need “supportive” parents or a lenient boss. The money in the beginning is too meagre and the distances required to travel too great (going to Melbourne “for a gig” is a thirty hour round trip) not to mention the fact that often these supporting slot type gigs are last minute affairs, requiring bands to jump on opportunities as they come up in order to climb the ladder. Unlike the UK, there’s not an infinite number of gigs available all within four hours of each other, eliminating the possibility of budding musicians living secret lives after dark and working during the day.

The archetypal Australian male is hard yakka, cold beer at the end of a hot day and dismissal of the unknown. Call it “Tall Poppy Syndrome” if you will, but there’s nothing in the Aussie Bloke’s Handbook about encouraging young bulls to follow their dreams. However, Jonny wasn’t the only member of the band who was encouraged by a male elder to take the intimidating plunge of quitting full time work to pursue their art. It happened to Benny too, who was working at Stone and Wood brewery, and had just been offered the opportunity to undergo a brewing apprenticeship.

“I was pretty scared that I was going to lose my job because I was spontaneously taking off for gig opportunities,” Benny says. “I remember talking to Farmer Greg, who used to come in to get the wheat malt for his cows. He used to work for 60 Minutes, filming on the helicopter and shit. He asked what I got up to and I downloaded my predicament to him and he goes: ‘Do it. This is no rehearsal. You go for that, you can do this later.’ I fully needed to hear that.”

The band’s ascent from those first trips to Sydney and Melbourne to where they are now seems steep when you run their timeline next to that of your average office worker’s crawl up the ladder, but for the boys in the band it’s been an endless blur of pubs, clubs, late nights and lugging their gear around.

I keep probing for an “Aha” moment during their rise, but without much luck. At first I thought they were just being modest, reluctant to admit that they’ve cracked one of the hardest fields in the world to “make it” in. But after numerous meetings it becomes clear that the timeline of breaking a band isn’t a race to an invisible finish line. It’s like regular life, a constant succession of victories and defeats, problems and solutions, stress, anxiety. Only heightened, because as well as yourself you’ve got bandmates, management, fans and other stakeholders in your journey. Jonny summed these years up best.

“It was just constant progression,” he told me. “Like, if we keep doing this then we might get to play a show in Melbourne, that’d be cool. Or there’s whispers that you might get to open a festival and you think, ‘I’ve always wanted to play at a festival’. You’re doing all this cool shit that you’ve always wanted to do, but you’re not making any money at that point, you’re lucky to cover your bases. But we’ve been so lucky. It’s never really taken a backwards step, it’s always been growing.’

For manager Aaron Girgis, who’s ridden every ripple of the band since signing them – driving the tour bus and selling merch in the early days, before progressing to more of a traditional manager role today – perspective is a little easier to come by. For him the real “holy shit” moment came at 1:30pm at the Splendour in the Grass amphitheatre, Australia’s most prestigious music festival for up and coming bands, held annually in Byron Bay, in 2018.

“I remember the time slot got moved earlier and I was wigging going, ‘Fuck, who goes to Splendour at like, 1:30 in the afternoon?’” Girgis tells me. “Then once they started playing the amphitheatre stampeded. There was like 20,000 people there or something, it ended up being massive. They were already doing Metro Theatre type venues (small but prestigious venue in George Street, Sydney) but when the amphitheatre was that full that early, I knew they were going to be a big band.”

There’s a lot of fog around finance in the music industry, but the bottom line is that bands don’t make as much as you’d think. Spotify royalties don’t add up to much when you divvy it out, so touring’s the reliable source of income. And it doesn’t necessarily go straight in your pocket as the crowds get bigger. 

“There’s been times, even within the last two years or so when it’s been like, ‘Yo, that tour we lost $20,000 or whatever, going overseas some place, and then we won’t be paying ourselves for a bit,” Toby explains. “And then we’ll try and do a tour that will make money to pay for the next one. But then it’s a rotating thing where there’s a lot of shit moving around.”

Doing something authentic and getting paid without losing your creative autonomy is difficult. At the beginning it’s easy. No one cares about you, and you’re free to make as much noise as you want, say what you want and control your output entirely. But when you start making progress, communicating your message to a wider audience becomes the primary goal. Good songs are the constant, sure, but what you’re now doing is marketing. And, you can count bands/brands who get big and stay cool one one hand.

When Skegss started to take off, Toby saw his surfing roots as a potential pitfall, and subsequently distanced himself and his band from surf. The mainstream media loves labels, and a successful Australian “surf” band who all live in the Northern Rivers (aka: the world famous holiday/lifestyle/celebrity spotting destination of Byron Bay) would have been too tempting for them to avoid. Queue the band taking the stage to “Wipe Out” by The Surfaris for the rest of their career.

“We want people to listen to us because they like our music, not because we’re the surfy fuckos from Byron Bay,” Toby says. “We try and play it down because all people want to say is ‘Byron Bay’ band. We still live in the area, but none of us live in Byron anymore, and we’ve always been weary of not making it seem like we’re trying to milk this fucken town for all it’s worth.”

“We want people to listen to us because they like our music, not because we’re the surfy fuckos from Byron Bay.”

Toby Cregan

Anyone who lives in the Northern Rivers currently will appreciate how greatly this contrasts with the shed load of startups in the area, who’ve slotted the words “Byron Bay” in front of their beer/kombucha/home enema kit companies in desperate attempts to “milk this fucken town for all it’s worth.”

Plus, Jonny doesn’t surf.

“I swear if one more person asks me what the fucken waves are like…” he says. 

Comparisons are cheap, but you could easy draw a link between Skegss and Blink 182. Blink are rooted in surf and skate culture — their first national tour was promoting Taylor Steele’s Good Times (with Unwritten Law), and their song “Mutt” is infamously about Benji Weatherly, who guitarist Tom DeLongue lived with for a period — but their appeal reached far beyond surf culture, as the songs were so universal.

Perception is the greatest hurdle of growing up, and plenty of people never scale it. Worrying more about how you feel in yourself than what other people think of you is a lifelong journey, and the people who most stringently declare that they “don’t give a fuck,” are generally those who care the most.

Skegss are a successful band by any standards. The three of them live off the proceeds of their music, they’ve topped charts, been listened to by millions of people around the world and have the clout to pull tens of thousands of people to a show, when permitted. But they still get uncomfortable when asked what they do for a living by anonymous punters. 

“‘Ah you play in a band? Your parents must fucken look after you mate,’” Jonny says. “You shouldn’t really give a fuck, but it’s hard to talk about too. You just want to say, ‘I’m not a fuck up,’ but how do you say that?”

Toby begins to dispute Jonny’s point, saying, “I think it’s just something that you should get over, you don’t want to lie to people…” and then concedes. “Actually it depends who it is. If someone looks like they’re going to go, ‘Ah what’s your band called, I’ll look it up now’ then I just say I work in retail.”

Numbers on apps, gold plaques and radio play are concrete measurements of success that most people aren’t fortunate to have, but the fact that Skegss aren’t concerned with them ties directly into what’s gotten them to where they are in the first place. There’s no red tape. Skegss, their mates, their fans, are one and the same. Their hotel room’s might not have holes in the floor anymore, but it’s still a DIY journey perpetuated with little moments that make it all worth it, overshadowed by the potential for it to meander off the tracks at any point. 

“When Coronavirus hit and everyone was like, ‘Ah you can’t play gigs ever again, everything’s over,’ I was like, ‘Well yeah, this has been coming any fucken day now!’” Toby says at the Ocean Shores Tavern before we part. “But whenever we’re walking on the stage somewhere and there’s a substantial amount of people, or even a real exotic place, I’m like, ‘Wow, this is sick, this is it, go now!’ That’s why we haven’t taken anything for granted, not once, not ever.”

Well. Maybe for a second. Back in Hamburg. When Toby and Benny almost came to blows.

After tempers calmed, the band headed back to their hostel and Toby and Jonny sat aimlessly around the hole in the middle of their floor. Benny entered the room carrying his ukulele, strummed a few chords and began to sing.

I might not ever work things out
I might live my whole life not knowing how
I’ve survived up until now
And it’s all been worth it
It’s just hard sometimes in the heat of the moment

It was an early version of “Up in the Clouds,” a song he’d been working on that his band members hadn’t heard yet. As Benny sang the chorus – “It’s a wonder, If we’ll ever figure some things out’ – Toby and Jonny lay back on the floor and cried.

“It was just one of those beautiful moments,” Jonny says. “Those are the ones that keep you interested.”