How does it feel to have finally completed it? It seems as though you’ve been working almost constantly to finish MK III. Moving onto your new album, MK III – how is it pronounced, “em-kay-three” or “mark three”? We can do any genre, and we mix that harmony aspect into everything we create, which gives us our signature sound. We listen to a lot of The Beatles, Electric Light Orchestra and Queen. I guess it’s easier to say what our inspirations are. I’d definitely suggest that we’re a rock band, with a bit of a folk twinge. You seem to cover a wide range of genres musically. So you just play an exaggerated version of yourself to begin with. You go with what you’re comfortable with, just because it’s kind of scary to go out there and perform these robotic movements while in makeup. I think that there’s definitely a comfort zone that we crawled into with our robot personalities, because it was so intense. Would you say that you share any similarities with Rabbit as a character? I guess you could say he’s the wacky, crazy one, but I think all of the robots are kind of weird. He’s Victorian, and he’s kind of stutter-y and a little creepy, but he would never hurt anyone. He’s the malfunctioning robot, and he’s also the least upgraded, which I think go hand-in-hand. You play Rabbit in the band, right? How would you describe him? So we stuck it with the robots and reverse-engineered a backstory around that. It was actually a joke to begin with – “what would be a really silly band name?” Then we used it as a fake band name for a music video that we made, and it turned out that it was pretty catchy. The simple story is that my brother was really into giraffes and I was into steampunk. Then my brother (David Michael Bennett, the performer behind The Spine) came up with the idea that we should take a guitar and maybe play a song if people put money into the hat. So we had a lot of training in our college days, and we even ran an improv troupe, so we took all of those skills and went out on the streets and decided to do the robot. We’d started doing stuff for the college – we’d done children’s touring shows, we’d done a lot of theatre, and then in the mime programme we were able to do “silent auctions” where we were whiteface mimes, walking around and doing shtick. So we started thinking that maybe we could busk at Balboa park, which is our local park and museum here in San Diego. And when we saw him do the robot at his shows and in class, we were really impressed and thought, “we want to do that”. We took a mime class which was hosted by Jerry Hager, who was the Seaport Village mime in San Diego for 26 years – it was an elective class, as we were theatre majors – and we found that we had a knack for mime. Where did the idea for a robot band come from? We caught up with the Bunny Bennett, the performer behind Rabbit, to find out just what Steam Powered Giraffe is all about.įrom L-R in photo: Hatchworth, The Spine, Rabbit (who took part in the interview) and GG the Giraffe. The three singing robots have wowed audiences across America with songs about sea adventurers, cowboy heroes and lost loves, and now The Spine, Rabbit and Hatchworth (and GG the giraffe) are gearing up to release their third studio album, MK III. Spectacular steampunk-infused visuals, memorable and vibrant characters, dazzling mime and gorgeous harmonies are just some of the reasons why you should be checking out Steam Powered Giraffe. Bunny Bennett of Steam Powered Giraffe prepares for the release of this singing robot band’s latest album, MK III.
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