Draft:Special Guest (band)

Special Guest is a Post-Junk band formed in Geelong, Australia in 2024. The band's sound is an amalgamation of both Post-Punk and Noise-Rock, a combination they coined as "Post-Junk". It's founding, and acting, members are known mononymously as Benny (Vocals), Joss (Guitar), Tom (Drums), Milo (Bass), and Jett (Percussion and Synth). Special Guest briefly disbanded in September of 2024, after an argument over the birth place of  Czech-American tennis player Martina Navratilova. The band decided reformed two days later, and the members of Special Guest have not had a disagreement since.

Formation

Lead vocalist Benny had embarked on a physical and spiritual pilgrimage, summiting the three peaks of the Everest region: Mera Peak, Island Peak, and Lobuche Peak. Two days before flying back to Australia, Benny, short on funds, couldn't afford any of the available hostels in Kathmandu. Instead, he sought refuge at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery for the last nights of his journey.

It was there that he met both Joss and Milo. Joss had been living at the monastery for some time, aspiring to become a monastic. Milo, however, was there purely on a whim, having followed a set of longitude and latitude coordinates they'd received from a psychic medium they once encountered in Albury-Wodonga. Despite their different paths, the three quickly found common ground through their love of music, literature, and a shared dream of starting a post-punk passion project. They agreed to reunite in Australia two months later.

Upon returning to Australia, Joss had trouble readjusting to driving and was involved in a minor fender bender. Shaken by the incident, they accidentally wrote down the wrong phone number of the other party involved. When Joss tried to call for insurance purposes, they unknowingly dialed their future bandmate, Jett. The two strangers ended up talking for hours about life, art, and philosophy, discovering that they lived just 45 minutes away from each other. Not long after, Jett was invited to join Special Guest.

With a three songs already recorded, but still missing a drummer, the band devised a plan to find their fifth member. They left a cassette tape of demos on the streets of Coburg, accompanied by a note that read:

"NEEDING DRUMMER. IF IT'S YOU, CALL THIS NUMBER. IF NOT, LEAVE IT SOMEWHERE ELSE."

No one knows exactly how many hands the cassette passed through, but somehow, it ended up in Albury-Wodonga, where Tom found it while passing through on his way back from hitchhiking all the way from Kathmandu to Geelong. When Tom walked into a band rehearsal with the weathered cassette in his hand, the band members all looked to each other with quiet anticipation. Tom sat down by the rented drumkit, and played a terrific solo that lasted 22 minutes (1 full length episode of Cheers). Benny and Joss smiled at one another in approval. Afterward, Joss said to the band, "I think we've found our Special Guest".

Discography

As of October 2024, the only publically available songs of Special Guest are "Habit Addict" and "Atomizer", which can be found on their Youtube publication "Special Guest Live STUDIO SESSIONS".