Supertouch - Andy Guida

ANDY: About a month ago, someone from Black N Blue Productions got a hold of Mark Ryan, our singer, and asked if we wanted to be the surprise special guest on this. We played the first Superbowl here in 1988 so it seemed to make sense. To get to play this room again with the history is amazing. It was really a lot of fun to play here again tonight.

Yeah, we did that show with SNAPCASE in 2007. That was another short surprise set. Last summer we went to Toronto and played the Radio Silence book release show. And now this!

Absolutely. We definitely want to try to go to Europe, and we are hoping to do a full set show in New York by the end of the year. There's nothing set in stone yet.

It's kinda a long story. We had been rehearsing anyway, and our bass player committed suicide back in December. The guy who replaced me on drums before is now the bass player. He has been filling in, and we have been just rehearsing because we all felt horrible after Joe committed suicide. It was nice to get together and play the songs again to help that. We were practicing anyway so it wasn't that hard to pick a few songs out of the seventeen songs we've been playing. Tonight's set was a retrospective of the band, from the oldest stuff right up to the newer stuff. It was like telling a story through our set.

My initial thought was that I didn't think I could do another show. We did the 2007 show, but we couldn't get a hold of Joe. He worked for the federal government. We didn't even know what city he lived in; we had lost touch. We went to Toronto, then we did get a hold of him. Getting the whole band back together made us remember why we were doing this band in the first place. After he killed himself, we were like…. Wow, we had just gotten things going again. Maybe we should just pack it in. If it weren't for the fact that Rich had been playing drums for the band when Joe was in the band, it wouldn't have made sense. With Rich playing bass and me back on drums, at least it's all people who knew and cared about Joe so it felt okay to continue. I don't know if we would have been alright with anyone else. It worked out as a nice thing from a super unfortunate circumstance.

Oh yeah, of course! I have such great memories of writing these songs in my parents' basement. I love playing these songs; I fucking love them. It's not like some bands who lose the feeling then get nostalgic later. I never lost the feeling for these songs. After SUPERTOUCH stopped, I wasn't involved in hardcore for a while just because I had been in it for so long, I needed to do something else. But the band always meant a lot to me. It came back eventually that SUPERTOUCH actually had an impact and was recognized well from other bands. That means a lot to know you impacted someone.