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"More Beast Than Man": HEALTH's Jake Duzsik Unpacks His Memorable Touring Moments Ahead Of Aussie Tour
- Tiana Speter
- 2 days ago
- 9 min read
This September, LA industrial trio HEALTH will return to Australian shores for a huge headline run, joined by special guests Perturbator and King Yosef.
No strangers to Australian crowds or stages, the trio will arrive armed with some brand new material in the form of their recent full-length, 2025's CONFLICT DLC as well as their 2026 companion EP ADDENDUM and remix R-TYPE EP series.
Acclaimed for their visceral and high-voltage stage presence, HEALTH do not skimp on bringing their own signature brand of intensity and soundscapes to lose yourself in from start to finish. But, as vocalist and guitarist Jake Duzsik recently revealed over Zoom with Tiana Speter, it's sometimes the moments we don't see on the road that make for the best stories.
Before the band touch back down in Australia next month, come and spend some time behind the scenes with Jake unpacking some of HEALTH's most memorable moments from the road, spanning band members projectile vomiting on planes through to sleeping at airports, Australian critter attacks and a universal truth most musicians may attest to (hint: it's shitting your pants on tour).
HURLING AT GREAT HEIGHTS
A very memorable moment of late is from last summer, we were on tour in Europe doing a festival run. We played a festival in Turku, Finland, north of Helsinki. At that time of year, it’s summertime so it does not get dark. I think Muse was the headlining band, they went on at like midnight or 1:00am, and it was fully light out still at 1:00am.
At 2:00 or 3:00am, it starts to kind of get dusky, real twilight-y. And then we had to drive from Turku back to Helsinki and fly early the next day to Vilnius, Lithuania. John [Famiglietti] had been partying this whole time with all these Finnish locals, and he was also trying to intermittently fast or something to stay fit or some shit…and he got hammered. We get to an airport hotel, get to sleep for two hours, then we get to the gate. On the plane, I'm sitting next to John. And when John’s seated, it looks like he's seven fucking feet tall. If you stand next to John and I and look at us, our waists are at the same height, we have the same length legs. He's like an upright wiener dog, it’s like a dachshund popped up. So if you seat him in a chair, he looks like some crazy NBA player or something.
As the plane is taking off, John grabs the air sickness bag and barfs into it. And I'm just like, “oh god, Jesus”. It’s this short flight, he just puts it in the seat pocket and just passes out. I'm sitting next to him, and I see him grab the air sickness again as we start descending. We're about to hit the tarmac, and right as we're hitting the tarmac, this ginormous man next to me loses consciousness and starts projectile vomiting. So there's a moment of course where I'm like, “oh, he's dead”. We're old enough now, I'm like, “he could be dead”. Then I'm also trying to hold his slack, greasy, giant head with my hands and not get puked all over. He's puking on the back of the seat, but he is unconscious. And then a woman across the aisle fully blood curdlingly screams as the plane is moving. Then everyone looks and sees what's happening, I'm holding this big six foot four Asian guy's head while he's puking onto the seat, he looks like he’s dead and this woman's screaming. Then we land and everyone de-planes and they come up to him, they have these Eastern European accents saying, “are you okay?". And he's like, "yeah, I'm fine”. Then the woman says in this thick accent, "...you do not look fine." It was very, very funny.
UNPLANNED AIRPORT SLEEPOVERS
Another one, we were once waiting for our flight out of Calgary, Canada to go back to Los Angeles. We had DJed a karaoke party after the show we'd played the night before that kept the bar open until five in the morning. The next day, we're just completely and utterly destroyed. I'm trying to drink my way through a hangover and just kind of stay drunk. I'm at the airport gate and I think we started drinking double Bloody Marys at the bar in the morning, and then it kind of just kept going. So now it's mid-to-late afternoon, I think it might've even been evening by that point. And I'm shit-faced. I'm at the bar, which was atypically very near the gate, within eyeshot of the gate. The bartender leaves to go use the bathroom or something, and they start calling the boarding groups. I'm like, "fuck, dude, I was planning on getting another beer. I need one more beer so I can just pass out, because once I start feeling this unbalancing and sober up, it's going to be very bad". The bartender didn't come back. So I reached over the bar and grabbed a bottle of tequila, poured a shot into this empty beer bottle and threw back two shots of tequila. And then I'm like, "all right. I'm good now! I'm ready”.
I get up to walk to the gate, and at this point I am pretty hammered. I can walk, but I can't give a dissertation or anything. Someone clearly narced on me because about 50 yards from the gate, one of the gate agents or flight attendants comes up to me and goes, "excuse me, sir. There's some concern as to whether or not you can safely board this flight”. And I'm like, "what are you talking about?!". But as soon as I heard myself speak, because I was a pretty seasoned drinker at that time, I was like, "this is gonna be a hard sell”. And so they're like, "you're not going to be able to get on this plane”. It was late and it's a fairly regional airport, I've had to go through immigration as well. So I'm passing back through Canadian customs and I'm getting pretty lippy and pissed off. I'm like, "this is ridiculous. I was going to go to sleep”, then while I was slurring, "I paid my money for this ticket!”. So then they're just like, "would you like to go to fucking jail?". Because by this point I'm dealing with border agents. So then I was like, "no, I don't want to go to jail."
I had to sleep at the airport because we were a broke noise band at the time. A, I was too fucked up. And B, I didn't have the wherewithal and didn't have a tour manager to be like, "I need to get a hotel and come back here in the morning”. I just slept on the floor in the airport, more beast than man. I woke up feeling like a cat shit in my mouth. And then I had to tell my girlfriend at the time, she's like, "why aren't you home?". And I'm like, "I didn't make it on the plane”.
THE STING
Next, I have an Australia specific one for you. It’s very short, but we had an off day one time when we were there. I don't know if we went to Bondi, but we went down to one of the city beaches you guys have. It was during summer, I think it was when we were doing Laneway maybe? We were out swimming in the ocean and I suddenly get this very, very excruciating pain kind of wrapped around my arm. I've been in the ocean enough, I'm like, “oh, I just got stung by a jellyfish and it hurts really fucking bad”. But just as an illustration of how chilled out Australian culture is, after I get out of the water, I have this giant red throbbing welt wrapped around my arm. One of the lifeguards then gets on a megaphone from his little lifeguard tower and he’s like (in an Australian accent), “we’ve got a lot of blue bottles coming in, so be careful”. And we’re just like, “oh, thank you for telling me now after I’ve already been stung!”. In the United States, they would’ve said they have to close the beach. But the Australian lifeguard was just casually like, “there’s some blue bottles out there, so maybe watch where you’re going”. I was like, “oh, I just got fucking smoked by this thing!”.
NEW ZEALAND NIGHTMARE
An addendum to that Australian story is the first time we ever went to New Zealand. The guy driving us around took us to these black sand beaches north of Auckland. I think Neil Finn has a compound up there or near there. We were trying to get fucked up and we're like, "can we get some beers? Can we bring it on the beach?". And they're like, "oh, the cops might come and give you a ticket”. So some of the guys wanted to get weed. The guy driving us around, he didn’t know, he wasn't a weed guy. They went to some shop and bought spice or one of those things where the molecules are different enough and made in some laboratory in China and it's not really regulated yet…but it's probably way fucking worse for your body than actual pot.
This guy was with us, he was our sound engineer at the time. He grew up in the Midwest, he was from Minneapolis. And it was pretty fucking hectic in the water that day in New Zealand. I've lived for a brief period in Hawaii and I've lived in California for a lot of my life, so I know how to swim in big water. Anyway, the guys smoke all this spice and they go out swimming. I'd already been out swimming and I kind of warned this guy. I came in and I was like, "hey, it's pretty powerful out there”. And he just was like, “whatever”. So I'm sitting on my towel and I'm watching him, and I'm watching him for a while, I'm seeing him treading water. And you can see by his body language that he's kind of getting a little agitated. And then I watch him for about another two minutes and I'm like, "he can't get past where he is, he's actually been trying to swim back”. He doesn't know to swim to the side and then try to swim in. So he's stuck in some sort of rip, and in the time that it took me to realise that we had a situation, the lifeguard at the beach immediately saw it and went out and had to fucking rescue him. When he got back in, he was in the middle of this heart-hammering, terrible trip from this fucking lab weed that he bought. And then he almost died in the ocean. He was totally fucked up for the rest of the trip, he was totally scarred.
THE UNIVERSAL TRUTH
For my last one memory today, I'll be honest: most touring musicians would admit to this if they had the balls. I was in Zurich, Switzerland, I believe, and we'd been on a long tour, but we had a festival and it wasn't possible for the bus to make it there. So we had to fly for this one-off show and then fly back to meet the bus. I brought a backpack and I remember leaving the hotel to go to the festival. The night before I had had this catastrophic hangover, death hangover, just pickled alive, like Jabba the Hutt in my hotel bed. I walked on the elevator with the rest of my band the next day, and I guess I thought I was going to have just a small fart. But then instead, I just sharted into my pants this horrible liquid, nothing but beer and black bile. And of course, because we had been doing this one-off flight, I had no other pants. I only had the pants that I came with. We had to go to this festival, so I'm like, "I left something in the hotel room” and I had to crab walk out. “Why did he walk sideways out of the elevator?". I had to go back into the room and try to triage shitting my pants when I had no change of clothes, and go do this festival and fly the next day. Anybody who tours, especially when they're young and you're getting fucked up all the time, you're jet lagged, you're eating weird food, and you're constantly doing drugs and drinking. Your digestive system is not well. Because of shame, I kept this story a secret for at least a year, or maybe two years. Then one night I was hanging out with the rest of my band and I sort of fessed up to it. We had another member that we knew had already shit his pants on tour once. And then my other band mate just goes, this is very beautiful, he goes, "well, I guess we've all shit our pants on tour then”. And that was his way of telling me that he had shit his pants on tour as well.
It's one of those things where everybody has some youthful indiscretion that they don't want to tell their friends about or some shit. But if you spin the bottle and tell the story? All touring musicians have shit their pants. I swear to god. Maybe we should do a "speak my truth, shit your pants, don't be ashamed" kind of PSA. A safe space and everyone can share their story
I mean there are plenty of uptight people probably that don't. If you're a teetotaller when you're young and only like to eat fucking Subway or white bread or chain food, it might not happen. But if you're traveling in Brazil and you want to go out and have a good time…the next day, who knows what could happen?
HEALTH
Australian Tour 2026
with special guests Perturbator & King Yosef
Tour Dates
Friday 18 September - The Tivoli, Brisbane
Saturday 19 September - Roundhouse, Sydney
Sunday 20 September - The Forum, Melbourne
Wednesday 23 September - The Odeon, Hobart
Friday 25 September - The Gov, Adelaide
Saturday 26 September - Metropolis, Fremantle
Tickets via www.destroyalllines.com
BY TIANA SPETER
