Q+A: Fucked Up

Toronto’s six piece indie-punk juggernaut Fucked Up are heading to our shores in support of the Foo Fighters next week. I caught what was meant to be 15 minutes of vocalist Damian Abraham’s (aka Pink Eyes) time… 30 minutes later we wrapped up after discussing the intricacies of the world, everything from the joys of fatherhood to the sub-par 80’s hardcore – below is the transcript of the more ‘relevant’ parts of our conversation.

Alright man, you’re on a massive tour in support of the Foo Fighters right now – how is that going for you?

It’s ridiculous, we played with them twice in Canada and then they offered for us to come to Aus and NZ with them. The Foo Fighters were one of the first bands that I went to see by myself live when I was a kid. On their first tour they opened for Mike Watt (Minutemen/Firehose), I remember going to that show and I was a huge Nirvana fan obviously, and now as time has gone on… well actually I was even more of a fan of Brotherhood than Nirvana, and Nate, the bass player used to play in Brotherhood and they were my favourite straightedge hardcore band of all time – actually they are probably my favourite hardcore band of all time. And like here I am able to talk to Nate about playing in Brotherhood at every single show

Ha-ha – so you’re kind of having your moments geeking out on old hardcore with him?

Yeah, that’s the great thing, everyone on the show you can geek out with. Shaun the guitar tech used to roadie for Poison Idea from 84-90, and he has incredible stories. Everyone on this tour has amazing stories, and they all come from – for lack of a better term – an underground background. So there’s no ego – it’s really bizarre, coz your on this huge, huge stadium tour – and it feels like your just hanging out the back of a VFW hall.

So, really it must feel like a whole lot of punk kids basically getting a massive ‘break’ into the rockstar world?

Yeah – I think Fucked Up has been one of the best at exploiting everyone’s punk rock lineage. Be it Jim Jarmusch, or the Foo Fighters – we’re the band that guilts them into bringing us along.

Okay, serious journalistic question… the change in sound from the last album The Chemistry of Common Life to the latest LP David Comes to Life — you’ve gone from a heavier rocking hardcore sound to a more textured indie-punk feel…

You know, I think the thing is – you’re in a band – there’s always repetition. You’re doing the same thing over and over – and I think it’s honest to expect people to not stay interested in you doing that same thing, but people are also going to hate you if you change, we have to keep it interesting for the people in the band too. Coz if it’s boring for the people in the band it’s definitely gonna be boring for the listener.

There are a lot of styles and scenes that have suffered from that lack of change….

There are always new bands that have new ideas and new ways of doing things – I think the problem is a lot of the other bands don’t step down and keep trying to do the same things over and over again – and that’s when it gets stagnant and stale. You always need that fresh new blood coming in. And as a band you always need that fresh new blood coming into the band too. Not to say that what we’re doing now is better than anything that came before. I still think probably ‘Police’ is the best song we’ve ever recorded. Actually that’s not true – I think ‘The Other Shoe’ is the best song we’ve recorded. ‘Police’ is number two though – and that’s one of the first songs we ever wrote. It’s not that I think we’ve progressed at all; it’s just that we want to keep things fresh for us as a band.

Do you think your audience has shifted with you or have you seen a change in the crowd?

Some have, but we’ve been a band for 10 years, y’know – I don’t necessarily listen to the bands I used to listen to 10 years ago. I think our audience has diversified as time has gone on. But, y’know there’ve been some people who have – to take a line from The Matrix – take the blue pill or the red pill, and I think that for us a band we can’t assume that people are always going to like what we do… People are individuals with individual tastes. That’s why we’ve always felt it was important that as long as you are interested in what you’re doing then it doesn’t matter. None of us in this band expected this to be our jobs. But if we have to go back to working other jobs then that’s fine. That’s not to say I don’t prefer this job to any of my other dumb jobs – like working in the candy store or the video store. I definitely like this job way, way more.

Had it not been for Fucked Up becoming what it is what would you have been doing?

I’d be fucked.

Really? – That bad?

Definitely!

I actually had a job just before the band went full time working in the mail room for Unilever – y’know that massive corporation. And I really enjoyed working in the mail room there. If Fucked Up wasn’t able to sustain itself – or sustain us – we’d still be doing Fucked Up, it’d be much more part-time. If you’re not creating in your life you feel unchallenged, everyone needs to have some form of outlet in their life. And Fucked Up is our outlet.

So – the heart is still what motivates you…

Well hopefully it does – but it’s easier for me to say that when I’m on tour with the Foo Fighters. Who knows what it would be like if we weren’t successful, but I’d like to think we’d still be doing music. Fucked Up is about to take a little break and I’m already talking to a friend of mine that I have another band with and we’re talking about doing a record while Fucked Up is on a break just coz we need that creative output… it can be playing in a band, even making pottery on a pottery wheel – or even gardening. I think you need that to stop you going completely insane.

You mentioned side-projects… with six members in the band there must be lots going on.

Josh is in school full time when we’re not on tour – so he doesn’t; Mike doesn’t really but manages an artist called Austra; Ben does Young Governor; Jonah does Career Suicide; Sandy’s got Redstockings and takes a lot of photography stuff as well, so we all have our little things to keep ourselves busy when the bands not. Someone asked me in an interview whether writing lyrics is an act of hope… I wasn’t sure of that as such, but I think creating something is always an act of hope. When people get depressed and sad I think it’s because they’ve lost touch with that creative side of themselves, and that’s certainly me this year – because we’ve been on the road so much I really felt that I nearly lost my friggen mind and I think that’s why we need to take a break and get back in touch with our creative sides – for the sake of our sanity!

With that in mind, what does taking a break mean for you? — i.e -what will a quiet Saturday night mean for you once this tour is over?

It’ll mean taking care of my 2-and-a-half-year-old son! It’s awesome, I love being a dad. He is a true wonder. Watching someone develop into a person is incredible. Next to making a record it’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever done. So on a Saturday night I’d probably be at home with my wife watching movies and playing with the baby.

As your son grows up he’s going to realize that his dad is Pink Eyes though isn’t he?

Oh — and I’m screwed! — Once he learns how to Google search.

Hahaha… there’ll be you shirtless and bloodied up!

Shirtless? – They’re the photos I’m okay with! It’ll be me doing the ‘mangina’, bleeding from the forehead, butt hanging out. I’m going to have a lot of explaining to do! I’m hoping technology fails before he’s old enough to use a computer.

Also – at the same time I’ve got amazing pictures of him with rock bands – so hopefully he likes some of these bands when he’s older – so I can say “Listen son, true, Daddy did humiliate you by going on stage and tucking his penis between his legs – but, you get your photo with Iggy Pop”.

I’m sure Iggy has been guilty of the on-stage ‘mangina’ too!

Definitely!

Going back to the gig talk – Fucked Up have generally been a smaller stage band – how has it been on the massive stage that the Foo Fighters are providing? Is it daunting having so much stage room?

Oh yeah – I tell you what’s even more daunting is having so much crowd room! There’s a lot of space to cover. I like to walk around in the crowd while playing – all the way out there. It’s been incredible and insane that we get to do this type of thing! The Foo Fighters have been unbelievably cool to us on this tour. Here we are getting to play to all these people and they’re not even there to see us, as long as we remember that and just go out there to entertain and fill time till they take the stage you can’t really lose!

Do you still manage to pour out that same amount of energy on that big stage that you would for a club gig though?

Absolutely, regardless of who the audience is there to see, they showed up early and you owe them a show. You cannot ‘phone it in’ coz those people sacrificed their time to come early and see you play. There’s no way that I couldn’t try to put that same energy into the show. Granted, sometimes it doesn’t work like it would in a club! But it’s something you’ve got to do.

I’m not under any pretense that we’re going to win over 30,000 people that are there to see the Foo Fighters, but if we can get 1% of those people to come check us out again then that’s still way more people than we get to play to most of the time! It’s still an unbelievable opportunity. We’re appreciative of a gig regardless of it being a stadium or a club – I’m just happy anyone’s turned up! We’ve done shows with only two people and we’ve still given them a show… they turned up – we owe them.

Have you had chances to do any side shows on this tour?

We’re doing a couple of side shows. We’re doing one tonight in Melbourne, one in Sydney – really hoping we could do one in New Zealand but that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen unfortunately. I’m a huge fan of all the old New Zealand music… Flying Nun records stuff. I love all that stuff, so NZ has always been a place of musical wonder for me… and the NZ bloodline of cinema I love those 90s horror films like The Ugly and all the Peter Jackson films. And it’s Flying Nun’s 30th anniversary right now so I can’t see a better time to come visit.

Tell me about the Fox news spot you had going for a while – It had me scratching my head… was this some kind of subterfuge of the media? Damian ‘Pink Eyes’ on Fox?

I wish I could claim it was that calculated coz obviously I don’t share any of the same political ideologies as the editorial side of Fox. But, at the same time, it came from a really weird way. Someone sent me a YouTube clip of the host of a show called Red Eye picking his favourite albums and he chose Chemistry of Common Life as his favourite record of that year. I was shocked so I wrote to just the general mail delivery address and said “Hey, My name’s Damian and I sing in the band Fucked Up, like, the last thing I ever wanted was to be in Fox News – but thank you”. Really Bizarre… and the host wrote me back and said “I’d love for you to come on the show”. I had a little hesitation to say the least. But the show Red Eye is a bizarre show for Fox. I’m not going to pretend it’s not right wing, at the time I didn’t know how right wing it was, but musically it was one of the coolest shows on all of American TV. The host of the show Greg has amazing taste in music, He’s had The Melvins on, He’s had Andrew W.K on, The Pistols, The Clash… or members of The Clash. Once he told me all the people that had been on I was unbelievably flattered to be considered part of that group, so I went on and had fun, they asked me to come back. I had fun the second time too, then they were like “Do you wanna come work for us” and I was like “Not at all”. I went home and told people the story, and somehow it got ‘broken-telephoned’ that I’d been contracted to host a show on Fox and all this stuff and I was like “That’s Not True!” It was really weird. I went on a third time and made fun of Glenn Beck (right-wing, conservative Fox host), and they never invited me back. I burnt that bridge – depending on your taste!

Obligatory question – and one that I always like to ask – what are you listening to at the moment?

All sorts of stuff… there’s a band from Melbourne called Total Control – they’re phenomenal, I really enjoy this band from Denmark called Lower, they opened for us a couple of weeks back and they blew me away! Culo from Chicago, they’re amazing. Older stuff too…. be it like… uhhh (pause for thought)… That’s the great thing about the punk/DIY scene is that is can be as dissonant as Japanese hardcore and something as beautiful as Flying Nun’s music… like The Bats first LP. But it’s all kinda from the same world. There’s always new stuff I’m finding out about, the world of DIY always need exploring. I’m kinda into this really boring bad late 80′s, early 90′s hardcore at the moment.

Go on, define bad hardcore for me?

You know, when bands started getting this U2 influence on them and became a little bit more pretentious, I kinda like that, and I’m convinced there’s gotta be an amazing record from one of these bands out there. I haven’t found it yet!

Damn I loved that stuff… are you talking bands like Into Another?

Yeah! Oh yeah, that’s what I’m talking about! Definitely! How could a band that had members of Underdog start writing progressive rock! But it works in a bad way.

(Facetiously) I blame Joy Division and The Smiths for all of that!

And U2! They all have sins! I mean, Joy Division I love, but they have a lot to answer for as far as the history of music now.

Are you talking about the dour deadpan NY sound of the mid 2000s?

Yeah – exactly!

Seemed to die away pretty quick though didn’t it?

Ahhh, you can’t say that man – it all comes back around.

The cyclic nature of music?

Exactly, that’s the thing about music, as much as it progresses, you’re so right – it’s cyclic. Everything comes back over and over again.

So will Fucked Up ride through the cycles?

You just gotta do what you do, if people come to you then they come to you. And if they stay away, well – they do. As cheesy as this sounds – as long as you’re being honest to yourself, you can’t really fail.