MISSION OF BURMA // Interview

(June 2013)

By all accounts Boston’s Mission of Burma should have had their day. Indeed Roger Miller, Peter Prescott and Clint Conley are all in their late fifties or early sixties.

In the early 1980s their first couple of records laid the groundwork for the majority of post punk that followed in their wake. After the release of the ‘Signals, Calls and Marches’ EP (1981) and ‘Vs’ album (1982), Miller’s on-going problem with tinnitus prematurely halted the band in 1983 who were by all accounts on the brink of a breakthrough of sorts, be it in an underground and independent way.

Some two decades later the band reformed, not for financial gain but simply because they could. There was unfinished musical business to attend to, and after the release of their comeback album ‘ONoffON’, released on Matador records in 2004, the band once again found themselves with a fan base that wanted to not only be challenged but wanted to be challenged in the loudest way possible.

I spoke to Roger Miller about Mission Of Burma’s latest record, last year’s ‘Unsound’. It has been greeted with universal acclaim by the press and the fans that have heard it. Now the record has been out a while we wondered what it felt like now that the band has finally been accepted?

RM: Well, we didn’t know what would happen. It was one of those records where we said damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! We said we would do it the way we want, and make it a little bit more crazy and out of control than the last one. We were just happy that people liked it so much. We have no idea how people are going to respond, so we are just happy and grateful if you want to know the truth, and with Fire Records behind us we are now touring over in Europe. We were never successful before, so now we can go over and play and get paid and people like it.

LIR: Since the dissolution of the band in the 1980s, it wasn’t an easy journey for you guys to get everything back together, but now that you have you have found yourself in a great position with the band. There is massive interest out there.

RM: Yeah, people know us. We are now established as being some kind of important thing. I am not saying that we agree or necessarily disagree with that, but that is how we are perceived so people pay attention to us, not all the time or anything but enough that we can play.

On the last Mission Of Burma tour we did in December most people knew who we were. We did play in places like Zurich. Now most people in Zurich had not heard of us, so we thought this is going to be the show that bombs. Everything had gone really well and now finally we were going have a bomb, but no… They really, really liked it, and I was selling merch afterwards and this girl came up to me and said, “Where have you guys been all my life?” And she had never heard of us before; how the fuck did that happen? We are just so happy that things like that are happening.

LIR: ‘Unsound’ to my ears is abrasive and caustic sounding, and full of exciting twists and turns. It’s eclectic and yet somehow feels like a single piece of work, a cohesive whole. Do you feel it’s your most complete record?

RM: I think we have made three really good records: ‘Vs’, ‘The Obliterati’ and ‘Unsound’. They are the ones that I really like, but I think ‘Unsound’ to me rivals ‘Vs’ in the amount of variety. I remember when ‘Vs’ came out that some reviewers said that, “It sounds like they are shopping for a style. The first one is like this and the next song is like that”. The thing is we were not looking for an identity. We are just diverse, and I think a lot of that is apparent also on ‘Unsound’.

We have three writers and that helps, but even from the same writer and this is just from my side of the mountain you have got ‘Fell Into The Water’ [‘FellàH20’] which is just a murky but streamlined groove, and then you’ve got ‘ADD In Unison’ which has got psychedelic left turns constantly happening. I think throughout the record there is so much diversity and I personally like diversity. Some people may like something that just has a groove and they can sit through it and it stays the same, but that’s not how my brain works.

LIR: The songs on the new record do not at any time seem forced.

RM: I feel that we were more excited about doing this one than our last album, ‘The Sound The Speed The Light’. We were just out of control. We were having a blast and maybe sometimes we made it to the end of the song by the skin of our teeth, but you can feel that excitement and enthusiasm in it. Everything on there is very honest. Someone may say that we are doing too much of this or too much of that and that’s fine. If we are for you, well, we are not doing it on purpose to provoke you. We are doing it because it’s what we like to do.

LIR: What about the final song, ‘Opener’? The “Forget what you know” mantra at the end of the song could mean just about anything, but I like to think you mean that the audience can forget what they know about Mission Of Burma, and the next release could jettison you into some unknown territory. Sound about right or am I way off base?

RM: Well(Laughs)… There is a couple of reasons that it is last on the record.

Primarily because it’s called ‘Opener’. That’s just our bad attitude, but by saying “Forget what you know” that came about from when we did ‘The Sound The Speed The Light’ and we all agreed that we were not at the top of our game.

So when we started to make this one I brought in a song and Pete [Prescott, drums -Ed] brought in a song, and they were kind of similar to what we had done before. Then Pete said, “If we are going to do a new record, we have to do something different,” so I threw away my song and he threw away his song. The next one I brought in was ‘FellàH20’ and then ‘This is Hi-Fi’ which is pretty different, and then the whole band did that to some degree,It wasn’t hyper radical, but we tried to get out of our comfort zone and to me that’s where the phrase “Forget what you know” comes from.

We had already done that, so we tried to be innocent again and throw ourselves off a cliff. You never know where you’re going to land. If you are going to try and make sure that you land on a soft pillow, then why the fuck are you making rock music?

LIR: And what about writing new material? How do you follow up a record like ‘Unsound’?

RM: Well, I have written two songs so far, and they continue to push the boundaries according to the guys in the band and the people that have seen us play them which is good. Pete has started to bring in one too. Usually we don’t think about making the next record. We just start to bring in songs. and when there is six or seven then we go, “Oh-oh, I think it’s time to make another record.”

At this first phase where we are at right now I tend to write the most as anybody who looks through our writing credits sees, not that those songs are the most important or anything but I’m just always writing. At the moment there are no plans to write another record. I believe that we have another really good record in us yet though.

LIR: Does Bob Weston ever bring fully formed ideas to the table for the band to work on, or does it always work in the reverse where he is presented the song ideas and adds his parts from there?

RM: So far he hasn’t, you know. He plays in Shellac and he’s got plenty of a life of his own, so, no, he hasn’t brought stuff in. But when we have a song he will add some parts and they will always be things that we wouldn’t necessarily expect, so he alters the material but he doesn’t bring in the core songs, but in the future maybe he will. I don’t know.

LIR: He’s been in the band now longer than your original song manipulator Martin Swope ever was. Do you still see him as the new guy?

RM: No (Laughs). Besides he was in the Volcano Suns with Peter years ago and he produced Clint Colney’s band Consonant and he played trumpet on my avant-garde chamber ensembles in the early 90s, so we have all known him for years and so, yeah, he is not the new guy.

LIR: Have you kept in touch with Martin at all?

RM: He’s not very communicative. He lives in Hawaii with his family, and he kind of dropped out of the music scene, I think the last time I emailed with him was five or six years ago. I’d be happy to talk to him again, but you know he has his own life and I totally respect that. So I have no idea if he has heard the new record. But if he asked for it I would send it to him. Maybe he’ll see this interview and say, “Wow, Roger said he’ll send me a record”.

LIR: There is a lot of footage online from both eras of the band playing live, and it would appear that with the most recent shows you guys are more fired up onstage than you ever were. What drives you?

RM: Who knows? It flies in the face of logic completely. Why when we are in our late fifties and me at 61 does this band push itself so hard? We just played in New York. and my brother Ben who played saxophone in Destroy All Monsters with Ron Asheton, well, he sat in with us, and a friend of ours that watched us, she described it as “Burma has gone completely feral.” It’s as if we are a bunch of wild and dangerous animals on stage (Laughs). Why is that? I don’t know, but it feels really, really good. It’s one of the most satisfying things that I can do with my life is to play a Mission Of Burma show. It’s so cathartic.

LIR: Well, I think you wouldn’t do it otherwise.

RM: Yeah, right.

LIR: It’s that cathartic release that gets most people into punk rock and hardcore in the first place. Was it the same for you?

RM: Well, I can only speak for myself as the other members will all have something different to say on the subject, but I had a band in 1969 and 1970 which is in fact now reforming called Sproton Layer. We were a very psychedelic band and described as Syd Barrett fronting Cream. It’s with my two brothers, and we are playing gigs this summer and we haven’t played a show for 43 years but…

In 1969 I started my first band. I wrote all the songs with some help from my brothers too, but it was there that I really found my voice and a couple of the songs sound a little like Mission Of Burma actually. Then during 1970 and 1971 rock music had gotten so conservative that by 1973 I had given up on rock. I had no interest in it anymore.

I went to music school, and then when I came back to Michigan after that as if from out of nowhere the first Devo single showed up and Pere Ubu too. Patti Smith’s first record came out and I was like, “What the hell is this?” Then when the Ramones showed up all of a sudden you could do stuff again. It felt like the world allowed for creativity in rock music, and even though by then I was a very skilled musician having been a composition major at music school I loved the Ramones. The Ramones were gods. That’s my opinion, but in some certain respects that should not have happened. They could barely play their instruments, but I found that so much more refreshing than just about anything else.

Because of that I was allowed to become interested in rock music again, and complete what I hadn’t completed at the end of the psychedelic era which is form a band that can actually do something, and that became Mission Of Burma and post-punk and bands like Wire and Television. That was just incredible. ‘No New York’ for instance was just amazing.

LIR: If you can remember as far back as 1981, there was that track ‘Outlaw’ on your ‘Signals, Calls and Marches’ EP that I loved so much. Can you tell us a bit about it?

RM: I have a really good memory for this stuff.

Even though ‘Outlaw’ sounds like Gang of Four, for us Gang of Four did not exist at that point in time. It was very much influenced by that ‘No New York’ stuff like the Contortions, but it was also me going back and rediscovering my interest in Sproton Layer with the disjointed and incorrect chord progressions, but it was that twisted funk from that ‘No New York’ stuff that was the inspiration for the groove. That guitar solo to me, however, sounds like Sproton Layer. There is that psychedelic compression and harmonic intervals, and those lyrics are very, very dreamlike.

LIR: Yeah, if you take those lyrics out of the context of the song and read them on paper they are pretty trippy.

RM: Yeah, super trippy. As we progressed my lyrics got less trippy. I think I wrote that one before we even got Peter in the band. Me and Clinton had just stared to write stuff and we didn’t really have a band yet, but we thought it was good and thought, “Let’s do this”.

LIR: With ‘Vs’, the track ‘Secrets’ really nails down what the band’s core sound is for me? How did that come together?

RM: That was the third or fourth song I wrote for the band, I was very interested in Steve Reich at the time, and he was into gamelan so there was no need for harmonic change. With gamelan music, it is not the harmony. It’s other patterns and things that make the music more interesting. So that is basically a one chord rock song, but it was an ambiguous chord. So that was the idea behind it, I was thinking how can I make something so simple as one chord into complex music and interesting to the ears, and that’s why there is a drum solo instead of a guitar solo. Then I put in all these little variations, so there is kind of a chorus and kind of a bridge, but basically it’s all one chord.

Putting the vocals at the end also appealed to me, and those vocals were totally derived from when Clint used to work as a bartender at a pub called Jacks in the Cambridge, Boston area, and I would sit there drinking for free which was a pretty good deal (Laughs) and watching these people standing around and looking at each other but not knowing what to say to each other, so they were just fidgeting. That’s what that whole song was about – The whole thing of not really communicating, but there is some tension there.

LIR: What about ‘New Nails’? It’s so weird but it really stands out for me., It’s my favourite Mission Of Burma song.

RM: The riff itself (sings the riff) was from a description from my brother Darren. He came up with the phrase ‘hand chords’, where you just put your hands on the guitar and try and figure out what’s there. Instead of saying, “Now I am going to play an A chord,” you just place your hand down. So I picked up a guitar and my hand was in that exact position, and I just played it to see what it sounded like, and it sounded really cool, and that’s the main riff.

It’s basically just a tirade against organised religion, and in this case Christianity and how perverse it has become. I am very much against organised religion, even though there is a lot of things about Christianity that I believe are good. I would say there are a lot of things that are good about all religions, but once they become organised you lose the spirit completely, and when you lose the spirit of the spirit then you’re totally fucked.

At the end there is like this jaunty little ditty where you have Jesus walking round the desert saying, “Please don’t make an idol of me,” and we have Martin doing those loops and it sounds almost demonic. To me that is one of Martin’s greatest tape loop manipulations. Also I played cornet on that one, and Clint always refers to it as Roman trumpets because it’s all set in this Christian environment. It’s like a call to the gladiators or some shit.

LIR: When Clint brought in ‘That’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate’, what ran through your mind? Did you know straight away that that song would be on the record?

RM: There was no record to plan for. We didn’t have a record deal at all at that point. We were just making music. The first thing you do is make music and by the time Mission of Burma recorded ‘Vs’ we had 2 or 3 albums worth of material, so it was just a case of whatever songs came out good made it.

I will say that the first ever song Clint wrote in his life was ‘Peking Spring’. He’d never written a song and then he brought it in fully formed, and I’m not a guy without an ego or anything, and I thought, “They’re my songs and it’s my band,” and I had this long tradition of song writing, and then suddenly Clint shows up out of nowhere like Zeus pulling Athena from his eye. This fucking song, honestly, it was devastating for me.

It became a huge radio hit and I thought I was going to be the big hit writer, but very quickly I got over that, and I realised that Clint doing that sort of thing and me doing this sort of thing, and then when Pete starting writing later, that is what makes the band so interesting. Without Clint’s epic rock songs and my avant-garde doodlings and Pete’s rantings, it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting. It’s how they interact, and we perform with each other that makes this band.

I will say though that when Clint brought in ‘That’s When I Reach for My Revolver’ Pete and I stopped and said, “That’s a hit”. This was before we had even gone through the song once. We knew that that was our biggest hit right there.

LIR: On a commercial level do you think that any of your other songs deserved equal or higher status than that one?

RM: No not really, it depends on what way you look at it, but ‘Academy Fight Song’ and ‘Reach for My Revolver’ are the two biggest. There is a reason that they’re big. They each have a real hooky chorus and they are easy to sing along to. Clint has a stronger pop sensibility than Pete or I. ‘…Certain Fate’ is good too, but it’s just not quite as gigantic.

LIR: Where you surprised at how well Mission Of Burma was represented in the book ‘Our Band Could Be Your Life’?

RM: It’s quite possible that it was one of those moments where I broke down into tears if you want to know the truth. Of all the bands that are in that, book we are the least known. I mean, we are nobody. The Minutemen put out a lot of records and they toured a lot. We didn’t hardly do anything. We put out one record and an EP, and then we disappeared. I mean Black Flag, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers and the Replacements, these groups were all big. We sold less records than any other band in that book, and we considered all these people to be our peers. We never, however, expected anyone else to think of them as our peers, so literally when I read that I cried. There was a release that somebody had finally put us where I always thought we belonged, but dared not think that I should be there.

If you have seen the documentary that’s out there, then you already know this, but what was really weird was that when that book came out we reformed about half a year later and we didn’t intend to. Somebody asked us to play some shows. We were so stunned to be in a place that we thought we actually should be and never expected to be that to us it was unbelievable that after all these years somebody else actually thought that too. People started paying more attention, and somebody said you should play this show, this benefit and I said, “No, we are not going to.” Instead we did something else, and now here we are still playing. It’s really weird how things work out.

LIR: Along with the book, the advent of the internet and downloading, both legal and illegal would have brought your music to an entire new audience. How does that make you feel?

RM: Personally, I would rather there was no illegal downloading. When we released ‘The Obliterati’ compared to ‘ONoffON’ two years earlier, it sold half as many records, but it was the equivalent of selling just as many because sales are down everywhere. It makes it more difficult for the artist to survive, but I’m not going to wail against it because it’s what people do. It’s the new norm. It’s unfortunate for Mission Of Burma because if we made more royalties we would be able to record a new record sooner. Soon enough it will settle out. and I think there will be a new paradigm in its place.

LIR: Getting the band back together and being such a noisy act, you must have had concerns about your on-going problems with tinnitus.

RM: In all honesty. we thought we were only going to play two shows, one show in New York and one show in Boston, and that was going to be it. Then it turned into three shows in Boston and two shows in New York, all sold out. Shellac wanted us to go to England to play ATP and we had never played in England, so we thought, “We’ll just do that,” which of course turned into “And then we’ll do that and that.” We don’t play so much though that it is a massive concern for me. Back in the day Burma rehearsed two or three times a week and played twelve shows a month. It’s a very different world that I am living in now with Burma. We rehearse much less and play fewer shows.

Still, it is a concern and we have a Plexiglas thing round the drum kit, and I don’t use any monitors, and my amp is at the side of me instead of blasting in my ears. I don’t use those headphones anymore, but I have these really, really strong walls of rubber that I put into my ears. They go in really well, and they don’t come out when I am running around and yelling and screaming and shit.

LIR: If ever there was an iconic silhouette in punk rock, then it would be you playing live holding your guitar with those huge ear mufflers on.

RM: That’s a good one (Laughs). The reason I don’t wear them anymore is because they finally figured out a material that feels a bit like silly putty, and when you put it in your ear it doesn’t work its way out. Plus also it sure would be nice to see a picture of me playing a guitar without those things on, and now I can afford to do it.

LIR: What about the artwork on your albums? The recent ones have seemed a little thrown together whereas ‘Vs’ for instance is a beautiful piece of artwork that wouldn’t look out of place on a wall.

RM: A time when we were really involved with it would have been with ‘Vs’ and ‘Signals, Calls and Marches’. We had an artist called Holly Anderson who helped write lyrics to some of Clint’s songs. Well, we were working with her, and we spent a lot of time on those covers. Those are pretty iconic.

The ones since then…

LIR: Until ‘Unsound’, they have been a little bland.

RM: I thought so, yes. ‘The Obliterati’ cover for instance is just a picture I took on an aeroplane of clouds; it’s completely bland and kind of smooth, completely contrary to what the music is. We just couldn’t decide, and we rehearse so rarely we just think, “Yeah, that’s good enough.” But in the case of ‘Unsound’ John Foster, a graphic designer who works at Fire Records, he said, “Well, I’ll do it.” So it was the first time that it was out of our hands, and I believe that is partly as to why it came out better. He was sending us stuff and it went back and forth a lot, so we steered him. I think, however, that is one of the best record covers that we have had since we reformed.

LIR: Finally, back in 2008 Peter said in an interview that due to the ferocity in the way that Mission of Burma plays live that he gave the band a two year life span from that date. What happened?

RM: Well I jump around all over the place. We did a Volcano Suns song in our set last week, and after we listened to the original Pete goes, “Wow man, that’s really fast”. He can’t really play as fast as he used to. It used to be just sheer madness. But I actually think that’s good for Mission Of Burma because some of those early recordings of us playing sets in, say, 1981 have us playing the songs so fast when some of those songs are so complex that it was no wonder that people didn’t know what the fuck we were doing, and now we are forced to play them a little slower it’s just that little bit easier to hear what those songs are about.

But some of the shows this year have been the best we have ever had. It was 2008 that he said that, and now it is 2013 and we are still rocking. Perhaps our age is working to our advantage.

LIR: Thank you.

This iderview was conducted by myself and original appeared in pennyblackmusic magazine. click the link and sit back and read.

Jello Biafro and the Guantanamo School of Medicine // White People and the Damage Done (Alternative Tentacles)

This is the second full length that Jello Biafra has crafted since the formation of his Guantanamo School Of Medicine project, and it has to be said that when Jello clocks in it tends to be business as usual. The Dead Kennedys legend hasn’t made a classic album since he made ‘The Last Temptation Of Reid’ with Al Jorgensen from Ministry under the LARD banner, and that was way back in 1990. Since then the lyrics have stayed masterful, and the voice is just as shockingly skewed as ever but the music itself has never been up to much.

So from a purely musical standpoint then ‘White People And The Damage Done’ is pretty much hit and on more than one occasion miss. Opening with the mid tempo ‘The Brown Lipstick Parade’ was a pretty grave mistake. The opening riff has been recycled by more rock and metal acts than it deserves, and until the half-way point where the band breaks the song down into its component parts it sounds like Jello just phoned the song in.

On the other hand album closer ‘Shock-U-Py’ has the greatest riff that AC/DC have never recorded. It seems incredible that after so many years preaching to the converted Jello has yet to become jaded with his cause. He can still create an anthem of hope and stand up for the little guy. It may not have the instant shock appeal of ‘Nazi Punks Fuck Off’, but the outrage and power of the chorus hooks you in as much as any of the 80′s Dead Kennedys stuff he does.

The general rule of thumb here is that faster is better. ‘Hollywood Goof Disease’, ‘Mid-East Peace Process’ and ‘Road Rage’ are perfect slabs of poisoned punk vitriol, and I wonder if the rest of the album had kept up that kind of pace with the stomp of ‘Shock-U-Py’ included for a little relief from the frantic pace then Biafra may have once more had a classic record on his hands.

I originally reviewed this for Pennyblackmusic.

FUCKED UP // David Comes To Life (Matador)

So let’s just put this out there shall we, ‘Queen Of Hearts’ is one of the great punk rock singles of all time with a fantastic video to boot. It contains at least three dramatic hooks that singer Pink Eyes manages to pull off with that gruff, gravel-chewing voice of his as if he were the late, great Kurt Cobain, and then overdrive kicks in as the female vocal lifts the song above the clouds and into another genre all together. This is something new and exciting for the band and me as a fan. The group’s potential greatness has begun to blossom with this record that’s for sure. And what’s more surprising is that ‘Queen Of Hearts’ wasn’t even the band’s first single from it. That was the slightly inferior but still ridiculously triumphant ‘A Little Death’ which contains the simplest and most uplifting solo I’ve heard in a song all year.

I’m sure that most that care will be aware that ‘David… ‘is a concept album that tells the story of the life of said chap who lived through Thatcherite Britain in the 80’s. It’s not easy to take too much from this story listening to the album even when you begin at the first track and stick with it through to the last, and I don’t want to delve too deep into the concept because I’m still at the early stage of falling in love with this LP and I don’t want to spoil the new discoveries I get from each new listen. It really is one of those rare gems that you come across once in a blue moon.

The one thing that annoys me most about Fucked Up though is that they sound so much like Virginia’s Avail that during many points during the album I can close my eyes and I can see Avail playing the songs, tearing them apart on stage and enjoying them just as much. It’s ridiculously uncanny but Fucked Up are far more than just plagiarists. Where Avail would run out of ideas after 2 minutes of versus, choruses and middle eights, Fucked off have the vision to make the whole song a chorus or play songs with no repeating parts at all. Avail were black and white to Fucked Up’s full HD colour.

Whereas in the past I never really could digest Fucked Up on their long players (even the universally acclaimed ‘The Chemistry oOf Common Life’ dipped and dragged for me) here ‘David Comes To Life’ has in effect turned the band in what they never really wanted to be when they started out; a full on rock band that can function with the best of them. The spirit of punk may fizz through every riff and cackle with every roar but when you come down to basics they are just a band, not the second coming as many mainstream publications would have you believe. Well not quite anyway, but damned close. It’s a crying shame that according to Pink Eyes this will be the final album he releases with the band. It took time sure but it would seem with this album the band have finally mastered the art of the full length LP. It’s one you can listen to again and again.

I originally wrote this review for PENNYBLACKMUSIC

X // More Fun In The New World (Elektra)

More Fun In The New World was a far more polished record than X had put out previously. The band’s second outing on a major label was meant to propel them into the mainstream and to finally achieve some commercial success such as Green did for R.E.M. a few years later. Unfortunately the cleaner direction of the album suffered much the same fate as Diamond Head’s Canterbury and Bow Wow Wow’s When The Going Get’s Tough… records by alienating a large proportion of their audiences that had found the band so appealing in the first place. Fortunately for X the press loved the new direction and reviews were on the whole not just positive but positively ecstatic, generating new fans that meant the band’s popularity didn’t wane, it simply had a less punky face when they played live.

In places you can hear a country influence which doesn’t always work as well as it could do. Sorry to mention it again but R.E.M. achieved a far more impressive sonic and interesting version of what X was trying to get across within their album here a few years later but when X hit the spot, usually when John Doe’s and Exene Cervenka’s vocals are combined, it is a delightful sound. The combination of male and female works despite the lack of harmonies. It’s as if each singer sang the song on their own in the studio and then both takes are just spliced together such as on Drunk In My Past and the stomping opener The New World where the band get overtly political without dating themselves by naming presidents or congressmen like the Dead Kennedys always did. Go to you YouTube and type in ‘Pearl Jam New World’ to see a passionate cover version on the 2004 Vote For Change tour to catch the grunge titans with a somewhat over enthusiastic Tim Robbins singing like his life depended on each and every word.

It’s on the even more anthemic We’re having Much More Fun that you think that even though this is only track two that the group has recorded a classic LP. But by Make The Music Go Bang and Breathless the record suffers with filler. And so it goes on. With the final two songs on More Fun in The New World it becomes quite evident that the band is unfocussed. I See Red is a shot in the arm punk dash which would not seem out of place on either of X’s first two records and yet because of the crystal clean production the track is out of place and old hat. The group seem far more comfortable on the funk infused closer True Love Pt 2 where they revel and weave their way through five minutes of full on retro groove, name checking their favourite songs from rockabilly to soul. Here they seem free and wired for anything new but not even this could ready fans for what was to follow on their next record, 1985’s Ain’t Love Grand.

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The Minutemen // What Makes A Man Start Fires? (SST)

Jesus, the Minutemen are a hard band to love. If you start your Minutemen journey with this record then the casual listener has no chance to fall for their charms. Mike Watt’s bass is ridiculously high in the mix and D. Boon’s guitar is way to low. The tunes don’t really come through until the fifth listen and even then they are few and far between. The band made better records before and after this and yet I feel compelled to always return to What Makes A Man Start Fires? The front cover artwork is ugly, the music is doubly so. So, what makes a man want What Makes A Man Start Fires? All this bass feels like a brick that pummels against your head. Yet Watt knows what he is doing. This record separates the weekend punks from the hardcore, a little like Coalesce do for fans of screamo. What Makes A Man.. feels like a proper punk record. And it’s almost double the length of their previous one as well. Again, this is not for the first time dabbler.

On the sloppier slower songs such as Life As Rehearsal and Fake Contest it becomes clear that there is a conventional band in there somewhere and they explored further these ideas on their later releases but in truth it’s the likes of the arty Beacon Sighted Through Fog and East Wind/Faith or the straight thrashers like ‘99 and Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs where my love for the band lies. The latter giving rise to where Watt picked up his incredible talent for bucking the status quo from.

Sell Or Be Sold is my favourite song on the record. The melody is the strongest here and whilst the lyrics are your typical anti corporate punk stance the band were brave enough to apply the message to what is essentially a pop song, be it one recorded by a low frequency bass wielding nut. Some twenty four years later Mike joined Iggy Pop and the Stooges for their comeback LP The Weirdness. Thankfully Watt had stronger character with him who could get that bass turned down, even if it was just a touch.

BABIES THREE // Interview

(from TUSC ‘Zine 2011)

Tusc: I’m Here with three members of Babies Three; Jim, Paul and Daniel

Daniel: I’d like to mention we are sitting outside in the freezing cold in Margate’s sea front.

T: So, can you tell us a brief history of the band before we get into the reforming thing…

Paul: We started in the late 90’s as a copyist punk pop type of band, threw members out then Jim, Alex and Daniel joined and we started to get good. When our drummer Russell joined we decided to take it in a more emo-ish of direction, we were still copying what we were listening to at the time

T: This was the late 90’s was it?

P: Yeah 1999 is when we got our sound together and when I say emo I’m talking Mineral or Sunny Day Real Estate that we were taking inspiration from. The thing that turned me onto it was an early Boy Set’s Fire album, a short while after that we started to discover our own sound thanks to Jim’s talent and later after our first European tour a genius thing started to happen in that we started to write songs as a band that we happened to think were original and we really enjoyed playing them without copying any one too much. And then we split up. Me and Jim had a falling out and there was a problem with musical directon, but pretty much it was over a girl.

T: It was a very emo way to split up.

Daniel: We did carry on for a little while with Ross.

T: Yeah, let’s name drop Ross who is currently playing guitar in Man Hands.

P: We carried on for a bit but it was never really the same, no offence to Ross whose talent is amazing and is a very good looking man. We battled on for a year or so after Jim had was gone but it just wasn’t right. And then we splintered into many different bands. That’s the early history. Done.

T: You have had a few attempts at getting the band back together though right?

Jim: We give it a go once a year.

P: Three attempts in the last Four years I think. Yeah, me and Jim have healed from what we fell out over. Various things stopped it coming together be it musical direction or we couldn’t get it together for practices. The usual band nonsense.

T: Now you’re older do you have work commitments and other family commitments.

P: It’s only really an issue with Russell. Originally when we got back together it was with Alex, who was in the original ’99 line up but he’s got children and he couldn’t fully commit and Russell is in the same situation. In the long term he’s said that its cool if we wanna take things more seriously we should get someone else. At the moment though there is no need to as we are still working on new stuff.

T: And of course now you have a new member.

J: The new member is called Chainy Rabbit, that’s not his real name by the way.

D: Has he said what his real name is?

J: It’s something silly like Eugene. I can’t remember…. Jermaine, that’s it. He’s a guy who makes some pretty interesting music. He’s a real musical thinker, not the most technical player but he is someone who thinks about music in a real interesting way and listens to lots of weird minimalist stuff. I was playing in a band called Mumdead with him before this. So yeah Chainy is our new bass player and he’s replacing a guy called Steve Jedrick who in my opinion was in the definitive line up of Babies Three around 2001. It’s a shame not to have Steve here with us now but he’s one that is even more complicated to talk about.

T: Have you written any new songs with Chainy?

D: Yes, two. But one of them is so long it may as well be three songs. I was excited and posted about it on facebook but then someone deleted it.

P: It was an accident.

D: I just feel like I am being censored all the time, I have so much that I want to say and I am just not being allowed to get it out there. Jim never lets me bring my songs into practice.

J: it’s because they are too good and I am jealous.

P: With the two new songs the long one (Polytheist Mind) starts off all Jesus Lizard like and then goes into unknown territory for us, very slow, very doom, a bit weird. It’s sludge almost, although so far people that have heart it so far have been like. ”Meh….. It’s a bit long”.

Paul’s wife in the background: People meaning me!

Everyone: (laughs)

P: The other song (Brethren Of The Free Spirit) is quite up-tempo, a bit like where we left off last time. I don’t like it when bands get back together and just play old songs. I can’t stand that.

J: Unless you’re Kiss

D: Or Iron Maiden.

P: Kiss and Maiden never split up.

T: But people from that time like me are expecting you to be like a Babies Three cover band.

P: We may play three or four old songs.

T: if you didn’t play old songs then I’m not going to watch you, ever.

P: With time some stuff that we loved back then sounds cheesy and horrible to me now.

D: We tried to play Eleven in practice and it just plodded and had no feel.

T: Some things are of their time and belong to that era.

J: It’s like listening to dated stand-up comedy, you can’t get the joke because it’s not of this time.

D: Good analogy.

T: What are the vocals going to be like in this new Babies Three?

P: Well, come first practice I had decided that I was never going to scream anymore and as of now I think it’s best if I never sing anymore. So it’s all pretty screamy. Whenever I try and sing I get Henry Rollins stuck in my mind and just end up yelling and shouting anyway.

T: So just before we wrap things up here because it’s getting really, really cold, Jim, tell us a bit about your solo project?

J: It’s not a solo project. To call it a solo project is like when Paul Stanley from Kiss and the others went off and did solo projects.

P: Good times.

J: I just make music and I am pragmatic about it. One thing doesn’t supersede another. It’s called Rough Comforts and it is just me. I play everything and record everything.

D: Pretty much like Babies Three then.

T: It’s not heavy, it’s like folk music right?

J: It is completely different music; I wouldn’t call it folk music. If you say folk music to me I think of traditional folk music which has its own conventions that I don’t apply to my music but the instrumentation is folk. It uses guitar. The way I sing is maybe influenced by people like Robert Wyatt and Kate Bush. I sing in my real accent, it’s not Americanised. I don’t want music to sound conceited but at the same time you do have to have a stylistic approach and that was the hardest thing for me to realise, took me three years to figure it out.

T: Finally Daniel, unlike the other guys you didn’t join any other bands after the split. Why was that?

D: I would play guitar from time to time at home but it always just made me miss Babies Three.

T: They were like your lover? Was it like you were so in love with Babies Three that after that nothing compared?

D: Well, I played for a bit in (Margate locals) Slingshot Around The Moon but it never felt as awesome. It needed Russell on the drums. I missed that. He was such a powerhouse and would lift everything up because he was so fucking….. bangy. Um… I did an interview once before in a skate park in Bristol but I didn’t talk much because I broke my ribs and um… my rib was broken.

Eveyone: (laughs)

Below filmed on a phone I think is the footage from BABIES THREE’s first show back together.

All BABIES THREE music available here for FREE!

BLACK FLAG // The First Four Years (SST)

As soon as you drop the needle on the record, you’re floored. The punch of the guitars may be a visceral blast of sloppy riffage, but it is effective as hell. Opening track Nervous Breakdown was the debut single released by Black Flag back in 1978. Now the Flag never claimed to be the first punk band in the USA but along with the Dead Kennedy’s, Greg Ginn and company ushered in the hardcore scene which spawned a hundred thousand mini genres and a work ethic that influenced my outlook on how I should run the band I was in.

The band adopted a Do It Yourself approach which involved every aspect of what the group did, from overseeing artwork to booking tours and releasing the end product on their own label (SST in this case). Many hundreds of other bands caught on and a generation of musical misfits took note. Without them there would be no Minor Threat, Nirvana, Green Day or even a Gallows, just how influential this band is I could not put into words. But as with any scene it had to begin somewhere and all Black Flag’s early recordings can be heard here, neatly compiled for your listening pleasure.

Kurt Cobain turned me on to them as he did with so many groups and yet even with his endorsement The First Four Years, which effectively documents exactly what is says on the tin, is a truly overlooked album. In my experience people often start at Damaged when they get into Black Flag and because Rollins wasn’t part of the band before this, tragically ignore all these raw primal gems that went before him. Henry Rollins, front man of the group from 1981 after the tracks had already been recorded admitted during the Black Flag biography Get In The Van that The First Four Years was his favourite Black Flag record. It’s easy to see why. He was the fourth vocalist. The three previous line ups of the band were the ones Henry fell in love with. These songs were the soundtrack to his life. I can picture him on route to his ice cream van job from home with his trusty walkman on, Clocked In pounding his brain sideways and him dreaming of clocking off and joining the band as they took flight across North America from one shitty venue to the next. A year later that’s exactly what he did.

The First Four Years collects together the Nervous Breakdown EP, Jealous Again EP, Six Pack EP and Louis Louis single on one LP. My favourite track though, Machine was previously only available on a compilation album called Chunks. In it singer Dez Cadena pleads with anyone that will listen that he is “not a machine“, the way he delivers the line is not to observe or convey an idea but to scream at us that he is at his wits end. It’s such a wrenching vocal onslaught the untrained ear would consider it an outburst prior to suicide. Black Flag of any era is not an easy listen. But it is an essential one.

FLATS // Better Living (One Little Indian)

Flats’ debut album is the punkest thing to come out of London in years. Taking their musical cues from the likes of Eyehategod, Bongzilla and Weedeater rather than the usual suspects in punk, the band deliver a most unusual record here. The only thing that remains the same from the group’s early recordings is Daniel Devine’s snotty vocals. He had warned in previous interviews that they would take this doomy approach but to be honest I never expected this devotion to the down tuned stoner style. It’s a brave and brilliant choice. Brave because the likes of ‘NME’ had already warmed to the band before the musical change and brilliant because there is no other band out there doing this right now. It’s ridiculously intense listen.

The vocals are something else. Imagine if Steve Ignorant from Crass was even more pissed off and you’ll be maybe half way there. The opening cut ‘Foxtrot’ and closing bomb drop that is ‘Mambo’ illustrate this sick anger to its fullest extent. Rather than a horror movie what you have here is a snuff film. This is the real deal. You can’t fake this disgust that runs through Devine’s throat. Both songs are the slowest you’ll find on here and work as a perfect set of bookends.

Elsewhere the band avoids complexity and sticks to the simple metal & punk principles of pummelling the hell out of simple riffs. Initially I thought this may be the album’s downfall by not rewarding the listener after multiple listens, but it turns out to be Flats trump card. Why? Well the riffs are played so ferociously that the likes of ‘Shuffle’ and ‘Tango’ always sound vibrant and fresh. It doesn’t matter that my 10 year old nephew could pick up a guitar and learn the song in five minutes flat. As for the ‘guitar solo’ in ‘Macabre Unit’, well, I have never heard anything like it. It sounds as if guitarist Paul Angeles plugged the guitar into a cranked up cab, put the guitar strap on, lifted it over his shoulder and then well, that’s it. What is not to love.

What with the ‘Ceremony’ LP released last month and Flats hitting now, it sounds to me like 2012 will be a year that the underground got some balls back and made punk, punk again.

I originally wrote this review for Pennyblackmusic.

CRASS – Steve Ignorant // Interview

(Oct 2013)

In Brief.

Steven Williams was raised in Dagenham and lived a somewhat typical working class life until during the latter half of the 70s he met the older free thinking artist and writer Penny Rimbaud and the duo formed Crass. Steven Williams became Steve Ignorant and the band he sang in became one of the most seminal punk bands ever. 

I say in brief because the life, times and musical career of Ignorant cannot be summed up in a few simple paragraphs, infact according to the man himself an autobiography entitled ‘The Rest is Propaganda’, a lyric book and an excellently compiled history of the band titled ‘The Story Of Crass’ by George Berger only just manage to scratch the surface. There are a lot more stories to tell.

Since the demise of Crass in 1984 Steve has fronted many more bands and has in recent times become a lifeguard volunteer whilst working on two new projects, the first being the joint venture with Irish punkers Paranoid Visions for a single and album, not only this but he’s also has been working on his acoustic project entitled Slice Of Life. The man refuses to rest on his laurels; it would appear that Steve ignorant is a man always on the move.

Lost In Rock: First off, the “Rock N Roll and Revolution” single you put out with Paranoid Visions sounded so great. How did it feel to have a new slab of plastic in your hands?

Steve Ignorant: It was really great, I mean really, really great. It always is when you hold the record. You can’t believe you’ve done it, even after all these years it is still a great feeling.

LIR: How did you get to join Paranoid Visions for this project?

SI: I had heard of them but I hadn’t seen them or anything and it want really until I met them that I began looking into them but we just hit it off straight away, they are a great bunch of people and I love their attitude and the stuff that they write about. It’s almost as if they are doing a crass angle on the Irish side of things and I am learning from them.

So yeah, I like the sentiments they hold and I am glad they offered me the chance to work with them; it just seemed a natural thing to do. I know that it helps them in a way because it has the name Steve Ignorant on it but it also keeps my foot in the door. We complement each other but there is no sense of stardom or heroism, I’m not anyone special and what I like about it is that when I perform with them I am just another member of their family. The way they work tends to be a little chaotic but you know what, I like that as well because it’s not my words or music which also means it’s not my responsibility so when I do gigs with Paranoid Visions I can relax a little bit, it’s funny to say that but the pressure really is off of me.

LIR: So with the single being a success you joined Paranoid Visions in recording the new full length album ‘When…?’ How did that go down?

SI: It all started when Peter Jones (guitars) phoned me up just after we did the ‘Rock and Roll and Revolution’ thing. He said “Steve, I have a couple more tracks here that would suit you down to the ground” and I went, Okay then. So when I went over to record them I suddenly discovered there were eleven songs and I was like, right okay! I really enjoyed doing it; I think we recorded it all in one evening, it was really quick but what they had done previously was sent over the lyrics and the backing tracks so I had previously heard the stuff so it ended up being just a matter of me going over there and putting the vocals down.

LIR: Did you take any part in the lyric writing at all?

SI: No, I completely left that to Deko (Dachau –vocals) and the other Paranoid Visions people as I felt that all I wanted to be for them is like another instrument. I didn’t want to get involved in the actual writing of it because I see it as their thing, it’s almost like I am, say, another guitar and it was nice for me to be able to do that. Saying that, there were a couple of bits where I said to Deko can I change this word or whatever because I thought it would fit better and he had no problem with that at all. If I did begin to write for them then there would be a danger of me taking them into a direction that they don’t want to go in after all Paranoid Visions is their project and I am just a guest.

LIR: From the interviews I’ve read with them and recent ones with yourself it seems that they are pretty close to where your head is anyway. I guess that’s why for you it was almost a no brainer for you to join up?

SI: Well yeah, absolutely. You hit it spot on there; it was just a completely natural thing to do. I have done the Crass and the Conflict sort of things and I can see that with Paranoid Visions’ use of visuals and female vocalists that they are almost taking on an Irish angle of Crass, I don’t think they are trying to be Crass at all; I just have really good fun working with them.

LIR: The song from the album ‘Log On / Bog Off’ was recorded acoustically. Was that something that instigated the Slice Of Life project you are involved with that has come to light recently?

SI: No, believe it or not I’ve been working on the Slice Of Life thing for around the last fifteen years but I’ve never got round to it properly until now. I couldn’t work out who I wanted to work with or how I wanted to do it and it wasn’t until I met up with Pete, the guy that played bass for me on ‘The Last Supper’ tour and Carol that did some vocals on it as well. It wasn’t until that tour that it really started taking off and I could reformulate the project. There is new stuff that I am writing but a couple of the songs for Slice Of Life I already had written down for quite some time.

LIR: I take it that Slice Of Life will play live and maybe have a release as well?

SI: Yeah, it was only last weekend that I was up in Manchester recording with them. Give it a few weeks and we will have a, what’s it called, an MP3 four track thing out there, not vinyl yet but something to let people know that we exist.

LIR: With your own autobiography ‘The Rest Is Propaganda’ out there and George Berger’s ‘The Story of Crass’ also having been out a while now do you think there is anything left to unearth about the history of Crass.

SI: Yeah, it’s funny because that ties in with what I will hopefully be doing with Slice Of Life. I think there is a lot of stuff that people don’t know about it, funny little anecdotes, that sort of thing, I’ve got lots of stories about what happened from my time in Crass. I will be slowly introducing this stuff into the Slice Of Life shows, in between songs I will be doing a lot of talking, almost like a spoken word thing and I will try and incorporate this stuff from those Crass years into it because I know that’s what a lot of people are interested in. People really like to hear it, I can’t get away from it and that’s not a bad thing.

Someone suggested to me that I should write another book that goes more in depth with Crass but I don’t really want to do that because everyone would know it and I wouldn’t be able to do it on stage. I can say that there is a lot though that people don’t know about Crass and what happened to us.

LIR: There is a great Crass documentary out there and you can watch it for free on YouTube called ‘There Is No Authority But Yourself’. In it you explain that you felt that the Crass legacy has been exploited by people out to make a quick buck from your logo, image and words. Do you think that with the backing from Southern Records now that the band’s legacy is a little bit safer in their and your hands?

SI: Yeah, I think it has a bit. At the time the documentary was made I don’t think I was even clued into the internet and I had just had two weeks where people were ringing me up saying Steve have you seen this thing on the internet where you can buy Crass merchandise, things were selling like Crass alarm clocks. I just thought for fuck sake! It’s one of those things that when I looked into it I found out there were a couple of big outlets in America doing Crass T shirts illegally. If there is some guy in his room somewhere silk-screening six Crass t-shirts then so what, who gives a shit but when it’s a big multi-national corporation then I start getting a bit twitchy, that’s what I was on about.

Around the time of that documentary I started doing t-shirts with this company called Machete which is a subsidiary of the American band Rancid and they managed to stop a lot of the heavy duty bootlegging that was going on but I am pretty sure that there is still a lot of it that still goes on today. But at the end of the day you have to decide whether you want to splash out on lawyers which means spending a lot of money that I haven’t got or just wiping your mouth and moving on, getting used to the fact that you are never going to stop it.

LIR: Ian MacKaye from Fugazi has recently had similar issues with merchandise from his old band Minor Threat that both legally and illegally popped up.

SI: Ah, right.

LIR: When I was researching that for an article I came across a picture of you two online hanging out together in Washington I think. How do you know each other?

SI: I met Ian MacKaye when he first came over, he was running Dischord Records and he came over to see John Loder (Founder of Southern Records who died in 2005) in the late 80s or early 90s, somewhere around that time and he came to sort out stuff with Southern and John. Then I was in a band called Schwarzenegger and we ended up supporting Fugazi in Germany for a couple of gigs, not only that but he’s been over to the Crass house a few times. I met him again at John Loder’s funeral and most recently I actually went around his house to drop off some spare merchandise that we had that we couldn’t carry around no more. We have always got on; we don’t write or phone each other up or anything but whenever we bump into each other we catch up a bit, have nice two hour long conversations. Yeah, he’s a gooden.

LIR: If I can speak about your youth a little bit, the move from your home in Dagenham to Dial House in Epping with Penny Rimboud who you formed Crass with in your teens must have taken a lot of balls, you were very young. Or was it a no brainer?

SI: Again, yeah it was a no brainer. My relationship was breaking down with my mum and my dad and I just wanted to get out so the first thing I did was find out where my brother was in Bristol and went and stayed with him for a while but then when the punk thing appeared I wanted to get into that. I didn’t have any close friends in Bristol and I certainly didn’t know of anybody there that wanted to be in a band so I thought I would go back to Dagenham to see if my old mates might be interested but they weren’t. They all had wives or girlfriends and steady jobs so I thought well, that’s that then.

I hadn’t seen Penny or any of the others that ended up in Crass for months and months but on impulse I thought I’d go over and say hi to them before I made my way back to Bristol and go back to work in the hospital like I was before. So I turned up and found out that Penny was living on his own and he asked me if I’d like to stick around. When he asked me about what I was up to I said that I was thinking of starting up a punk band he said that he had a drum kit and said I’ll play drums for you if you want. Honestly, it literally started like that.

LIR: How did you actually record those albums and singles? Was it in the house or did you go to studios?

SI: We actually went to Southern Studios. John Loder was an old friend of Penny’s and Gee’s (Voucher – Crass artist) and at the time he was recording jingles for radio stations and because we didn’t have any money at all so what we would do was barter some of Gee’s artwork for studio time. At the beginning we released a little cassette thing but we tended to do everything in one take because time was money even though John used to give us a bit of leeway and we used to record stuff at night time to keep costs down. Then Small Wonder (Crass’ first record label) picked up on it and they paid for us to go into Southern properly and we recorded ‘The Feeding Of The 5000’ and we did that maybe with two takes, just a couple of drop-ins here and there but it was all basically done in one night.

LIR: The Crass albums sound remarkably fresh today; there are some really unusual production techniques going on there.

SI: Because I was in Crass I tended not to play any of the Crass stuff. A long time later I was in a bar in America and someone said there you are on the jukebox and there it was between Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra so I heard ‘…Owe us a Living’ and I thought, fuck me that sounds really good so when I got home I decided to listen to the other stuff and I thought it was amazing and I asked myself why did it take me so long to realise it.

But at the time of doing them I didn’t realise it but you know they have now been re-mastered because we recorded them onto two inch tape and it was starting to deteriorate so they had to be digitalised. Not being restricted by the vinyl format there is more space on there so now you can actually hear the bass a lot better and you can hear the guitars more clearly.

LIR: I take it these are the newish Southern CD’s that came out a few years back.

SI: Yeah, that’s it. But I think the reason why the records have such a unique sound is because none of us were musicians. I mean some of ‘em could play a bit on the guitar but they weren’t guitarist and rather than say it has to be C, G and then D, we would say no it aint, its gotta be B flat, F sharp and E flat blah blah, all these notes that don’t actually go together. And with Penn producing a lot of the time his take would be that for this song can you make your guitar sound like its stabbing somebody, we were creating atmospheres rather than music.

I was talking to Bob Butler (bass player for Schwarzenegger) a couple of years ago and he said Steve, I’ve got to tell you that when I first heard ‘Feeding of the 5000’ it really scared me and I understood what he meant because it is really rough record to hear and I don’t think anyone has done anything like that since, punk wise.

LIR: With the release of ‘How Does It Feel to Be the Mother of 1000 Dead?’ It showed that you were furious with the way thatcher dealt with thee Falkland’s War, in fact you can still feel your frustration within the records grooves but when the mainstream press called you out as traitors did that fuel your anger further?

SI: Oh yeah, absolutely yes. It was just non-stop the bloody time.

LIR: Yet as well as the many angry songs contained in Crass’ body of work, people often overlook the art side of things, especially as you left the 70s and ploughed into Thatcher’s 80s.

SI: Because of the climate of the times and it being Thatcher’s Britain and all the yuppies making loadsa money and all that, the miners’ strike and then the Tories getting back in for another bloody five years, we had a lot to write about, it just went on and on and on and of course what we were writing about goes hand in hand with that time.

I think there was a certain time that all of us, and it feels odd to use the word, but it stopped being fun. It was no longer a bit of a laugh and it got really serious and we all started to feel tired because there was always someone doing an album about the Minors strike or the bloody Falklands war or something and the arty side of it came about because we were always trying to introduce new angles for people to come at us from. What was the point of doing another boot boyish album like ‘Feeding of the 5000’ when we had already done that.

LIR: When ‘Penis Envy’ came out you did not feature on the album, but from what I’ve read you didn’t feel left out about it. To the outsider it looks as though there was a complete lack of ego involved for yourself and also really the other members of Crass throughout the bands life span.

SI: I thought that ‘Penis Envy’ would be a great crack after having done something like ‘Feeding of the 5000’. Why not bring out a record that has no blokes on it at all (laughs). The nice thing about that album musically was that it was more accessible for people and what it did was that it started people talking about sexism and people began to write songs about it. It may have failed initially but at least we were trying. After that a lot of bands sprung up and started to use female vocalists, it was a nice spin off from that. Even though punk was meant to be non-racist and non-sexist you rarely saw blacks at gigs and the ratio was usually about 70% men and 30% women. We noticed that it changed a bit after that record; it became 60/40. So yeah I completely understood why we should have done it.

LIR: Finally Steve, I personally love the odds and sods compilation ‘Best Before 1984’ but you were already involved with Conflict when this came out, how did you feel about its release, did you even care?

SI: No I didn’t particularly care at that point; I thought it was a nice thing to do because it saved people from having to hunt around for these long lost singles. I knew even then that Crass would never, ever reform so there was nothing about that to do with it coming out, it was just nice to have it all there on one album.

LIR: Steve, thank you very much for taking the time out and talking to us today.

This interview that I did with Steve Ignorant first appeared on Pennyblackmusic.

BURNING LOVE // Interview

(Nov 2010)

When I found out that BURNING LOVE were playing close to me I thought it best to send off this emailer to singer and general hardcore legend Chris Colohan to find out what’s currently going on with the band.

LIR: What was the catalyst that turned you on to the underground music scene?

CC: Just being a pissed off teenager growing up in a fucked up city. I listened to a lot of punk records and then somehow realized that existed on a level I could interact with firsthand.

LIR: After the Euro tour that ended Cursed how easy was it to dissolve the band fully and effectively start again from scratch with Burning Love?

CC: We were already a band while Cursed was still playing, but it was on the side of that and all the BL boys’ band Our Father. I definitely didn’t do shit for a few months after the Cursed thing happened, but then naturally came back to it and we kicked BL into gear.

LIR: From what we hear and read in the UK Toronto has quite a varied and healthy hardcore scene, Do you feel a part of it or, as you have gotten more successful as normally happens have some of your original fans turned their back on you?

CC: I don’t feel that at all, feel more attached to the hardcore scene than I have in years actually. Yeah, Toronto has a great thing going, lots of stoked younger kids and productive older ones, and a ton of great bands in all musical corners of the spectrum. I’m in the middle of releasing a Toronto/Montreal comp LP called City Limits with 23 of them.

LIR: Deranged puts out some fantastic records, how have you found it being on the label?

CC: I’ve known Gord a long time and worked with him before in past bands. He puts out some great records and did a great job with the BL LP and EPs.

LIR: The song Alien Vs Creditor hits home hard in this country as it would seem our government is also intent on bankrupting any person who wishes to gain an education unless they come from privileged backgrounds. Now the record has been out a while the themes contained on it (of which AvC is just one) still feel almost universal. Before you commit pen to paper do you consider how your writing maybe conceived in other countries…?

CC: No, I can’t say I think about it like that. I think most of what I write about translates cross-culturally, and as for AVC I think people being forced into systematic debt and bad credit is a symptom of modern capitalism everywhere, which unfortunately is universal.

LIR: Chris, you’ve been knee deep in hardcore for many, many years. What makes you stick with the DIY approach and ethics?

CC: I see what you did there. Hahah. Well, those are two different things. As for punk and hardcore, I love this music and it helped me at a time when my life would have taken a drastically different and worse path. So I feel like I owe it to that to see it through, even when it looks and sounds very different from the culture I grew up in.
To still be playing this music in basements at this age, you do have to make some compromises you don’t plan on, because if the math doesn’t add up at least to zero, then you can’t even be there doing it. But you try to pick your affiliations wisely.

And ethically, in terms of my personal lifestyle politics, those are a part of me regardless of my involvement in music, it’s automatic for me to do things as DIY as possible in all aspects of life, from food to work to consumerism. It really comes down to supporting the things you have a reason to respect, and cutting out those you don’t.

LIR: How about the downloading debate, which we hear a lot about in the mainstream press but very rarely in the context of punk and hardcore?

CC: Oh fuck. Who cares, other than Lars Ulrich and people who made their millions off it already? I can see it being a pisser if you can’t afford to make music anymore because of it, but those aren’t the people who generally complain about it. I find that our crowd, and me personally, will download something just to have it digitally and still buy the records and go see those bands if it’s something we’re into. Maybe hip-hop guys it really hurts, if a million college kids download it but don’t go see it live, buy merch or buy it on vinyl. But in our world, downloading doesn’t bother me at all, and it goes around 10 times farther and faster so it’s actually doing your band a favor.

LIR: You are returning to tour the UK again shortly. What were the best and worst experiences last time you came over with Burning Love and what are you looking forward to on your return?

CC: Man, I’ve always enjoyed playing in the UK, Cursed always had great shows there, and BL had a great time last year. There was nothing about it that sucked, minus one or two dud shows. The highlight was definitely the 1 In 12 Club, can’t wait to go back there. And all the awesome record stores you guys have. I’m stoked that we’re playing with Goatspeed and Cry Havok again, stoked to see our friends, eat awesome curries and stock up on British sore throat remedies that cost 1 pound and really work. I never even knew I had catarrh, now I’m a Catarrh Hero! Poundworld, Hollaaaaaa!

LIR: What is to come after the tour for Burning Love?

CC: We’ve been out on the road pretty solidly since June here at home and in the US, a lot of shit happened that left us pretty far in the hole, so after this next tour we’re going to chill the fuck out for a few months, work as much as possible and write a pile of new songs, make our plans and be out again by spring/summer.

LIR: I am currently writing a book about the 1980′s and would love to know, if push came to shove and you had to choose just one release from the 1980’s as your favourite which would it be and why?

CC: Probably Black Flag – My War. There are a lot of records I could name more recently but this one was there for the drunk, angry 16 year old me and still does it for the nearly 36 year old sober angry me.

If you click here on Burning Love’s myspace page you can see the upcoming dates of the bands UK tour, if they are playing near your town, you’d be a fool to miss them. If you took the photo let me know so I can credit you.