Photography: Cat Stevens

John Robb’s punk history gets an update in the formidable form of Toronto post-hardcore squad Fucked Up

In the early Eighties, bands like Bad Brains, Black Flag and Minor Threat reinvented punk rock in an American style, with a fierce intelligence and an even fiercer music. Hardcore's scorched-earth policy turned wired kids onto the possibilities of music, and those inspired created sounds often vastly different from the hardcore mothership, branching out into noise, grunge, indie, and even hip-hop.

Hardcore itself went back into the underground, and became more metal-oriented. Occasionally, something appears out of this fevered, subterranean melee that touches more than the already converted. In 2006 it was the turn of a Canadian band, Fucked Up, who suddenly registered on the UK radar with a never-ending stream of hard-to-get import singles and a powerful album, Hidden World on Jade Tree, that took the velocity and ferocity of hardcore and crossed it with a neo-psychedelic drone and a bizarre nod to British anorak indie twee pop of the mid-Eighties. Fucked Up cuts across genres without losing their hardcore intensity, and that’s what makes them a great band. Their music draws you in with three guitars piling on the hardcore drones and a 200-pound singer who leaps headfirst into the crowd putting equal amounts of fear and joy into the skinny kid pit. Post-gig in Manchester I bumped into Damien Abraham, aka ‘Pink Eyes’, that manic man-mountain frontman, who turned out to be a guy oozing a love of hardcore and punk rock culture with a cool intelligence and manic glint in his eye. Back home in Toronto he’s a regional star after appearing on a reality TV show with his wife, so the tour is a welcome escape for him.

This UK jaunt is the band’s first ever back-to-back tour in their seven-year history. “We went in with insane hesitation because we have never done anything like this before,” says Damian. “Everyone’s been super nice on the tour. The younger kids are receptive like sponges. I like to think I'm filling them with my sweat!”

Fucked Up have for years been taking everything that is great about the genre and cross-pollinating with whatever they choose. “We were all hardcore kids. Our involvement in it now varies. I still love that kind of stuff. We are perverting hardcore a bit. The band I'm super stoked about in hardcore now is this band, Mindracer, from Boston. They are brutality personified – all-consuming, and all-crushing. I’m also really into Iron Age from Texas – someone said they sound like a lo-fi Cro-Mags, and for me that’s the best description anyone can give of a band.”

Growing up, Damian was first turned on to the limitless possibilities of rock’n’roll by Sonic Youth, and subsequently, the bands that Thurston Moore would constantly name-check. “Sonic Youth were the perfect bridge between punk, psychedelic and hard rock. They did a cover of that Crime song ‘Hotwire My Heart’ and that blew me away. Every interview I read there would be someone new to search out. Thurston Moore was a real musicologist, and although there were few dead ends for me – like free jazz and some of that noise stuff – that hardcore stuff he mentioned was dead on.”

There were also other more unexpected musical tangents. “I bought a Shop Assistants record because I was super into the Vaselines. I was in a record stall in Toronto and saw some 53rd And 3rd records, and since The Vaselines were on that label I thought I would check the other bands out and it was Shop Assistants and it was great. Then Mike and I got super into researching all these twee pop bands from there to the Sarah scene. The drums are unrelenting in most of these songs – they make The Ramones sound like minimal synthesisers. I love the wall of noise with twee vocals on top, which makes for great music. In the UK it had a presence because of C86 but it didn’t exist in America – it was really alien over here.

“So that was my big hope on this tour to meet some of our twee-pop idols. I was hoping that the guitarist from the Shop Assistants was going to come to our show in Scotland. Steven Pastel owns a record shop restaurant in Glasgow but we didn’t have time to get down there. The problem on tour is that there is no time to do anything fun.” After his Sonic Youth obsession led him down the path of pop-punk, Damian drifted through numerous Toronto punk bands before ending up in Fucked Up. The band quickly made their name in the Toronto underground with their confrontational shtick. “Every time we were about to hit a new precipice we would do something silly or something that we thought was funny and no-one else did!”

There was the confrontational use of Nazi imagery, which began with a lengthy and, what many believed to be, a self-written interview in Maximum Rock And Roll that covered the band’s politics and ideas and, in the process, brought up allusions to mind control, Fascism, and Nazi mysticism ¬– a tactic that raised concerns in places, concerns hardly allayed by the release of a split split seven-inch with the band Haymaker released in 2004 which contained a picture of Hitler addressing a Hitler Youth Rally in 1938. “The Nazi imagery thing fascinated us but we were never Nazis,” explains Damian. Rather, this was old-school punk rock provocation, and an interest in experimenting with the power of symbols: an intellectual exercise, but one easy misinterpreted from the narrow confines of the moshpit. “What we were really looking at was the mass suggestion utilised by totalitarian regimes. The Nazi regime had great imagery that you could exploit. Unfortunately people took it the wrong way. It got a little out of hand with bottles being thrown at a gig but it’s better than sitting idly by watching. We were trying to get a reaction. I'm not going to pretend that I'm a tough guy and I always want a reaction, I want people to pay attention.” He laughs. “Maybe I've got crushingly low self-esteem.”

Far more successful was 2002’s ‘No Pasaran’ seven-inch, a tribute to the participation of anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. The cover and insert features anarchist propaganda posters and portraits of Spanish worker and peasant columns. “Everyone in the band to various degrees is into left leaning politics. The Spanish Civil War was one of those wars where there were good guys and bad guys. It was one of the few points in our history where there was a right and wrong, and that interested us. We were absolutely aware of The Ex doing the same thing years ago.”

If the will to provoke is in some way inbuilt in Fucked Up, though, the crowning glory is, of course, their moniker. “It’s a name you can't ignore,” says Damian. “We are five people who feel ignored in our regular life. We are one of those bands you can't ignore though – with a 300-pound dude with no shirt on jumping up and down at the front and a name like ours.”

The name also perfectly captures their Situationist outlook – taking a position to make a point, constructing situations to cause a reaction or to change a mindset. It’s a powerful philosophy and one that still intrigues since its inception in the late Fifties. “Situationism was a total revolution, an aesthetic idea in philosophy and language and that was what punk was when it coalesced in 1976 – a total revolution that unfortunately got co-opted pretty quick.” Damian very much feels that punk rock is carrying the torch for Situationism, a revolutionary ideal that still colours the mainstream. “I think hardcore picked up where punk left off and then post punk and noise carried it on. Look at pop music now – anyone remotely interesting in music has got a punk route, from Beastie Boys to Jim Jarmusch, an important touchstone for so many people. It’s like a secret world.”

There is an artfulness about Fucked Up, an understanding of the power of music and images that make up their attack. The sleeve artwork is powerful and unconventional, capturing the same sort of atmosphere of dark humour and desolation as the music. They look more psychedelic than typical hardcore graphics. “With Black Flag there was an aesthetic that’s always the same,” says Damian. “The illustration is perfect – the text the same. There was a real commitment in Black Flag to the whole package in the band, and in Fucked Up we want the same. There is nothing more depressing than flicking through a record bin and your record is there, just blending in. You want to make it always jump out in some way.”

Fucked Up are that real anomaly in hardcore, genuine free thinkers. Who else would make the noise they make and then pull a move like asking Nelly Furtado to contribute to a Christmas song? But where in some corners, hardcore and its descendents is proving itself co-optable, just another sound to be marketed, Fucked Up are standing their ground. Just recently, they’ve sent a lawsuit to Camel cigarettes for using their name in an ad.

“That’s ongoing. They put all the bands in an advert with no permission. They hoped we would ignore it and get away with it. The ad was like a pullout in Rolling Stone, like, how Camel support independent music and we are one of the bands listed. We took offence to that. They were trying to associate us with their product against our will and cigarettes I find reprehensible – I’m still straight edge from my hardcore days. My dad’s addicted too. I called Ian Mackaye to ask his opinion on it. He was saying, ‘These people are scumbags’. He had the same situation with Minor Threat and Nike. We thought, ‘Screw this, if they wanna use us for their means, why can’t we fire back?’ So, that’s what we are doing. It was kinda weird having to sue, but that’s the only way. Fight them on their own battlefield. We could fight them on blogs but where it really hurts is in the legal world.”

Damian grins the grin of a man who’s up for the fight. “It should make for an interesting year.”

That’s for sure.

Fucked Up also do a blog, which includes downloads of their fabled (and mostly now unavailable) mixtapes.