Interview: Fucked Up

10 years in the game and starting to creep their way into the major media of the UK, Toronto's Fucked Up are playing a single UK show at the Arts Centre in Colchester before they jet off to mainland Europe. Nick of Exit Smiling caught up with their frontman, Damien Abraham, to chat shit for an hour before they destroyed the venue.



ES: What’s it like being in Colchester? Have you walked around yet?

DA: No, cause we were stuck in traffic for, like, three hours, due to the M25.

ES: Where did you come from?

DA: Just south of London, I think. This is our first date over here. So, we flew in this morning to Heathrow and stayed at our friend Adam’s house, and he lives near Guildford.

ES: So kind of Shitty Limits area? I used to go to the shows they put on around there.You guys played one of them, didn’t you?

DA: Well, they’ve stopped doing shows there now but it was just before Ellis (Shitty Limits) moved away to Reading. It was a really fun show and a really cool venue to play. It’s good the fact that there are still venues that have shows run by punks that are really relaxed and easy going about it. Us and Ellis have been good friends since our first tour of England when we met him. And, of course, The Shitty Limits are great and they’re doing really well for themselves.

ES: What other bands in the UK have you been into?

DA: There’s The Shitty Limits but also I really like Rot in Hell and I really, really like Down and Outs, a lot.

ES: What do you think of Down and Outs’ new record?

DA: I really like it. I love all their singles. “This one’s for the lads” and so on. There’s also this band which is like all older dudes.

ES: Geriatric unit?

DA: Yeah, Geriatric Unit, that’s the one. They’re really good. Also, Lets Wrestle who came on tour with us; but that tour was a bit rough.

ES: Was that the band that got a bit strange about where they played on the bill and were talking to The Limits about contracts?

DA: I’m not sure. I don’t remember hearing anything about that.
We’ll I think it was either them or Lovvers. Lovvers are another really good UK band. But I don’t know it might have been Let’s Wrestle.



ES: Is there a new record coming out?

DA: We will be doing a new record, one day.

ES: Didn’t you guys play a 12 hour show, once?

DA: We played for about 8 hours in total. The rest of the time it was like other bands like playing in between songs and our friends coming up to play songs with us.

ES: Was that when you did the Nirvana cover?

DA: Well, we’ve done the Nirvana cover several times but we’d never practised that Nirvana song before that show and now we only bust that out when we’re just like “Hey, do you want to do something stupid tonight?” so we sometimes do that. We also played it in China, once.

ES: That cover is probably the worst thing I've ever heard!

DA: Oh, come on, it's probably not THE worst thing you've ever heard (laughs)

ES: You guys played in China?

DA: Yeah, we did like a two week tour over there. It was really cool. The shows generally got about 100 to 300 kids out, which is pretty good. But the kids didn’t really know who we were. They were just coming out for the music. But everyone was super awesome and it’s also weird coming from North America where most of the bands you play with are just trying to reach the next level of being in a band, whereas the bands in China do it because the just love it. It’s like the only thing that they want to do. There’s no goal; they just want to do it.

ES: Did you sell a lot of stuff at these shows?

DA: We didn’t take any records with us over there. If we had of then they wouldn’t have given us visas. We came in as tourists and just played shows with borrowed gear. We knew that we were going to lose out on money, so we just decided to have as much fun as we could doing it.

ES: How did that come about?

DA: We had a friend over there, who was an American guy that moved over there and was able to speak mandarin and so on who pretty much told us that if we could get into the country then he could sort out the rest for us.

ES: Have you guys been offered any other places to play that you might not normally?

DA: We got asked to do a show in Africa but haven’t been able to find a way of doing it without losing money. But South Africa actually has a history of hardcore punk. There were hardcore bands over there in like ’79 and that must be so different from being a hardcore band from Toronto in ’09. They were speaking out against apartheid and the mandatory draft that they had and that would get you thrown in jail. I mean, I had a professor in university who was expelled from the country for speaking out against apartheid and bands were doing that! It’s kind of cool to think about punk music being in places where punk is necessary.

ES: It’s really interesting how music is perceived around the world.

DA: Completely. I love finding records from places you didn’t know had that kind of music being born there. Poland had a really vibrant punk anarchist scene going on.

ES: You play in England quite a lot. Do you still enjoy it?

DA: After coming here so many times, I think, it loses its impact. It’s not necesseraly a bad thing and I think it happens to every band, period. I remember the first time I got to see Tear it Up, and then, after a while, they were always around and in the area. But whenever a band first comes along people will always be like “They’re here, what the hell!” and it just slowly diffuses through time. Also, it doesn’t help that some hardcore and punk kids- even though I still consider myself a hardcore kid – are a little stuck up. Once they’ve seen a band it’s a bit like a been there, done that. So we played a show in Toronto recently, and it was a huge show, but none of the kids the kids there were kids that would have shown up three years ago. It was all new people.

ES: Do you get bored of playing any old tracks like “Police”?

DA: No, not at all. I still love playing that song and I think it’s one of the best songs we’ve ever written.

ES: Do you ever tailor the set list to a specific audience?

DA: We do, to some degree. Not some much to the audience but more for ourselves. Playing a lot of shows in a row can get really boring if you keep playing the same set every night, so we write a new one for each night that we play. But if you’re playing these songs every night, soon it starts to grate on you unless something happens that upsets the balance. It can either make a show really good or really bad.

ES: What’s happened at a bad show before?

DA: We played a show in Barcelona, once, and I had a breakdown on stage and it was a disaster. But it always stands out, so I will remember that show forever.

ES: Was it band drama?

DA: A mixture of that and also my wife was pregnant at the time and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing over there. But it all just built up – especially when you want to be home with your family – and I just had to think about whether I should be working a really job, already. It’s also a money issue as we all know that we’re not going to make money off being in Fucked Up.

ES: Is carrying on the band something you’re looking to do?

DA: Well, either way, whether it’s with Fucked Up or another band, I always plan on being in a band. Being Fucked Up also takes up so much of my time and also a massive emotional strain on everybody in the band, so I don’t know how long we’ll be able to do it. I think we’re going to try and see it out till its logical conclusion. On our last tour, in Belgium, we got into a big fight, so we sat down and tried to plan out the rest of Fucked Up.

ES: What’s the plan for Fucked Up in the future?


DA: It’s more of a loose base rather than a plan – there’s like no deadline. We’re doing a singles compilation, there’s going to be another record and another couple “Year of...” singles. We’re going to do “Ox” this year. But it might be something that we keep doing, like, getting back together just to write and record singles. But in terms of the band I think we have one more record and that’s it.