Things Get A Little Fucked Up

“When I’m on stage I really get a chance to explore the psychedelic extra-sensory aspect of it all. I’m up there, you know, drunk as shit, walking around with my ass out, bleeding from the head…” (Pink Eyes)

Some people like to shimmy. Others like to do the twist. Pink Eyes (aka Damien), lead singer of Canada’s dearest punk aggressors Fucked Up, likes to bleed profusely on stage with his ass out. It just happens. That’s his thing.

The truth is, there are two kinds of eccentric people in this world - the many who consciously labour at their weirdness and the few who just are. The latter camp is much more fun, and Pink Eyes seems to have weird oozing from his pores.

“We can never really tell the way the chaos is gonna happen,” he says, referring particularly to the band’s live television debut on MTV in 2007. “I busted myself open; I don’t know what happened because I do it a lot, but, seriously, I had never bled like this in my entire life. Blood was like streaming out of my face and getting everywhere - on the equipment, it was getting on the kids…”

Like I said, it just happens. Enough with the blood though; that’s for the shows. In the studio, Fucked Up are significantly - and astoundingly - more methodical. There’s a trace of artistic ambition in their music that makes it confoundingly mercurial. Punk? Yes - it sounds like punk. But it’s also fairly experimental - they did release an 18-minute single entitled Year Of The Pig last year. And it’s definitely hardcore, mainly owing to Pink Eyes’ throat-wrenching growls (on a side note, he attributes his vocal abilities to “working out” and “eating only about…seven times a day”). Many of their songs also feature gorgeously-voiced female vocalists. Can we call it post-hardcore, then? No. The important thing is that Fucked Up are in constant motion, be it reckless and oblique.

Playful inventiveness seems to run through virtually every aspect of the band, though they’ve so far shunned the more contemporary internet-based conventions of music promotion. They all have pseudonyms (Pink Eyes, 10,000 Marbles, Mustard Gas, Mr Jo, Concentration Camp), they’ve done without MySpace or a band website, and until last year’s LP Hidden World, they only released their music through an extensive series of 7” singles.

“I still think 7”s are the ideal format for punk, because you’re dealing with one or two direct concepts. We were always a little nervous about recording LPs because you have to ideally link a number of things together and the whole process is astronomically larger.”

Fucked Up’s new album, The Chemistry Of Common Life, really is astronomically - or agro-chemically - larger. Epic themes of birth, death, fatalism, and hope abound. The title is taken from a 19th century book of the same name written by James F.W. Johnston (born in Paisley, Scotland, actually), which essentially describes hallucinogenic qualities found in plants and mushrooms.

“It’s kind of about finding the magical in the mundane,” reflects Pink Eyes, “you know, because you think of mushrooms and fungus as being some of the lowest forms of life on earth, but yet at the same time there’s this hallucinogenic extra-sensory power contained within this base life-form - in other words in this shit - and I think the trick is more about recognising, well, the magic inside the shit, and that’s what punk is, really.”

This shit truly runs deep. Until they play it live and it’ll all go up in flames.