Posted on December 10, 2009 - by Editor

Changing The World – Strike Anywhere

Thomas Barnett © Imelda Michalczyk

Strike Anywhere took their name from a song of front man Thomas Barnett’s previous band Inquisition; that was 1999. A decade on and the five piece with a base in Richmond, Virginia has been consistently touring the world, taking them to some exotic places with more on the hit list to come. They have also seen their fair share of different record labels on the way and latest release “Iron Front” through Bridge Nine Records sees them change their tune in terms of some of the issues they discuss with global touring and the world through their eyes prominent.

Outside the less exotic Koko in London, Thomas and myself ducked out of the cold weather after their set and into the bands tour van to discuss a range of issues, from the band’s music and their maturity, to more pressing issues such as political and personal optimism, our shared cynicism and punk rocks positive energy. Be warned this was a long chat, but incredibly insightful and Thomas ever humble, compassionate and intuitive.

Steve: So the last time I saw you play the UK was the Give It A Name festival I think, which was odd?

Thomas: Yeah where was that weird fucking shit? Where they built the space shuttle? It was disturbingly large.

Steve: I remember Anti flag otherwise and that’s about it?

Thomas: I think Billy Talent?

Steve: Yeah that’s right. So this is the first time I have seen you play in a smaller venue.

Thomas: Did it sound alright? (Thomas looking for reassurance or being polite?)

Steve: Yeah I enjoyed it, I have listened to your latest album over the past couple days and I think it’s far more melodic than previous stuff, and I think the new stuff went down well tonight.

Thomas: (Grinning and relaxing) Good. It’s always weird with a new record; we get reviews that say we went in a more hardcore and heavier direction and we hear the complete opposite?

Steve: What do you think?

Thomas: (Pausing) We don’t fucking know? I think it’s musically a little heavier but I don’t know exactly. We had more time to put it together. (He considers his words and is incredibly expressive and articulate). There was a more intuitive or soulful, organic process. Where you actually write melodies and then you attach full phrasings and the cerebral part second. So it’s kind of interesting if you hum something to yourself that kinda feels hypnotic or soothing or cathartic or both and then you figure it out. Well what does that feel like? What idea was that? I think a lot of singers work like that.

On taking some inspiration for this record Thomas expands.

Thomas: My significant other and some friends work in Los Angeles doing legal work/legal aid for poor people who were disenfranchise by the mortgage banks which helped start the whole global recession. And they are involved in an epic historic lawsuit against the banks for litigations and damages for 4500 working class people that should not have been made to leave their houses and were. So between tours I was there and there working in this garage in the backyard right next to a howling freeway, Interstate 10 that goes all the way across our country. Ya know, It’s a militarised police state; working class South Central, South LA. And it’s not what you would call project block houses, but like nest up crazy places that don’t feel like the first world. And then there are a lot of historic chopped up old Victorian houses and stuff, like all these different ages that occurred before people settled up in the Hills and made their exodus to North Hollywood. It’s very rarefied up there. And we lived in the thick of it, and there are all kinds of helicopters flying around and lights in your bedroom windows making you feel surveilled constantly. Not even surveilled like the cheap little cameras you have here, like surveilled like a metal dinosaur that’s going to kill you! So anyway after we recorded “Iron Front” to punctuate the feeling, a car was on fire in front of my house when I came home and I was “like what the fuck!

Steve: And was that something like part of the neighbourhood and normal and dodgy?

Thomas Barnett © Imelda Michalczyk

Thomas: Ya know, it’s not even that dangerous. Like the place I lived in my hometown in Richmond which is where we are making our exodus back to after this tour ends. Actually it’s a little more compressed there with the violence, like “this corner is hot, don’t walk the dogs this way.” The corner scene is like 45 men competing for the narcotics trade, and if they know you are not visibly trying to be part of that franchise they will leave you alone. But there is all kind of gun crime all the time. Friends of mine nearly got shot in their house, making food in the kitchen. If they were like (acting this out) 10 feet to this side they would have been shot. I don’t know. There were just so many experiences whilst writing the record. A lot of it was how much we toured, like we never took a break. We have just been touring the world. And I think live, we now feel heavier and it just feels right and we tapped into that. “Dead FM” was written before with the melodic sensibility, acoustic guitars and clean and that was the right record for that.

Steve: I have read with “Dead FM” how you wrote the songs first on an acoustic and transferred that.

Thomas: Yeah this was more like? Well some dude, one of my band mates (and we all write and play guitar) but someone would plug in and turn the distortion up a lot to where I could barely hear and it was awesome and crunchy. During the entire process we saw each other only on tour. We all lived in different cities. Eric lived in Madrid then Chicago, Matt in Baltimore and Garth in Richmond, which is where the band is based and we always meet up in Richmond.

Steve: So how easy is it to co-ordinate things, like for a new tour or time to write again?

Thomas: Well Ales (tour manager) and the Nomads of Prague, this touring service which started in the 90’s out of the squat punk culture in central Europe, now have this giant warehouse with all the backline that we are using and these vehicles which we are using and all handmade. And strange in between and less expensive, and no hotels –we all sleep here (revealing the bunk beds). They had the perfect idea, where they can implement the next phase of Nomads. We were going to meet Rise Against at the end of January. We haven’t seen each other in a long time; all we had was these shitty footnotes we had been passing back and forth for the recordings on our computers, we wanted some time to rehearse. So he (Ales) said come to Prague, and we rehearsed in this warehouse in Prague.

Steve: And how long was that for?

Thomas: Um probably six to seven days, and we were all jetlagged in different ways! So we were practising from midnight to six and went back to sleep while it was snowing. Well have you been to Prague? The beautiful sculptures and the strange like sad alternate truth on public life that exists in the Slavic hard way. And we appreciated that and we got a lot of writing done. The songs were kind of there but having Eric there and playing drums and saying, “Where is this going to go?”. Then we kind of fell back in love with mosh parts and break downs. They weren’t missing from “Dead FM”, but they were a little underscored. We really like the music we play so we can’t go too far in one direction or another without it becoming an unauthentic or contrived recording experience. We know there are some more fast hardcore songs from us, we don’t expect everyone to feel it’s too different. But each song is getting closer to some kind of truth, ya know what I mean? It’s not like we have a song about this issue; ok we did that. And we have a song for this issue- we did that. Cos everything is evolving and you have to evolve the process and evolve the art form, and evolve your own autobiographical connection with something much bigger than you.

Steve: Do you ever look back at your own albums and writing and see how things have evolved? Maybe trace the time-line with things that were important but now not as much?

Thomas: I think there is more on this record, not personal, but what it means to be older and see different things change. To feel that there was such a weave of optimism after Obama got elected. And we of course playing our hometown, on the night November fourth. So many friends of mine had never cared about the Democratic party and all of the corporate theatre of democracy that we, your cousins across the pond have. But there was just something charismatic and heartfelt about it and the autobiography of Barrack Obama is still really important. Like he is a child of a single mother, we have never had a person that removed from the aristocratic, untouchable, ‘controlled by back room’ elites. Like George Bush is from Connecticut but had nothing to do with Texas that was all built for him, that whole Texas Bullshit. But at the same time so many people engaged with the election, like folks, working class of colour in our country were like “this is going to be that radical moment“. Like, “We believe in this!” But it’s still all the same shit ya know? Something deeper is wrong.

Steve: I know what you mean, the euphoria with the election, that even people outside the US were mostly happy Obama won but there is always going to be a sobering after effect. I think Obama, besides Nelson Mandela in 94’ is the most important thing to happen in global politics of our time.

Thomas: Yeah I don’t think that’s too hyperbolic on a larger level for what it means to people. It is one of the most important events of the century. But there is a grand fear of disillusionment and cynicism. And you need a fair share of cynicism to retain innocence. (Starts laughing at himself) I have realised this and I know it’s the strangest thing to say but my meaning is, well like me and some friends when we were 19 tore off some doors from some cars and had a mini punk precession protest against Bush and Clinton in his first campaign; we were doing a debate which was at my university against the whole electoral façade and I still believe in that, my heart is in that. But now with how much is on the line? I’m so happy McCain is not president.

Steve: Sure but I think it’s too soon. People are still reeling after eight years of Bush and people turn too negative too quickly and there have been other issues to distract people like the global recession. And I think the fact that many people outside of the US for the first time have taken a real interest in politics whereas before there was pure disillusionment, now there is still optimism. The only reason I can relate is in South Africa post-Mandela and the ensuing years there was massive euphoria and slowly reality set in for many people.

Thomas: Yeah that’s a good analogy and not one I thought of before. Of course I wouldn’t have. What’s happening in South Africa at the moment?

Steve: Well I just think the euphoria that most Americans felt when Obama was elected, people in South Africa felt; that the world was going to change for everyone and unfortunately it doesn’t happen that quickly. It’s tied up with red tape and whatever Obama is trying to do and would like to do its going to take a long time.

Thomas: (listening intently and nodding) There is a huge machine in place that has never pretended to be democratic about the extraction of resources, the exploitation of people and nature and a war regime. And that’s something that Obama is tied into now and I’m not sure he even knows what he is doing.

Steve: I think the problem is he can’t make only cosmetic changes; he needs to make real changes!

Thomas: I think he honestly believes like a lot of Democrats I have talked to that we need to go in and kill Osama Bin Laden and wrap things up like a proper story and whenever we can help the down trodden people of North Waziristan and people that are oppresses by the Taliban. And when you think what the Taliban does to women and to men and to life in general, that is some crazy bullshit. But then you think how controlling and theocratic the giant mega churches in America are and how above the law they are. Like in Salt Lake the Mormon churches funded all this money into these hysterical TV advertisements in California that were against Gay marriage; like “they will have to teach homosexual sex in public school to your children” and then a million people voted Proposition Eight. You are not allowed to do that but it doesn’t matter, they did it. And then of course there is this thing in Switzerland about outlawing minarets. I want someone to give me some perspective on that cos that just sounds insane.

Steve: I was going to ask you, getting back to the music; there are so many issues Strike Anywhere discuss and I asked something similar of Propagandhi, but is it difficult to fight all these battles, does it wear you down and does it become defeatist?

Thomas: Well I guess in some ways you eternalise the war one has with yourself. I have a job, which is hard

Thomas Barnett © Imelda Michalczyk

in America these days (chuckling). But a woman who is wheelchair assisted, non-verbal, spastic, paralytic, cerebral palsy since birth, she is also an activist for the sexual rights of the disabled and she is also lesbian. So she has a lot on her plate and she is getting her PHD in family therapy for the disabled and I learned the letter board that she points to with a laser pointer, its kind of like texting in a way. Anyway I learned that fast enough to pass the test to become one of her aides around the clock and that was my main job between tours for most of last year. Now she does workshops but she is non verbal but she has an interactive small like bindi dot the size of my pinkie nail, and a small bit of alloy she helped develop with her father which reacts to a laser pointer that comes off the top of the flat screen of her computer. So when the laser reflects & hits the screen and when she dwells it clicks. So she can PowerPoint, do workshops and travel about the sexual rights of the disabled and disabled community. These things are all incredibly amazing to me and trying to be a professional aide you can’t allow yourself to indulge in the extastential crushing sense of sympathy or tragedy or all these feelings you would get.

(Thomas explains how they also discuss animal issues, lesbian folk singers etc, before Thomas really get riled on an issue)

Thomas: A huge billion dollar Christian group put her on a blacklist as a purveyor of perversions, with her sexual rights and being lesbian; that was enough! Like the thing that can push you over the edge can pop you back, like there is another lifelong worth of anti religion songs right there ya know? (Laughing at the irony). And I think it’s the things Dick Lucas from Subhumans and Citizen Fish said “I would rather write songs about nature or love or poetry or what like. These are things inhabiting my mind and I have to let it out.” And it’s also the part of the connective tissue that we are kept so apart, isolated by the highly capitalist, hyper media world and the spectacle dwells between them and us and trying to defeat that with real context and real connection. With trust and truth, people don’t get that. People live their lives to the rhythm of consumption and going after work to get a beer, I don’t get that. There are so many lost moments and this art form is a way of us trying to communicate with the inner world and the outer world. I know it seems superficial, “a bunch of teenagers screaming along”, it’s well rehearsed and it’s a counterculture that’s now 30 years old, you know? Whatever. But I don’t think so. I think there is too much realness, too much “I don’t look cool doing this”, I’m sweating too much”, conversations that get started and windows that open up inside of you, like all of us got engaged with this when we were 15 or 16 and nothing else made sense but this.

Steve: Yeah I think there is definitely a tangible positive side to punk. I mean how many shows have I been to in my life and visibly seen and hear people walk out and carry a positive energy with them; that must go somewhere. But , and I am a cynical person anyway, I’m worried  the more you learn about the more you actually get disheartened until something comes along and resparks things again.

Thomas: Well look at how many other people don’t have the platform we do, the means that we can do this, like write a song and mean it, and it’s not easy but when we get to that that point, the final delivery mechanism is in place for us to tour the Earth and talk to brilliant amazing people and learn things which is a privilege. Whereas folks such as my boss Eva and so many other activists and educators and people just trying to live their lives and be good ya know. And not be worried about the gang that’s running things. Whether that gang be the cops or an organised group of entrepreneurs outside of the law, like having a perspective and these philosophies are ways to look at life to not make you feel like that. Your cynicism is a tool, and your irrational innocence is a tool and all these things need to be projected. The problem with mainstream entertainment is the lethal cabal from the backroom, like how can we turn these people further into sheep. There is this numbing process that has to do with profit and consumption making things mean as little as possible and get people engaged

(I interrupt Thomas) Steve: Is that ever going to change though?

Thomas: Well I think that are art forms like the one we have the privilege to participate in and this whole age is fascinating, like the democratisation of media allows for so much more real content but people have to challenge themselves to sort through the websites that you do and then you get tired, and you ask why do you get tired? There is this whole world at your fingertips. Like we are planning this tour in Malaysia/Singapore and Indonesia…

Steve: And this will be the first time you are going to all of those places?

Thomas: Yeah, apart from Japan we have been to four times and we are going again but then Seoul , move down to Bangkok and Hong Kong and Singapore and two places in Indonesia and Malaysia and those are the kids where I don’t know if they have ever heard or bought our records and I don’t care.  They can download as much as they want and we are going to have an amazing time figuring it out while we are there. I talk to the guys from Propagandhi a lot, this is the second tour I have done with them recently. In 2002 we toured Italy with them and with my former band Inquisition in 95’ we toured the Gulf south and that was pretty amazing. But we get to check in and meet up with each other and try to figure things out. And we realise we know less than when we thought, we knew more in the past (chuckling). But we have also seen things work in real practise and that has been really important. Like Copwatch which has been going on in various American cities.

Steve: What is Copwatch, sorry?

Thomas: Copwatch is when a community get together and make sure the police, well essentially it’s based on the Black Panthers in Oakland and I’m sure there are a couple of them in South London like Brixton? Where usually  a colour led community watch how the police behave and the industry in which the police work, getting their quotas of arrests and ticket people and make sure they aren’t doing that in a way that’s is racist. To make sure there is someone around when 17 cops nearly kill a man with a baton as what happened in NYC. But these things like the infrastructure with Food Not Bombs has been kicking it for almost 20 years now and feeding people and that amazing. It’s the idea of forcing the commons back into their corporate owned. Like in my hometown..

Steve: Richmond?

Thomas: Yeah, you can’t gather in public parks, and fighting the city council and shouting them down so we can feed people in the park and we clean up after ourselves and it’s not church based or the state, it’s us the commons, its dissolving in America. There are people from the punk and the activist world that are worried about it now which is cool. I feel optimistic cos we are still all alive ya know but it feels good.

(We get Interrupted- this is the tour van! So I bring the discussion back to music)

Steve: Ok if we can chat about the new record again, it’s only been out a few months, have you got a sense yet of how people are receiving it? I think you are only playing a few songs live from it?

Thomas: We have had really good responses. The weird thing was when we wrote “I’m Your Opposite Number” in the warehouse in Prague, we played it a couple times when we played with Rise Against in the tour in Europe and people were singing by the end anyways and we were like, “What? This is crazy.” And people passionately engaged with the songs from the new record already like ‘Postcards from home’, ‘Western Scale’ and we feel every song to the record so much and you have to. You cant constantly justify yourself but you end up… (pausing and reflecting) Like this is the fifth punk LP from us and you have to make it stick, it has to mean something to us so we can project the future of these ideas. That’s why we called it “Iron front”, it’s like being self titled. I think we will play all these songs live and they have already found their people and there is a lot of good conversation and we are honoured and stimulated. We think the song is just the beginning and what people bring to it and people attach belief and meaning and we listen to that and we attach that and it spills.

Steve: So how much do you expect or want people to walk away from hearing your songs and disassemble them and feedback to you, is that something you crave, to hear what people are thinking and feeling or it is it more “We are doing what we like”, but we appreciate your views?

Thomas: That’s a good question. I think it’s nearly on an hour by hour bases. Honestly once you nail a song down or after a great session for us if it feels exactly what we needed to make and feels the way it needed to feel and right on, ya know.  We are more open to what people think at this point, more so than our previous records. It’s a point of feeling so solid and getting to say what we wanted to say and now it’s the worlds.

Steve: I know the music is not there for a pure commercial reason, but is there an anxiety around a new record, maybe people won’t like it or get it or do you put it out there and hope for the best and carry on doing what you are doing?

Thomas: Definitely the latter. That for me would be the part to answer the opposite from your previous question. This is for us and this is a letter to each of us and to the world. Whether it matters if it’s a commercial success even on the platform of the independent underground punk, it’s nothing we can ever worry about. We can’t ever tease out the solution to that puzzle. We love it and feel it and that’s the part of us that makes us so happy as music is fun! It’s almost like The Bouncing Souls theory of “it’s just exciting to play songs together!”

Steve: And it takes you to different parts of the world. I imagine that aspect from a band must be amazing.

Thomas Barnett © Imelda Michalczyk

Thomas: Yeah its mind blowing. Especially form a working class mom and dad  who grew up in Richmond in the south and once I dropped out of high school  and became a punk rocker they were like “Oh no, the son we built this home for and provide for is rejecting society.” And now I’m sending them postcards and emails from all these places. Its heart warming and intense. That’s the personal part of the journey that’s so incredible and I’m so glad it still influences the way we write songs. Like ‘Postcards from home’ is about a conversation I had with a man on a plane who was a 20 year old entrepreneur building houses  and schools for the resocialised child soldiers on the border between Kenya and Uganda, and then I read “King Leopold’s Ghost”. And I met a cousin of mine who is from Gambia and lives in Australia, and I went to visit them and my uncle and cousins there because of this punk band. All of these strange tumbling events it puts us in touch with, feeling the events from around the world. And we haven’t been to that continent (Africa). Not, yet. (Grinning, knowing my background).

Steve: What would you want, if Strike Anywhere came to an end tonight (touch wood it doesn’t) to take as lasting image of the band?

Thomas: Everything that happens at all the shows, there is a smile or exchange or that glance and these little things that are incredibly important to us. And those fans don’t just think of us a collateral effect of entertainment. This is the way we can understand the way we feel about the world and for a punk to pop out of a shell and feel alive and trembling like a spiritual experience without any hierarchal religion!

Steve: When was that moment for you?

Thomas: I had a string of really formative shows like in 1988 I saw Fugazi in my hometown and it was incredible and there were so many people there that didn’t know what they were seeing and that’s an incredible feeling. Maybe that’s why we go to some more obscure & off the map places, it seems like we give people a touch of that experience. That passion and transcendent moment beyond the hyper individuality of the western world from where we come from. We are trying to get to those states of minds you read about in classic texts without manifesting any religious structure. We are just trying to make our consciousness and engagement with the world, and I think there are so many forces in this world that are trying to push us away from that.

Its real isolated and fucked up as an adolescent and you find this thing that starts this fire, and you realise everyone is getting older and the people you went to school with are now more isolated and disengaged; they feel powerless even with good jobs and cars and 2.5 children and all that shit.

Steve: Well that’s the” ignorance is bliss” cliché and comfortable lifestyles.

Thomas: Yeah but having at least an awareness of it and not being crushed by the idea that we are all bought up to be cogs in a well oiled machine. But as heavy as those ideas are, you can’t say your life is running on how doomed you are as a species. There are too many hopeful moments and too many people with brightness and for all of them and all the good friends that have passed on..

(Thomas pausing and eyes lighting up briefly)

Thomas: I do want to end this with a shout out for Ivan Hutorskoy AKA “bonecrusher”; one of the leaders of the RASH-the anti fascist skinheads. They came to our show months ago in Moscow to protect us from the neo Nazi skinheads. And he was assassinated outside of his apartment last week; two bullets to the back of his head. And the whole anti fascist world is mourning his loss; “Uncle Vanya”. We only met him for a second really (well six hours) and they came to the show not really knowing or caring about our band but knew that the Nazis wanted to hurt people. And we had an incredibly safe and wonderful transcendent experience playing for the hardcore skinhead and punk men and women of Moscow. They live in a embattled universe there the likes of which I’m not sure any community has seen; even in the Southeast when we finally beat back the Nazi skinheads with the  confederate hammer, sent them away from the world. So yeah a shout out to him and his memory.

RIP- Ivan Hutorskoy  AKA Kostolom (“Bonecrusher” in Russian )  16 November 2009