From the Event Guide, August 2008
Looking for Gold
By Aoife Barry
There may be no other band as perfectly named as Canada’s Fucked Up. A hardcore punk band who are renowned for their intense live shows (which often end with frontman Damian Abraham, aka ‘Pink Eyes’, with blood streaming down his face from a self-inflicted head wound), they have just under 50 releases to their name, including most recent album ‘The Chemistry of Common Life’. But behind their confrontational and in-your-face style and sound lies a world of self-discovery and passion. An intrigued Aoife Barry finds out more from Damian.
There are bands that waddle, bloated with self importance, onto the stage, play with a half-arsed attitude and then shuffle off, leaving nothing more than a dull ringing in their audience’s ears. And then there are bands like Fucked Up, who bound on stage, trash it out with their inner demons and leave the audience scared, riled up and exhilarated. Fucked Up literally dive head first into every live experience, not caring who (more often than not, themselves) or what is hurt along the way – they give what their audience wants and then some. Frontman Damian Abraham is what holds the band together on stage – the 300lb mountain man who is a genial soul offstage and a towering behemoth on.
“There are things I would never have thought I would be able to do,” says Damian of his transition from gentle soul to wild beast during his live shows. “Like the other night we played a show and I jumped off these speakers and I stuffed the landing – kind of like an Olympian – and I was fine, and the next day I woke up and my knees felt like they were going to pop off at any second. It’s like the combination of adrenaline and cockiness on stage, like the world doesn’t exist.”
