Interviews: Strike Anywhere

Rock Sound gets political with Thomas Barnett from Strike Anywhere as we look forward to their UK tour.

Posted Wednesday, 11 November 2009 in

Ahead of their trouser-wettingly exciting forthcoming UK and Ireland tour with Canada’s Propagandhi and Protest The Hero, Rock Sound caught up with Thomas Barnett , frontman of Richmond, VA quintet Strike Anywhere about their latest album, ‘Iron Front’…

How did you come up with the lyric, “Freedom ’til death, death until birth” in ‘I’m Your Opposite Number’, and what do you mean by that?
“It’s paraphrased from the US hip-hop band / activists X CLAN. It’s about optimism and the circle of life, carrying on liberation ideas and roots of rebellion across lifetimes and cultures.”

You’ve mentioned in a previous interview that at points the album lyrically addresses police brutality, as have previous Strike Anywhere albums. How do you feel policing in the US has improved, or equally got worse, in your lifetime?
“It’s a city by city question, and certainly the proliferation of guns and gun culture makes the everyday violence of criminal enterprises lethal and tragic. The bottom line is that the policing of working class and poor urban communities still relies on a heavy-handed and racially biased approach. Statistically, the concrete jungle is a prison without walls, and a mutual shooting gallery for those trapped within it and the machinery of the police state.”

When you write about issues such as the police, is it from a specific US perspective, or do you pull on experiences from touring elsewhere?
“We have been witness to, and victims of, police corruption and rights abuses, as a touring band in several countries, and in our own cities in the United States. There have also been a few surprising moments of police help in cases of vehicle breakdown and border incarceration. It’s a mixed bag, but you always get the sense that it’s harder for them to break the mould and be reasonable and empathetic – the weight of their badge and the stress of the job tend to ruin and debase personality, character and consciousness. We can view the individuals as [being] themselves the victims of the violence and militarisation of everyday life after we get up off the ground, disarm, and recover.”

‘Iron Front’ is your most melodic album to date; how conscious were you of this when writing the songs?
“There were a lot of songs written as laptop footnotes – just guitar and vocal ideas and melodies I recorded while in a garage between tours over the past three years. Perhaps we are just writing progressively on all of our styles and sonic tendencies without abandoning any of our earlier works’ relevance or impact. Definitely a more roots and soul music-inspired vocal approach may have helped the melodic underpinnings of the record… We just do what we do really, and write hardcore punk songs that move us, and we want the response to be both physical and one of spirit.
“None of these things do we actually think about while writing music, we just try and be as honest and inspired as we can.”

You once again worked on this record with Brian McTernan; what is your favourite thing about working with him, and have you ever considered recording an album with anyone else?
“Brian McTernan and the five of us hashed out some live demos and then let the songs do the work. We all wanted the record to have impact, ferocity, and to feel as exciting as the songs and ideas felt in our heads. Brian was adamant that we retain the emotion and the impact of each song’s potential – with soaring and organic, anthemic highs, and crunching, floor-shaking lows. The production aesthetic was to be relentless and magnetic, and the songs were organised to build a narrative of impressions – the aggressive coupled with the hopeful. None of the cleaner, more translucent, sonic moments that were present on ‘Dead FM’ seemed relevant to the trajectory of this record. It was the quickest and easiest recording we’ve done; all the rehearsals and time poring over the writing took place during the previous months.”

To what extent did the recession inspire you when writing ‘Iron Front’, and what have you made of the panic whipped up by the media and the subsequent effects on the public?
“The effects of global recession, its actual physical impact, as well as the mass psychology of the mediated hysteria, are both very involved in the tone of our record. We’ve been critical of globalised corporate capitalism for most of our lives, and certainly from the very beginnings of this band. But the realities of it, especially in the States, and especially in Southern California where I stay at a house with dear friends between tours and recordings, is painful to witness. The amount of illegal evictions, unsecured loans, high stakes securities gambling with the lives and resources of so many, exhalant a stench of retrograde social Darwinisms and a weighted playing field where we are not the happy spectators, cheering for our political / economic teams from the terraces like we’re meant to believe… really we’re the pitch and the dirt of the field, below the feet of the fake ‘choices’ above us.

“Never has this been more evident than right now; never has the inbred, impotent, nakedness of the ‘free’ market emperor been more revealed. Never has there been a more crucial time to change perception and knock these elites off our backs.”

Carrying on from the last question, in the UK at least, it largely seems that the greediest people at the top of the money food chain are the least affected. They lose assets, while other people lose homes and livelihoods…
“Exactly, while whole wings of public services close indefinitely: libraries closing in Philadelphia; public legal aid and city attorneys losing jobs while trying to work on civil lawsuits for damages AGAINST the banks; social services that the homeless and chronically poor will be literally dying without… Corporate banks get bailed out by Congress, the solvency of global trade taking morally adrift precedence over the lives of millions of us… And this is just the unemployment, social safety net erosion in the wealthy-first world we are talking about, not even the impact it will have on the colonised and extracted resource economies of the third world.

“It’s gonna get very interesting when we all come knocking on the doors of these captains of industry, the lawmakers who live in their pocket lint, and demand our world back from their paper prisons of speculation and law… In some ways, it’s what we’ve all been waiting for: lifetimes redeemed in an evolving, historical push for reason and justice. We’ll see all of you there.”

Catch Strike Anywhere, Propagandhi and Protest The Hero at these shows:
NOVEMBER
30 – LONDON Koko
DECEMBER
01 – LEEDS Rios
02 – CARDIFF Coal Exchange
03 – DUBLIN Village
05 – BELFAST Speakeasy
06 – EDINBURGH Studio 24
07 – BOURNEMOUTH Academy
08 – NOTTINGHAM Rock City