Named after an all-weather camping match, North Virginia’s outspoken quintet Strike Anywhere pen visceral hardcore as virtual advisory warnings to the public, much in the vein of fellow punk radicals Anti-Flag and Avail. It’s an activism-minded approach borne out of a distrust of, and disillusionment with the government and you can hear the band’s anti-fascist polemics on last year’s rarities/live disc To Live In Discontent.

Interview by Steve Tauschke | steve@staff.truepunk.com | with singer Thomas Barnett from Strike Anywhere.

Hey Thomas, what’s been happening?

Well, I’ve been working 12 days straight between tours so my mind is a little mushed. I work in an organic farm market and I’m in charge of produce. We work 12 days straight then get five days off. I’m visiting my wife here in Vermont where she’s studying for a Masters in Environmental Law. We’re moving to Oregon soon and she’s doing animal rights law. She’s quite bright so hopefully she’ll be suing the shit out of corporations that poison poor people – and the earth.

You mentioned Vermont is quite progressive whereas your homestate Virginia is dominated by the tobacco corporations and the media.

Virginia is kind of microcosm of what the US is like. It has a very unfair and unbalanced media and racist police practices and a very aristocratic ruling class who own the politicians. That gives us a really good background for having the world view that we do and writing the songs that we’ve written. If I’d grown up in California which is a little more progressive and laid back maybe I’d be in a band that has more of a sense of humour, like NOFX.

There’s so much about our city (Richmond) that comes out in our songs. We’re discussing forgotten ghosts and secret histories and the internalization of the cruelty of capitalism which creates the classic American depression; Attention Deficit Disorder and the art of forgetfulness where our ability to have long term memories is short-circuited by emotional responses to repressed guilt and repressed grieving for events such as September 11 and the subsequent war-mongering left in its wake.

You’re not a believer in disorders such as ADD?

Well, we were just sitting somewhere around in Belgium with Anti-Flag and thinking how there always seems to be a clutch of new neuroses and medical issues that appear out of nowhere. And it’s the same with fad diets. It’s like taking people’s responsibilities for the mental problems so that the pharmaceutical community can make a profit.

Do you think old social values dying off in the US?

We just kind of feel like the pissed-off intellectual working class movement that used to exist in the States back in the time of our great-grandparents. All of that culture has almost winked out but I think it’s coming back and coming back strong, especially on the west coast. It seems that the rag-tag idealism of punk music and the biographical and emotional politics of songwriting that we have and that many other bands before us have had allows us to carry this banner. I think that’s why the Rock Against Bush touring and the punk voter movement was interesting because what it did was introduce people to the idea that we are given this power once every four years and then it’s taken from us and used to justify the rest of the servitude to this system.

I think once you put yourself into the public light your rage can really manifest. That’s why I dropped out of high school because I wasn’t learning anything that was useful. And that was many years ago. I can’t imagine what kids go through now with the climate the way it is and with public schools being invaded by religious agendas and other bigoted, controlling forms of dominance.

What have you learnt from the radical historian Howard Zinn and others and how has think impacted on the band?

I have of course read The People’s History and a few of his other essays. He wrote a really good response right after September 11, a 300-word essay on the roots of these issues and the nature in which people’s fear and grief was manipulated. And possibly not even intentionally by the government or media but because of the system that we’ve built, this cultural virus that takes any expressions of public dissent or internationalist sympathy and reverse-engineers it into this self-hatred, this hostility so that people just crawl back into their houses, work their two jobs, lose their health insurance and make themselves broke and depressed by buying things that TV tries to tell them. And it’s a cycle.

No-one is expected to be expansive and extraverted and emotionally open in our culture – unless they rebel. Our lives are being sold back to us by being made to pay for things that have always been theirs. That’s a part of the classic punk ethic by bands like Crass who asked ‘do they owe us a living?’. And there’s no place in our society for these ideas to spread other than punk because radical activism becomes too cloistered whereas punk is populist and visceral and emotional and doesn’t talk down to anybody – all at once.

And you can take it around the world?

Yeah, and it can take you around the world. And you can sing along to songs you wrote from your heart in your bedroom with people who don’t even speak your language. That’s so fantastic. This is the way that art was meant to be… Our government has massive conservative Christian momentum and it’s a juggernaut destroying reason and rationale and humanism with superstition and bigotry and anti-woman and anti-homosexual agendas. That just helps keep the fires cooking for people to have wild and fucked up ideas about their neighbours… If it wasn’t for punk rock there wouldn’t be any honesty left in our society. What’s really important is that there’s still people out there speaking up and gaining ground and we’re happy to add our small voice.