Music

Q & A: Fucked Up's Damian Abraham talks Halifax record stores, bands, walking up hills, and the band's upcoming full-album shows

by Nicole Villeneuve

Fucked Up were one of the most anticipated acts of Halifax Pop Explosion. They had two shows scheduled on the last day of the festival—a standard 10:30 p.m. headlining set at the Palace, and a 6:30 p.m. show at the Pavilion, a room about the size of a large living room that is the city’s only official all-ages venue (you can read a bit about the show itself in our final day roundup).

The band only flew in that morning, and as usual, were generous with their time. We grabbed frontman Damian Abraham outside of the Pavilion before the early show to chat a bit about the city that they’d only played in once before, as well as when Canada might be able to see one of the David Comes to Life full album concerts.

AUX: You guys haven’t really come here much as a band.

Damian Abraham: I have an aunt that lived in Dartmouth, so I was here a little bit growing up, and we played here in 2006. We’ve never really toured Canada. We’ve never toured out east, but we want to. That’s one of the things that we all still really want to do. Going to a place you’ve never been is way more exciting.

What was especially appealing about coming to do Halifax Pop?

I think this city is gorgeous. I don’t like it so much when you’re on the bottom of the hill, and you’ve got to walk back up. But walking downhill is nice. And I love Taz Records. I love that store. I’ve only been there about three times now, but I always find stuff. And that’s not always the case when you do to a record store.

And obviously there’s a good amount of good music that came out of here, both well known and really underground.

There’s a lot of bands from Halifax and out east that don’t really get talked about. There’s the Sloans and the Thrush Hermits of course, but there’s Tough Justice, or even Envision, who’s been playing forever, and sometimes it’s like Canada is the hardest place to break in, and it felt that way for us too. I love coming to these places because you get a chance to find a lot of this stuff that’s harder to find. The chance to find a record from a band you didn’t know existed from here. There’s a guy in Toronto who moved to Toronto from Halifax, and he had awesome records. I cleaned up. I think I got the whole murderecords catalogue from him.

This city, though musically really rich, is pretty isolated, in terms of touring bands not visiting. Or at least used to be more so.

And that’s why it was able to develop the way it did. Now, you’re not going to see the scenes develop in the same way they have previously, because things aren’t as isolated anymore. Now it would be like, one of those bands would do something melodic and be on a blog, then it would be talked about somewhere else, then signed to a record deal, then people hate their next record and then they break up.

Do you think kids here are hungrier to see bands when they do come through though?

Definitely people are hungry for it, but it’s weird. For us, we go to a city like New York, and that’s the craziest place for us to play. Kids are rabid there. But going some place you don’t get to play very often is nice, because tonight when we play “Police,” it won’t be the 50th time we’ve played it here. And we’re playing new songs we’ve never played here.

Seeing you guys play solely in Toronto, you’ve graduated from a room this size to bigger stages, now. Do you still get to play venues this small often?

Oh yeah. I think the thing about Fucked Up is that we’re not universally big (laughs). We still play smaller shows. And I like it that way. As much as its nice to play to 700 people losing their minds, it’s also cool to play to like 30 people, and see their faces, and talk to them. I have a feeling we’ll have shows relatively soon, like probably for the next record, that will still be fairly disastrous.

Are you doing a lot of the David Comes to Life full album shows? Will we get one in Toronto?

Well we’re doing two in New York, because we added a second show. And there will be one in Toronto. We don’t know when yet, but it’s going to be a benefit, because we haven’t done one since our benefit single [which was paid for with their 2009 Polaris winnings]. We wanted to do something fun. It’ll be a nice way to close out the year.