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Metal Hammer 86 'Hell Billys'

Looking down at my questions I catch the sight of four hands. They belong to Larkin, the drummer, and Casey Chaos, the messiah, from Amen. And they’re a fucking mess.

            “I wreck them every night” admits Larkin. “Drain blood from them. Tear them apart, cut chunks out of them. Wake up in the morning and think ‘fuck’.”

            “My hands aren’t a big problem,” says perpetually bruised frontman Casey, “but everything else is. In the heat of the moment, it just doesn’t compute, you don’t even think about it. S’weird that the precise little irrelevance that you barely think about is what so many people focus on. If that’s all people hear about, when they come to the show they’ll relies what it feels like to not care about yourself.”

            I hide my fairy soft palms behind a fag. Never done a hard day’s work in my life. Like to keep it that way.

            All the same, it’s funny what some people are impressed with. Read anything about Amen in the past year and what’s surprising isn’t how such old rock’n’roll myths can still exert such a powerful hold on people, it’s how utterly unquestioned those myths continue to be, even in the context of a band who are the antithesis to the mainstream. And with a band as thoroughly hostile to the times as Amen, those old self-destructive myths of r’n’r surely won’t do as a whole story: in Casey Chaos, Amen have a frontman who contains all the contradictions inherent on their music – the resistance to the modern goosestep, the simultaneous love of tradition they’re tapping into, the insistence that forward is the only direction without death.

            On one level, Chaos is the modern Iggy, a stranded shaman in the dead of time – lurid personal details are always gonna be what people stretch for with anyone so dementedly set on a collision course with life. On another level, he’s absolutely of his times, responding to no-one else is to the modern sickness that is America. Amen are that odd thing: a blast from a past for those looking to reheat internal fires long-since dampened by the streak of corporatised, paralysed piss-poor US rock became, but they’re also a band with a fury uncontainable by the precisely the lineage they pay homage to. All this from a band who’s lead singer self-mutilates on mixing desks, tears himself a new orifi every night and plays the new renaissance rock god persona with more wit and flawless authenticity than anyone else out there. There’s something odd in the relationship between Amen and their fans, a fidelity sure, but also a voyeurism of pain, am ogling of person trauma that’s too dangerously close-up to be theatre, too mutually intrigued to be posturing. You feel like asking Chaos, when you meet him and fellow band-mate Larkin in the Astoria before a sell-out London show, how does it feel to be a flagellant for people? Do you think being a whipping boy for the vicarious-living masses is a fair exchange.

            “It isn’t that,” he smiles, a far more affably considered figure then you’ve been led to believe. “People tend to focus on the kind of self-destructive things we do onstage simply because they don’t see many bands doing that anymore. I think what people respond to is simply that we’ve become so inured to this idea of rock meaning very little and just sitting in our lives like every other piece of entertainment, sedating us. I remember when I was growing up, I hated music, I thought it was all like Bon Jovi and it was all just this huge advert for the conventionality and the American dream. I thought music was just a part of every other piece-of-shit entertainment.”

            “Someone played me Black Flag. It was like a revolution. My head just caved in, I couldn’t believe that music could do that, could talk about that, could say things in such a totally passionate way. It was like suddenly realising that all this sound that had sickened you could actually be directed against your enemies, a realization you never ever forget. A lot of people, hopefully, are finding that first moment through our record. We made it precisely for people who were only used to music as ear-candy: it’s a wake up call that what they thought was music was bullshit, what they thought were the limits were just limitations. That’s the collest thing ever, making people realise that music doesn’t just have to surround you, you can let it in, let in infect you. After that, all our behaviour is simply what it is – what we do. Any violence to ourselves is thoroughly overwhelmed by the violence with which we do to sound, the violence with which we insist on our music, the violence with which we put the idea of music as attack-device into people’s hands.”

            And this is what you keep coming back to: no matter how much you’ve been tutored to denuflect to the Chaos throne (even Larking admits, “we all feel like fans of Casey, he’s just this totally charismatic guy we are all fascinated by”), Amen actually have far more danger in revolutionary word and sound than rock’n’roll act or deed. Towering over any discussion of Amen has to be ‘We Have Come For Your Parents’: as I said at the time, it’s less an album than a weapon, less a text to be read or a groove to be bounced on than a physical jolt, a corrosive, cleansing suffusion of noise and battered blasphemy that whites-out the mind’s eye every time you hear it. Without such an album, Amen would be empty: with such an album, the undeniable drive of  Chaos’ personality finds it’s perfect elaboration and you realise the most boring part of the story is all you’ve been told.

            “Because it’s easy to focus on that, the smashed stage, the bloody mess, the carnage, then the actual unpredictability of the show, the barrage of stimuli, the suggestion that there’s more to rock’n’roll than just play acting,” says Chaos. “As far as I’m concerned, all the things we do on stage, and the way we’re kind of self-destructive off it, are all just aftershocks of what is really going on, where the battle and the heat and the intensity is really taking place. That’s on stage, that’s when you listen to the album. We have this thing in our throats and our fingers and we play at maximum pitch to get it all out, leave nothing untouched, leave nothing in ourselves but hollowed-out exhaustion. And for people who are used to going to gigs simply for seeing the spectacle of people doing what they do to make a buck, that’s a real surprise.”

            Larkin: “Some people kind of overplay the insanity and make us look like we’re constantly on the verge of falling apart. But we’ve got battles to face. We can’t afford to fall apart.”

            A-fuckin-men. There’s a sense of psycho-geography to modern rock that’s totally reconfigured the whole pliant and submissive attitude this side of the pond has usually had towards the US. Simply put, we aren’t a cultural airstrip anymore, and we won’t simply slavishly follow US trends. With the increasingly dull and lyrical politeness of US mainstream-rock any refusenik from the current lukewarm drizzle is finding Europe a home away from home. Marilyn Manson can’t get arrested in an increasingly conservative America yet plays to millions of adoring perverts over here: similarly, Amen have found relatively little success in their native home (they struggled to find a deal in the US) whereas over here, they’re a certified poll-winning success on the back of albums that make no concessions to the mainstream. There’s a weird Parissalon feel to a lot of US bands coming over at the moment – ideas that find no possibility for exposure in the States find empathy amongst those of us who’d like to take a more defiant position to the cultural blitzkrieg of MTV and the US industry cronies.

            Further, with US rock currently in a holding pattern of emo-tedium, the intractable, nagging feeling Amen bring to their music simply doesn’t sit well in a nation that wants it’s songs to have happy endings. In a world of plink-plink fizz-rock, Amen are too undilutable, too problematic to slip down the cultural food-chain so easily.

            “You hear some horrible shit out there,” spits Casey. “There are bands, and I ain’t gonna mention any names, but there are bands out there willing to pay to play, make their companies give out like, a quarter of a million dollars to play with a bigger band and therefore get the exposure. We can’t and won’t do that: I mean, how is doing that different from the millions of dollars record companies pay putting boy-bands together? It’s no different, it’s just that these bands can say ‘oh yeah, we’re really into it cos of the music’ while all the ugly industry shit gets done in their behalf by someone else. It’s the same ol’ flow of cash from insider to insider without giving a fuck about the music, the fans or anything else. The urge of materialism, the search for fame and the satisfaction of naked ambition with no real talent to back it up, it’s all actually started affecting the way the music is made and I think that’s fucked up. Right now in the states it isn’t even a battle between art and commerce; art has been bought-up by commerce and put on the same side as every other piece-of-shit entertainment.”

            Larkin: “But we’re not lying down, we refuse to give up and go away. We’re always unsure of how this band’s gonna survive but we’re always sure we will, we know we have to.”

            Casey: “I mean, on one level, fuck America. Fuck it. I’m just fucking sick of it, it’s an unendurable hellhole filled with sheeplike scum and no individuals. Everyone you meet in the States immediately you can tell what social clique or class they fit into: everything they do is this mannered expression of what fucking bullshit demographic they fufil. People act according to what they own, how much money they make. When you meet someone who isn’t that easy to identify with it’s like ‘fuck! I’ve got to speak to you!’. Over here and in Europe’s ‘like, everyone’s an individual, everyone’s got a way cooler attitude and an understanding of music as something way more than just something else to go spend money on and make a consumer choice over. To be quite honest, whenever I’m away from Europe I’m just thinking of coming back.”

            So do you feel totally isolated in the US? “Not totally cos there are some really cool bands who won’t play the corporate fucking game.” Casey: “At The Drive-In, Queens Of The Stoneage, those are the kinds of bands we dig, the kind of bands genuninly ignoring what those supposedly in the know are trying to tell us matters. That’s another thing, over here, magazines like Metal Hammer are constantly giving people exposure to new music: in the states no-one gives a shit about you unless you’ve had a video with all the right safe hip images on MTV and you’re friends with someone they might bump into at some Hollywood party. No-on wants to risk investment in anything that hasn’t already been proved bankable. We play over here a lot cos people over here understand that music’s too important to be left in the hands of fucking accountants, people understand over here that it’s not about how cool you are or how much money you make, it’s about integrity, something you can’t buy or recreate in a video set.”

            Casey: “In ten years time, all these rap-rock guys will be sat in mansions with the thought that it all came from utter shit, that they made records no-one listens to anymore, records that no-one is ever gonna have their lives changed by. I’d rather stay who I am and know that’s what I meant and that genuine non-bullshit people responded to it, than know a million people bought my record cos MTV told them it was cool.”

            And if you feel like tattooing that on the foreheads of a few of metal’s current figureheads don’t let us stop you: in retrospect, what’s oddest about Chaos and Larkin is that about four hours after I have my wee chinwag with them, they’re exploding across the stage of the LA2 like men utterly bereft of reason. Larkin is smashing his fists into even messier disrepair and Chaos is singing like his head’s on fire and he’s gotta put it out with noise. And what occurs, as ‘CK Killer’ bullets into you like a missile-laden flatbed truck to the head, isn’t the contradiction of a band with such evident smarts acting so reckless – it’s how no other action makes sense with fans so bound up in the swell. And while the almost elemental phenomenon that is Amen on stage in undeniable in its power, inarguable in its inarticulacy, you wonder how Chaos himself battles his priorities, how he balances losing it with zeroing in on his enemies. So how much of Amen’s deeper critique survives the twisted wreckage?

            “We get all kinds of reactions” admits Chaos. “I think the fans stright off respond to the sound and then dig deeper into the lyrics. We don’t think about it that much, all we can do is make everything happen at once and trust the audience to take what they want from it. I know that the reason a lot of punks in England love us is cos we remind them of when music was in some way connected to reality. Ultimately our responsibility is to ourselves and to the truth – the only way we can fulfill out responsibilities to our fans is not to think of that as a responsibility. We just have to make sure we stay ourselves and that’s the truth people will respond to.”

            Larkin: “I want kids to be able to always approach us, ask us for things, ask us to sign crazy shit. They’ll let us know if we’re fucking up, and we’ll let each other know if we’re getting too fucking rockstarish. It’s just surreal coming from a country where no-one knows us to a country where you can play to a thousands of kids who know every word.”

            But presumably Amen’s something you couldn’t envisage living without: when you find something within which you HAVE to tell the truth, going back to a world of bullshit just isn’t an option.

            “If I ever found myself on stage during something I knew I was gonna do beforehand I’ll stop. If I ever get on a stage and so all that bullshit crowd-pleasing stuff most bands do then I’ll stop. Y’know some asshole up there asking ‘Y’all like drinking? Y’all like smoking weed? Y’all like titties? – I hate that shit, I hate anything that’s guaranteed a positive reaction. I like things that could go either way, that make you think, wait a minute, what do I think about that?

            “It’s a fucking tragedy how rock’n’rool – the artform that’s meant to question all the morals and morays of society – has actually ended up celebrating the worst things about the modern world. Sexism, capitalism, vanity.”

            Larkin: “I think our fans recognize that pretty much 99 per cent of what they’re being told is great is an advert. Music sells a band, which sells t-shirts, which sells merchandise, which sells an image, which sells product. All the rest is advertising. Living in America is like being trapped in an advert you can’t turn over.”

Casey: “What you were saying earlier about America being obsessed with self-help and therapy is totally right: at the trouble is they need answers so quickly they’re willing to go for the easiest option always. Usually that’s wrong. America is a violent country, a lot of people get killed in a school so who’s the enemy? Rock music.” So would Casey agree with Marilyn Manson’s pronouncements to the effect that conservative administrations tend to provoke a healthy dissident reaction from artistic communities?

Larkin: “It is true: back in the early ‘08s when people were waking up to the full horror of what was being done in our name by the Reagan administration you had a real explosion in California of punk bands, really good punk bands. It’d be great if Bush could provoke that.”

Chaos: “But music’s got so depoliticalised now it’s difficult to imagine it happening like that again. That’s what we’re battling against. Twenty years of basically right-wing control saying ‘get a job, be productive, enjoy your leisure time as we dictate you’. That’s rubbed of on a whole generation.”

Its definitely something that evidently strikes a chord with Amen’s audience right away. I don’t recall seeing a more righteously pumped-up crowd since I first saw Public Enemy – all the more inspirational when you consider that metal, above all, encourages that blissful losing of yourself in the crowd, that self-inflicted lobotomy foged in the moshpit. Amen’s crowd, by contrast, feels entirely different from the kind of self-abasement. Entirely unpredictable, entirely unthreatening, it’s a free-floating space where anyone can dive in on the chaos and still keep their mind racing. The crowd in an Amen gig aren’t just crucial to the experience, they seem to be as much a part of the phenomenon as the band. Compare it to the hermetically-sealed cubicle of ‘enjoyment’ that most bigger US bands have given us in the past year and the choice ois obvious: Amen or no fun.

Chaos: “I’m not someone to be mystified by cos I’m just as mystified by what happens as you are. I don’t feel like a conduit or a cipher. We go on stage and shit happens. No-on can take a single thing away from us cos we earn the right to say this shit every night. You people understand that. American’s don’t have a fucking clue.”

I wouldn’t say that. Here’s five who know that the best American is an anti-American. Here’s five who know it’s not where you’re from but who you’re getting at. All the right enemies. All the right ammunition. Amen to all that.