I was pretty stoked to being able to interview one of my favorite bands from high school. Dick Lucas from the legendary Subhumans was kind enough to answer these questions on July 18 at the Middle East in Cambridge, MA. His answers were very thoughtful and it is easy to know what he feels strongly about. This interview also talks about punks vs. hippies, which should be read by everyone.

PL: Introduce yourself.

DL: I'm Dick. I'm the singer of Subhumans and I sing in Citizen Fish. We're on tour. At the end of the Subhumans tour, we start the Citizen Fish tour going from New York back up to Chicago where we started this one from two weeks ago.

PL: Are there different members in Citizen Fish than Subhumans or is it pretty much the same?

DL: Its not exactly the same. Me, Phil and Trotskey are in both bands. Phil plays bass for Subhumans and guitar for Citizen Fish. Trotskey plays drums for both and I sing for both. There's Bruce, who plays guitar for Subhumans and Jasper plays bass for Citizen Fish. So, we brought the five of us on this tour.

PL: Has your opinion of what it means to be in a band changed since when you started?

DL: Don't think so. To be in a band is to express what you feel musically or lyrically. Put it on stage, it always feels good. Added bonus, if you're successful enough, you get to go to places that would otherwise cost you a fortune for free, relatively. You get to meet lots of people, get to interact with a whole community of people who are doing different things and doing similar things on this punk rock scale, which is largely D.I.Y. and self sufficent based on the help and coordination of other like minded people. At worst, it involves a bunch of people who get way commercial and do the commercial side of punk rock. There's a whole world of activities in punk rock, and to be involved in that hasn't changed. It gets you out of the house, and its better than getting a job.

I asked him a question about him going to college because I thought I read that a long time ago. It turns out I was wrong, but it led to this:

DL: I didn't go to college. I went to school, and punk rock happened while I was in school. I started the first band I was in called The Mental with some mates from school. That lasted about two years and we put out a seven inch EP. That fell apart and I joined up with what used to be The Stupid Humans, which was Bruce's first band, and that became the Subhumans with the new line up. I had jobs, but only until The Day the Country Died earned us about a thousand pounds in royalties a month after it came out because it sold a fuckload of copies really quickly, which was insane, but fantastic. I said, "Dad, I'm quitting work next week." He goes, "Well, I'm not surprised."

PL: Thats good that they were supportive.

DL: Yeah, yeah, he didn't mind. He said, "as long as you don't get arrested."

PL: Have you had a regular job since then?

DL: No, this is it, really. (pause) I'm the only one who can say that. Let me put this picture a little clearer: Bruce has got a family, runs a music shop and teaches music at school. He's well busy. Phil and his girlfriend run this curtain making D.I.Y. business in the south of Spain where they moved to about a couple of years ago. Thats still not really a job, but a self sufficient way to get money in. Jasper avoids jobs, but he's totally in debt. Trotskey avoids jobs, but he keeps it together somehow. He does occasional gardening jobs and things like that. We all try to totally avert working for "the man" or anybody else if we can.

PL: Is it tough having a member move to another country?

DL: Trotskey moved to Germany as well. This was all very recent, in the last couple years. It is tough. We can't just practice every weekend like we used to and create new tracks like we used to, so we have a real lack of new stuff at the moment. We can't just do one off gigs anywhere because it'd cost too much to get someone to one place, so all we can do is tours. We have to plan those several months ahead based on Bruce's work schedule. This is the first tour we've done this year, and we'll be doing a tour of England in about October, so we'll have two tours this year, which is really unusual compared to three years to fifteen years ago to twenty or however many years its been by now where it was always non stop gigs; between 40-100 gigs a year was normal. It takes some getting used to all this spare time. Yeah, it is difficult. Most bands would split up if members moved to a different country.

PL: How far away is Germany and Spain from England?

DL: In miles? I don't know; several hundred. Its far away where you'd have to afford a plane ticket or a ferry tickets and hire a car to drive all that way. Its a lot of logistics involved, mostly with airfares. Its just not as easy as going twenty miles down the road.

PL: Do you feel safe with all the crap thats been going on lately (especially the bombings in London)?

DL: Um...safe. I feel less safe to the reactions that have been going on to the bombings at the moment. The reaction being to curtail peoples' liberties, their liberty to protest. The liberty to say what you want, the threat of being labeled as a terrorist if your actions are against whatever is deemed to be whatever is on the side to social security or social safety. These bombs going off-I'm almost inclined to go through all the conspiracy theories that say thats its all totally prearranged, even 9-11 was-it was so coincidentally the excuse they needed to charge into wherever they wanted to go to get the oil they needed, i.e. Iraq, on the back of George Bush's dad having fucked up the initial mission to get all the oil out of Iraq in the early 90s. I could believe that they planned the whole thing out. The Oklahoma bombing was a bit of a practice run to see if it worked. There's evidence about the way the towers collapsed that it had to be bombs inside the building-several explosions going on at the same time as the planes were crashing into them. The time it takes for anything to fall from the height of the top of the Twin Towers to the floor is exactly the same gravitational speed that it took for it to collapse into the floor. Now this is a building with major metal structures to stop it from collapsing so fucking rapidly. It just went straight fucking down. Now, that doesn't happen unless you totally undermine the foundations of that building up front. There's websites; there's one called www.infowars.com where there's a whole bunch of this stuff. On a weekly basis, they're doing reports and back up facts and stuff that people don't notice on the mainstream news. It comes out on the first news report and gets buried on the second news report, like the bombings in London recently. This Isreally political guy was in London at some sort of meeting, which meant that he had to be in the locality of or travel around the same street as the tube station where the bomb went off at about 9 o'clock or whenever it was. He got a phone call telling him not to go because something was gonna be going on. That was reported in Israelly newspapers, and suddenly, those reports stopped being reported on. So, after the disaster, the first initial reports contained all these little facts that could lead to somewhere else that got squashed immediately. This has been going on since J.F.K. was assinated. There's just so much stuff going on behind the government; its not just one little idiot in charge of the country. There's a whole bunch of neo conservative evil bastards who just want to control the entire structure of the way people live. Most Americans' style of Democracy is a total farce, and largely based on words without any depth of reality what-so-ever. Do I feel safe? No, I never really feel safe, but you can't walk around feeling scared all the time, which is the other side. I don't feel scared all the time, no. I don't feel totally safe. Watch your back when you talk to cops because they have all the powers in the world and they could arrest you for anything. So I don't talk to cops. This is all the basic street level of it. The cops are this public face of the government control thing. But in terms of being scared of being blown up, no, not really. You could go out and get hit by a bus, you could die from smoking or whatever. Something will get you in the end.

PL: I almost don't want to believe that our government would be fucked up enough to plan stuff like that.

DL: Thats what they play on: the public's complete willingness to not want to believe that they could have a part in all this stuff. Thats how they get away with it. Last election-there's this whole book that was written about the farce that was the last election results process in Ohio. There were votes for Kerry that were switched over to Bush and they blamed it on a computer malfunction. They say that it costs $100,000 to recheck the results, so the Democrats raise $100,000, so the price goes up to $150,000. They got another $50,000 together and they said it still couldn't be done because of some legal process, and the longer things go on, the less people are interested in them. And then Kerry, the next fucking day-before there was even a chance to do anything about it-says: "I bow down, Mr. President; I give up." Well, what the fuck.

PL: Do you think the country or the world would have been better with Kerry?

DL: Yeah, only slightly, but totally in another way because Bush employs his own men as his fucking henchmen in this whole thing. Its a very very corporate government that you've got here. I don't know much about Kerry at all. He was just the other guy, the "non Bush" guy.

PL: Do you guys have any plans to release any new music in the future?

DL: Only if we get the time and affordability to get the practices in enough to getting new songs that we could release. We always plan to, its just that the plans are usually difficult to put into action.

PL: How do you feel about the Canadian Subhumans?

DL: They're fucking great, but they're long gone now. Some people still mistake us for them. They go; "Remember that song you wrote called whatever?" And I go; "No, I didn't write that. Its the other Subhumans." They go; "What other Subhumans?" I tell them what I know about the other Subhumans, which isn't much. In the early 80s, Canada was just like another planet. It was a place that you never visited.

PL: Is it possible to not pay attention to what America is doing?

DL: Yes, its possible. Millions of people do it every day. They sit at home, see whats on TV. They ignore the fact that the junk food they're eating is coming from an American company like McDonalds or Pizza Hut or whatever. They ignore the fact that the semi humorous stuff that they see on TV is an American sitcom. They ignore the things about Iraq. I'm not just generalizing, I completely feel that the majority of human beings in England are just sedate, non caring, apathetic, large lounge lizards who sit in front of their tele after their shit job everyday. They come home, don't talk to their kids and just watch the tele instead. Its a nightmare picture. I'm sure it goes on, but I don't actually know these people-they don't go out much-but I'm sure they exist. I can't stop thinking that because I've been hanging around with punk rock people for so long that everyone is like us: free thinking, active in our heads and looking for causes rather than just agreeing with all the effects that are going on around us. It is possible to ignore what American culture is doing to the planet. Not all American culture is inherently bad, but a lot of it is.

PL: Whats a little known fact about England?

DL: (laughs) A little known fact about England? Wow. Well, it depends on what you already know, doesn't it? (laughs) You can tell that these are questions that I've never been asked before, so I've got no basis on where to flourish a reply.

PL: Is that good or bad?

DL: Its great. I'm just trying to think of a funny, witty answer. There's more free space in England than you might imagine. Its a very overcrowded country, but there are complete areas of peace and countryside that are untouched beauty. Thats a good thing. And not everybody in England drinks tea or warm beer. We're not all uptight idiots.

PL: Name one album, besides your own, that you feel all kids should have in their collection.

DL: Never Mind the Bullocks by the Sex Pistols. Thats easy. Or the first two Wire albums. Not for the lyrical content, but for the nature of the music. Fantastic.

PL: Whats the difference between a punk and a hippie? I see them as being similar in a way.

DL: Yeah, mostly long hair, beads, colorful clothing. Mostly appearance. And, mostly punks are willing to physically fight for what they believe in. Sometimes, that turns into stupid violence that doesn't get anybody anywhere, but other times they will stand at the front of a protest and be willing to get hit for their justification or their right to stand up for whatever they believe in against the cops. It takes a certain amount of bravery to do that. But the hippies, as far as I know, never seemed to have-there's more physicality to the punk rock nature of protest perhaps.

The hippies had the luck to be in the generation where the cops had less awareness of the amounts of protest and less powers to do so much about it. Having said that, I wasn't alive in 1968-I was alive, but I wasn't old enough in 1968 or 1969 to experience being beaten up by cops for protesting the Vietnam War. I'm sure they were just as ruthless as any cops beating up anybody else. So yeah, that last generalization is pretty ridiculous.

PL: Do you think its odd that the punk cliche is to hate hippies even though they're so similar?

DL: Yeah, thats a really old cliche. Thats a 1976 cliche. A lot of the early punk stuff was about shocking people and seeming violent and shocking and nasty and dangerous and hard to get along with and just loud and shouty. Hippies were despised as well as anybody who seemed weak by definition. It was all inclusive, but only to a certain extent. If you had long hair, cut it off. It was all very basic. It was a reaction against 70s music. A lot of the hippies in the 60s turned into semi capitalist rock star types, writing technologically progressive rock music that nobody could afford to see, and nobody could afford the instruments to play except for the very few. All the hippie idealism with freedom of music ans speech and peace and love and all that got bought out by a bunch of corporate ideals and making loads of money off the back of it, and it all went very stale. That staleness was what caused that kind of reaction in terms of attitude. And, a lot of it was directly pinned on people with long hair. The enemy wasn't so much the system then, it was just everything, and hipipies were an easy target because they didn't fight back.

But not that punks would go around beating up hippies. That never happened as far as I can remember. People went around beating up punks because they looked too different, and punks didn't realize that hippies were on the same side as punks because they too, especially in their day, looked different from everyone else. That didn't really spring to many people's minds, it seems. There again, the punks were going to Stonehedge Festivals in the early 80s/late 70s amongst loads of hippies and bikers and all sorts. They found that them and many of the hippies had the same ideas: have a free festival, enjoy any sort of music being played; don't pay for anything unless you absolutely have to, like a cup of tea. And that was a real sharing experience, and that really helped kick start the whole anarcho punk thing that came along with that soon after. So, yeah, there isn't that much of a difference between hippies and punks, except the outside appearance. I mean all punks go: "Ahh, what the fuck, you fucking hippies." They should think about what they preach about hippies. Its just a picture. Its just people with long hair, but their life has been really exciting, almost radical revolutionary a few decades back. Those such people should be given respect for starting a lot of things that caught up, like bands like Crass.

PL: Do you have any final comments?

DL: Thats always the last question, and its always the most impossible one left. If people ask if I have anything to add, I say that 11+2 is an anagram of 12+1 and they both add up to 13, which is true. Read more books, fuck computers. The internet is a bitch. It gives you all the information you need, but most of it you never ever need at all. You find all this stuff that you do not need. And, you spend the whole time staring at a fucking screen. Its just the notion that you can't turn it off. You think you have control and are leading your own life, but you're just staring at a flat one dimensional two dimensional screen. Its basically shoving things at your head more than you realize. Its got subliminal advertising stuff on there, and you just don't need any of it. And it leaves you just stuck inside of the house doing this all the time. You should be outside breathing the air and seeing whats going on for real. There are three dimensional people.

PL: Do you have a computer at home?

DL: Yeah, its good for Emails, and just about bad for everything else. I can't walk away from a computer without feeling like a fucking zombie.

We talked about how I found out about the Subhumans show from a computer.

DL: Having said that, a computer does open up avenues of really good alternative information that completely weakens the power of the mainstream media. It completely weakens it. They can no longer just print bullshit and imagine that everyone's gonna believe it. Just as long as it takes to turn on a computer, you've got access to alternative websites that gives people more of a chance to have a balanced perspective of what is going on. The more information there is, the more people in government will ever realize that people are not as stupid as they think. And so the people in powers get fed down to whoever to make sure that no one protests too much. Fortunately, this would lead to create mass panics every now and again to keep people indoors and scared of each other and afraid that anybody could be saved if a terrorist was about to blow them up.

People should develop something to gain more freedom for themselves, especially when it comes to whats going on with people in power. Then the people in power have to go back to creating major diversions so people go back to the status quo of believing what they are told to keep themselves safe from the enemy. And the enemy will always be something that we don't normally bump into, like brown skinned people from the other side of the planet who have a different religion-who don't believe in the same God. I mean, fuck, Tony Blair and George Bush both go on about being Christians and believing in God, and once they say that, you imagine this whole populace going: "Thats okay. Yeah, thats good. God to Bush or God to Blair; its coming to me directly from the horses mouth." Thats one of those arguments that you can't really argue against in a way. They can just say that you don't believe in God so you would argue against it. Its one of those infallable arguments. You create something thats infallable. Thats like saying, "I believe in that and you don't believe in that, then you're fallable and I'm not. And its just believing in everything they say from then on. Religion is a very corrupting thing. You just listen to everyone's opinions and sort of know inside yourself what is right and wrong, wherever the opinion comes from. An example would be England's involvement in the currency of the Euro. We're joining up more with Europe. There's two people who want England to stay out of Europe. One is the right wing, the far right. They're into Nationalism, Patriotism, small is good. And the other people are the anarchists, who believe that once you give away power to large massive entities in say, Brussels, to control the expanding Europe, thats expanding as far away as Russia right now, the less power there is on a local community basis. They're both saying the same thing: one is on the far right, and one is anarchists, which is just about next door to far left. So, in a way, these wings are saying the same things, and once you take the wings of the politics out of it, you take out what those wings believe. Thats where the difference really lies. Its all due with labeling yourself or not labeling yourself. An opinion can be shared by the weirdest fucking people in the planet, but if they share your opinion on one thing, it doesn't make you instantly agree with everything else they're thinking. So just be aware that people will have a diverse amount of opinions, and you can agree with one of them, but you don't have to agree with the rest of them. It won't make you a racist if you believe in other things that a right winger believes.

PL: (long pause) I think thats it.

DL: Its probably good timing. We're probably going on any fucking minute.

Interview by: RF
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