Anti-Flag – 10-11-2009

Interview with: Anti-Flag
By: Nina Mende

Before the Antidote show with Anti-Flag and Alexisonfire I had an interview with Pat, the drummer of Anti-Flag.

First I was asking Pat how he’s doing. He said he’s doing fine and that he took a little walk through Wiesbaden, couldn’t find any culture though. Last time he had been here he found this Roman Theater in Wiesbaden, but he couldn’t find it this time. After checking which direction Pat went, we found out he went to the opposite direction of where the theater was located.
We continued talking about the tour. Pat said that they were two thirds through the tour and it was going well so far. It has been a long tour and Pat said he was ready to go home now to spend time with his goldfish. But besides that the bands on this tour are great. They had done a lot of work with Alexisonfire before and they are friends. They did some shows with Ghosts of a Thousand before, Four Years Strong they had just met on this tour but they are all getting along really well. They played in the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, France and now Northern Europe and Scandinavia is still coming up. The best shows so far were Prague, Madrid was fun. Bilbao is a great city but the stage had this staircase going up the stage so the fans were standing right in front of the bands which was a little weird and a bit of a challenge. But all shows were good. They sort of all blended together.
Somehow the interview turned around now and Pat asked me some questions here about me which I answered. But this interview was not about me so I tried hard to change it back around again and we continued. So I asked Pat about the history of Anti-Flag since they have been around for like forever. He agreed and called them ‘Dinosaurs’, which I wouldn’t say, but they are pretty close to that. He told me about the two new guys in the band that are in the band for 10 years now (yes, and still the new guys!). We laughed about that and he made clear that they are not the new guys at all anymore. Just thinking of it was funny. Anti-Flag has been around for about 16 years or more now. As I asked for any career highlights we were laughing again as Pat said “No, it has all been shit so far.” The fact that they were still able to play music that they all love and interact with a community of people that love the music is really valuable. And these people seem like the best people in the world, Pat said. He thinks that real activism and change comes from these people. And even if you grow out of this community for example as you grow older the passion for justice and activism is still with you. Even if you don’t go to that many rock shows anymore you still have these believes in you.

Anti-Flag do a lot of social stuff. For example during this tour they work together with an organization called MEIA which helps homeless people, it helps them to get away from the streets and gives them access to houses. It also has some other programs to help the homeless. Because in reality we are all pretty close to be living on the streets, especially in the US where we don’t have the social safety as you have here in Europe. Losing your home means losing your identity. So it is very important to support stuff that helps preventing that and especially that helps people in that situation.

But that’s not the only program and organization Anti-Flag is supporting. On Warped Tour last summer they joined a program of Greenpeace where they were trying to get Obama to go to Copenhagen to show leadership on the Climate Change issue. At that point Obama still hasn’t decided to go, which is bad because without American leadership on this issue not much will happen and nothing will really change.

Further Anti-Flag is working with Amnesty International on a program for Illegal Immigrants in the United States. The US puts non violent or criminal immigrants in the same prison system like rapists and killers and criminals like that. That doesn’t make too much sense. It costs a lot of money and even if you’re a complete bastard and all you care about is money it is not a financially wise solution to do. And of course it is also not good for the people that are non violent to be put into this situation with all the real and dangerous criminals. It creates more violence and forces people to become violent in such a situation that haven’t been before. To Pat he thinks there should be no illegal immigrants because none of us is born in borders. He doesn’t believe in borders and thinks we all should be allowed to go anywhere. But that’s another step. The first step is to treat people humanly and if we can do that we are one step closer to have everybody live where they want to without borders and limitations.

Another one is just caring about a domestic reason: “The military recruitment in High Schools. We think that is a problem.
We always try to see where we can be helpful and support what we believe in.”

After hearing all that social engagement Anti-Flag has, I of course wanted to know if they had any major success with that yet. Of course that is always hard to measure, but maybe there was something big…. You never know. Pat agreed and said with activism there are never any big changes because it all happens in little tiny steps. But a big success to Anti-Flag was: they had written a song called “Depleted Uranium is A War Crime” a couple of records ago. In the states the military always denies that Depleted Uranium is an issue and it wouldn’t cause any birth defects and so on. So we wrote this song about it with the help of a congress man that we worked with in 2003 and 2004. He was able to introduce legislation so there could be a real and authentic study about the use of depleted uranium. And that is one thing where we can say: Yeah, activism and music can put pressure on people in charge to get a real answer on it and not just a “yeah don’t worry about it, everything is fine.” That was one of the victories. But there are few. Little things matter as well though and they build up to something big. And of course do we always open eyes of people that haven’t been seeing the truth before that and that also matters a lot. Together we can all make changes. As little as they seem, everything matters. The people we are interacting with today will be the voters of tomorrow. So it is very important that musicians take their chance and support activism as well as getting people to join in with the ideas. Especially in the United States but also worldwide.
Maybe together we can make a bigger step.

Anti-Flag is in a position right now that wherever they go they have at least a couple hundred kids coming to the shows and know what they do and are interested in it as well. Of course in some cities it is more in some less. But it is the same way in Europe, in the US, Australia, Canada and even in Japan and such. There is different cities that seem to get more what you do than others. But it depends on what the local bands are doing in that area more than the bands are coming into town. Because if the local music scene is strong then there are also more people that come see the touring bands than if there is no strong music scene it that town. Here we continued talking about favorite places. Vienna was one of Pat’s favorites because the people there are great. Berlin is also fun because there is a strong music community. Birmingham is also a great place. …

Before we drifted off chatting about cities too much, I was told Pat that I thought it was really cool to be that close to their fans. Pat explained here that they simply come from a world where they play a show one day and their friends the next day, so there is no real fan – band separation. People that come to the show is great. But Anti-Flag would be watching Alexisonfire on stage just the same way everybody else does if they were not touring together right now. So there is no difference. We somehow try to break that separation. As well as encouraging people to start a band, so they can be on stage and Anti-Flag comes to watch their show if they play in Pittsburg or somewhere near. Anti-Flag is trying to break that boundary and show the people that they are no different. Another thing Anti-Flag did on this tour and also on the past one is, they brought the drums down to the crowd for the last song and have the kids play. That is really fun. And also because the drums are always so far back on the stage it is cool to be interacting with the kids in the end and have no separations.

Future goals the band has are mostly activism goals. And maybe all together we can make stuff like that happen. Let’s see.

A very interesting interview with a very interesting band. I think it was really cool to not talk about the music only but also talk about social aspects and to show how much we can change together. To always stay true to yourself and not sell your morals and thoughts in today’s world.

Thanks to Pat, the rest of Anti-Flag and everybody else in that special community.

Links:
Anti Flag Official