Living Things - Wake The Fuck Up

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St Louis, Missouri isn't high on the list of desirable places to live in America - a predilection for right-wing politics, hard-line Christian fundamentalism and the resulting curfew-laden nanny state have combined to make life for young free-spirited people fairly unbearable. So when you and your brothers look like The Lost Boys compared to everyone else's Dawson's Creek, it's pretty certain sparks are going to fly in all directions.

It's in this environment that the three Berlin brothers who make up Living Things - singer/guitarist Lillian, bassist Eve and drummer Bosh, the first two named after their grandmothers and all three under the age of 25 - grew up, with politically active parents, a basement full of books by the likes of Chomsky, Plath and Burroughs, collective juvenile rap sheets as long as their arms and a fierce conviction that Something Wasn't Right.

Starsandheroes meets Living Things in London's semi-legendary (but in fact decidedly unglamorous) Columbia Hotel, and Lillian is trying to explain the St Louis mindset. "The Attorney General of America, this guy John Ashcroft, was the governor of Missouri - he's super-conservative. If you walk around the city saying anything other than 'I love Jesus and I respect my elders' they'll throw you in Juvenile Hall, so we had a lot of problems." He's being disingenuous, since he'll later confess to having once stabbed a schoolmate for stealing his cap gun - blameless they're not.

It seems you can't turn a corner without encountering another snarling, black-clad scuzzy garage rock band with nothing to say but the unquenchable desire to say it ear-perforatingly loudly. But if there's one aspect that separates Living Things from 99% of the current crop of angry young men, it's their tangible need to use their music as a catalyst to make people think clearly and act directly.

This is an attitude barely seen since The Dead Kennedys and Fugazi spent the '80s doing their best to cut the powers that be down to size with noise and intelligence. It certainly makes England's overtly politically active musicians - stand up, Albarn, 3D, Yorke and Martin - look like a bunch of ineffectual moaning minnies by comparison.

"Our direct message is that there's floods of information and opinion on everything from guns and politicians to your rights as a citizen," Lillian explains, "All we're saying is that when you're at school, you're not gonna hear about it, so go on the Internet, go look for it in the library, go look for it with your friends, just develop your own idea. I don't care if people are pro-Bush or not, I just want them to think."

Their shows are frequently shambolic - Bullit witnessed a messy, sweaty outing at Alan McGee's Death Disco in London, where the whole band was virtually falling off the tiny stage and singer Lillian gleefully pissed on a newspaper picture of Dubya. Lillian: "Normally we play until the equipment stops - if it takes us 10 songs or six, we just keep playing 'til we can't fucking play anymore. We don't use setlists."

At a recent show in America, the band split the audience between pro- and anti-Bushites and asked both sides to come up onstage and explain why they wanted him to win or lose the next election. And while this may sound like Living Things are doing for politics in rock what Le Tigre gamely attempt for feminism, Lillian insists they're not preaching or hectoring their audiences. In fact, Living Things are the closest musical equivalent to Michael Moore in existence - they're "big fans", of course.

With an album called Black Skies In Broad Daylight (Loog/Dreamworks) hitting shops in 2004 - Lillian describes it as feeling like "the march of an army" and we're inclined to believe him - and more UK shows to come, Living Things are more likely than most to fill heads with ideas and then rip them off by sheer force of volume. As Eve attests, "People seem to listen when you're turned up real loud!" You have been warned.

Charlie Ivens

Originally published in Bullit Magazine February 2004 issue.