Fishbone Bring 40 Years of Fire And Fury Back To Australia

For over four decades, Fishbone have been one of music’s great genre disruptors, fusing punk, ska, funk and soul into a sound that is both socially conscious and musically innovative. This September, the legendary Los Angeles outfit return to Australia for the first time in fifteen years, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of their ground breaking debut album, performing the record in full alongside fan favourites from across their career. Their Australian tour arrives in the wake of Fishbone’s long-awaited ninth studio album Stockholm Syndrome, released last June and marking their first full-length LP in more than twenty years. The album is a real and powerful statement on modern life and picks up where the band left off in 1995, tackling politically charged themes alongside reflections on life, relationships and redemption. The record continues in the spirit that first made Fishbone one of the most influential alternative bands of the 1980s and 1990s.

In Your Face remains the cornerstone of Fishbone’s legacy, the album that introduced the world to Fishbone’s brilliance and helped redefine the possibilities of punk and ska. Earlier this year, the band celebrated the record with a special fortieth anniversary reissue, paired with Cover Your Face, a tribute album featuring reimagined Fishbone songs from artists across the globe, including Patrick Stump, Wheatus and Silversun Pickups.Emerging from the Los Angeles punk scene, Fishbone quickly carved out a reputation for their high-energy performances and fearless engagement with political and social issues. The band has always thrived on resilience, adaptability, and reinvention, weathering decades of industry shifts, internal struggles, and line- up changes – yet their mission remains the same: to push boundaries, challenge injustice, and create music and art in a way that only Fishbone can. Front man and founding member Angelo Moore talks to Rob Lyon about the tour.

Fifteen years is a long time. Did you worry that time’s got away from you and that it might not happen, that you could get back?
Fifteen years? No shit. Really?

Yeah!
Man. Well, I didn’t think it was that long, but you know, time flies when you’re fighting the forces of evil and winning.

Okay. Forces of evil? What do you mean there? Is that just doing what you do?
Doing what I do, man. Making sure that the music stays afloat, staying sober, being a dad, being a husband, I just went through a departure with that, so that was a little challenging. But that’s still all the things in life, that happen as you try to stay afloat and keep your integrity to your music and your art. And Fishbone, I don’t consider us mainstream, so if you’re not mainstream, then it’s not really too much of an easy way to go when you’re picking the other route, which sometimes doesn’t necessarily agree with how society runs sometime, if you tell the truth, and I mean all the truth. Especially because Fishbone, we have our own truth as black men in America. Living in a white society, we see some of the flaws in racism and stuff like that, and we end up talking about it and singing about it in our music. That’s not all that we sing about, but it’s a part of it, and that’s some of the subject matters that can get you shunned if you talk about it. But, you know, one of ’em is racism… we got a song called Racist Piece of Shit. You heard about that one?

Yeah, I have.
That’s the one, that’s the one that got banned. Right. So I guess because it’s banned, people know about it more. ‘Cause they always like to hear about shit that gets banned or hidden.

I guess it’s just as relevant now as it ever has been before. I know we only see what’s on the news here in Australia, but is it as bad or worse as what it has ever been in America?
Man, I think it’s just as bad, but because people can see it on cell phones, they can capture all this shit on cell phones on the internet now, so people can see what’s going on. I don’t even know if I want to call it worse or if it’s worse because people see it now. You know, you see and you hear about this shit a lot more where it was easier to hide before and now it’s not and because people see it more, you can definitely comment on it more when it’s available to see.

Celebrating forty years or over forty years is an incredible achievement. How do you feel about that milestone?
Well, it’s a miracle. It’s a miracle! I’m glad that I’ve been able to survive and endure it. I’m glad I’ve been able to achieve some sobriety throughout the journey. If I wasn’t able to achieve any sobriety throughout the journey, I don’t think I would be able to be here to sustain Fishbone and what we’ve created and sustain it throughout the different line-ups that Fishbone has been through.

Is that part of the secret to longevity, keeping it fresh and having those line-up changes whether it’s good, bad or indifferent?
I guess that’s the secret to longevity to sustain it no matter what. But if you’re going to sustain it no matter what, you got to be able to have a thick skin and you got to have the strength. You have to be able to apply unconditional love, toleration, forgiveness, patient strength, grace, endurance, and sometimes numb to get past all of the different pitfalls and hurdles of what it takes to sustain a legacy.

So when you celebrate an album, which is a focus of this tour, In Your Face, what does that album mean to you now?
Well, it was our manager’s idea, Pablo Matthias, to do an In Your Face album play tour and it was his idea to do a double album release. So there’s In Your Face and then there’s Cover Your Face where we had different artists that came out of the underground to reinterpret the songs on In Your Face. I’m glad we couldn’t really get any prominent artists to do these covers. You would think that a lot of these prominent artists would come running, but they didn’t. But we got a lot of underground artists and I cherish the underground way more than I do pop culture because I always use the analogy of a tree, right? You got the tree. If you look at a tree, the roots spread out wider than the top of the tree does. So the roots are sturdy. They may be dirty, but they’re sturdy. They’re a whole lot sturdier than the top of the tree is. A storm can come by or a tsunami can come by and wash the top of that tree and break that top of that tree off and send it down the river. But the roots remain underground. So when all of that shit’s over, because the roots are still there, the tree can still grow.

That’s pretty good! That’s solid! But how do you find playing it start to end?
Oh yeah. We playing the whole album from start to end. Yep. We sure are. We did a little rehearsing to make sure that we had all of the songs good enough for presentation and so now when we come down there, we going to present ’em all to y’all.

What moments stand out from when In Your Face was released?
In Your Face? Oh, well, it was the original line-up. I do remember that. I think we took part in Lollapalooza, some Warped Tour shows, but we played a lot. We toured and we spread that word. You know, it’s hard, it’s kind of hard for me to remember all the details, man. Whether it was easy or hard, it happened and we survived. I’m glad I survived this long. I survived all the way through it. I didn’t quit. I didn’t stop. I kept going .

Is there anything you would have changed or done differently or do things happen for reason?
Back then we weren’t really too concerned about record company contracts and what they had to say and words like perpetuity and what that means. That means forever and ever and outer space through the black hole, through the event horizon and on into your other life, the record company owns all of your shit. They own all of your publishing and your rights and everything to your music. Then if they decide they want to forget about you and move on to something else, you don’t have any control over your own music or your art. Lucky for us, our manager Pablo Matthias, he was able to help us get our masters back up to a certain point after a thirty‑year period. When you’re still around after thirty years, you get a five‑year window to get all your masters back and pretty much it’s a song on the record called Dog Eat Dog, which is about that. We got a video about that too on YouTube. It’s a lot of videos on YouTube, man. Fishbone has a lot of videos on YouTube from the Stockholm Syndrome that you can check out. It’s good, man.

I’m glad you’ve mentioned Stockholm Syndrome, awesome album. Is it still important for you to keep being creative and keep pushing forward with new Fishbone music?
Yeah, it’s definitely important, man. Especially if you got it in you. If you got the music and art in you to do that, then you should go ahead and do it. Not only do you get it out of yourself, if you don’t get the music and art out of yourself, that can be damaging. But if you don’t get it out for the people that are listening, that could be damaging too, because you leave a lot of people uninformed. By the way it’s been turning out, Fishbone has been informing a lot of people about life, music, art, poetry, and informative about the world we live in and the society that we live in.

Did it feel like, particularly with the line-up changes, a moment, a triumph finishing this one?
I guess that’s just the way the cosmic boomerang set it up, so with some of our band members leaving, you get to a point where you go, well, do I still want to do this shit? Or do I want to stop and do some music or some art elsewhere. It got to a point where I said, well, that’s when you start praying and shit . That’s when you start praying, right? You start praying and wishing and hoping and all of that shit, and you throw your wishes out, you throw the cosmic boomerang out there, and then when that cosmic boomerang comes back with your prayer answered, you get your prayer answered with everything else that boomerang caught on the way out there and coming back karmically and spiritually and everything else, man.

So fortunately we were able to continue Fishbone with some new band members, JS and James from New York, from Harlem and Queens and then Hassan Hurd from Oakland, and those are the new guys, right? Then you got Spacey T, which was in the Special Forces line-up for Fishbone, which was like a big chunk of Fishbone right there. Then Chris Dowd, the original member, he was there in the beginning and then he left for twenty years and then he came back. We have Chris Dowd back in the band now and so now we have a new beginning, and we were able to squeeze out the Stockholm Syndrome.

It’s been a real privilege talking to you and we can’t wait to see you out here in Adelaide at The Gov.
Yeah, man, thanks for having me. Oh, so look up, check out fishbone.net and then check out drmadvibe.com. D‑R‑M‑A‑D‑V‑I‑B‑E.com, man. My website is rebuilt on steel poles, not stilts now. Also check out the brandnewstep.com, which is also on my website. That’s my contemporary project called A Brand New Step, man and we got a shit ton of stuff on YouTube. I got my YouTube channel and also I got a Patreon channel, a bunch of really good stuff on there too, man. So I got a lot of stuff going.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Fishbone on the following dates, tickets from Destroy All Lines…