Fucked Up

The evening is hot, sweltering, the air itself feverish. Only a few stragglers wander around Circolo Magnolia in Segrate during the sets by the opening bands – Seditius and Labradors, both Italian. It looks set to be a quiet show, for a small, close-knit crowd. But nothing stays quiet for long when Damian "Pink Eyes" Abraham, the burly vocalist and frontman of Fucked Up, is around.

I spot his massive presence at the merchandising table, busy selling t-shirts. He shakes my hand, a smile breaking out beneath his thick beard. "Thanks for coming": him, to me. I knew Damian had a very warm relationship with his fans, but I certainly wasn't expecting him to be the one thanking me. After the ritual autographs and photos with fans, he retreats backstage with the rest of the band.

The sets from Labradors and Seditius (the former convincing, the latter pointlessly histrionic) go by quickly, clearing the stage for the night's main act. The tension builds, the crowd grows thicker – no more than three hundred people at most – but the mood stays intimate and communal, a rarity for a hardcore show! The stage is small and the six members of Fucked Up are a bit cramped on it. Damian stands in the middle, flanked at the front by Sandy "Mustard Gas" Miranda (bass) and Ben "Young Governator" Cook (guitar).

Behind them, half-hidden by the amps, are the other two guitars: Mike "10,000 Marbles" Haliechuk and Josh "Concentration Camp" Zucker. Jonah "Guinea Beat" Falco (drums) rounds out the unlikely six-piece. They look casual, low-key and vaguely nerdy (Sandy's glasses in particular).

Seeing Abraham go from merch-table duty back to his post as singer feels like a kind of return to order, but as already noted, order doesn't last long. Pink Eyes' legendary showmanship is beyond imagining. At first he lingers centre stage, working up his devoted crowd, but by the closing chords of "Queen Of Hearts" he's already stripped off his shirt and hurled himself into the crowd, which welcomes him with open arms and drags him to the far end of the stage.

He hands the microphone to the crowd, inviting them to follow the backing vocals traded between Sandy and Ben. “Hello my name is David, you are Veronica” is the motto that seals a pact of interactivity between performer and audience, a call to get involved in the music. The powerful riffs of the three guitars carve out moments of intense narrative pathos, with bright major tonalities that turn psychological lyricism into epic drama.

During “The Other Shoe”, the fourth wall disappears for good. Damian wades into the crowd in a whirl of hugs, handshakes and winks, steals a hat and seems genuinely moved with joy. What makes the spell ambiguous is the song's climax, marked by the mantra “We're dying on the inside / dying on the inside”.

He comes across as a follower of David Thomas (in girth too), one who has shed his schizophrenic torments and finally found peace with himself and the world, yet retains the same charisma. The rest is hardcore fury borrowed from Husker Du and pushed toward territories that shun the post- label to wallow instead in noise and progressive temptations. None of this, however, is taken to its extreme, and the live experience still comes across as fun, with a dose of theatricality somewhere between the surreal and the grotesque (“Turn the Season” sung while perched on a stage scaffold). The frontman's sermons, meanwhile, ramble across the most disparate topics, from Dario Argento's cinema to the heat of the night - a drenched-in-sweat “I hate Summer” is his epigrammatic verdict.

After the encore, the final farewell is slow to come, with thanks and handshakes extended even to the bodyguards. “Thank you, sincerely” is the heartfelt, moved goodbye - but only from the stage, not from his fans.

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