Interviews

 

WASP

 

Words: Rod Yates

 

There are many images you associate with the name WASP. Central to all of them, however, is founding frontman Blackie Lawless. Whether it be his brandishing a codpiece that shoots fireworks, mock-torturing a topless woman onstage or roaring the lyrics to the controversial Animal (Fuck Like A Beast) single, Lawless has been the perpetual enemy of good taste since he and three similarly minded mentalists – guitarists Chris Holmes and Randy Piper and drummer Tony Richards – formed in Los Angeles in 1982. Though his founding bandmates have since moved on, WASP’s formidable reputation as censor-baiting extremists has not, and it comes as something of a shock to hear the frontman reflect on his sizeable back catalogue and declare there to be one central, very human thread that links all the albums.

 

“I wasn’t even conscious of it until a few years ago, but if you look at every album that we’ve done, the one common thread throughout is, Who am I? Where have I been? And where am I going? What is this journey all about? That was as early on as [the single] I Wanna Be Somebody, the title alone tells you that. That’s become the common thread of where the band was headed all along.”

 

Of course, you’d be forgiven if you’d missed that, particularly as Lawless himself only recognised it recently. Misconceptions such as this have, however, plagued WASP since their inception, something that irks Lawless to this day.

 

“I never saw us as a shock rock band, that title always offended me,” he explains. “The one thing that people never got about the band, even in the beginning on the first tour, was I thought we were making a social comment. The rudest lesson I ever learned was that people were listening with their eyes, not their ears.”

 

Even Lawless has to acknowledge, however, that WASP were their own worst enemies in that regard – and, indeed, owed some of their early success to the controversy a song such as Animal (Fuck Like A Beast) caused when it made them the number one enemy of ’80s censorship lobby the PRMC. Such notoriety was a double-edged sword that, while blinding fans to their message, also earned WASP the kind of publicity money couldn’t buy.

 

“Absolutely,” agrees the frontman. “But as time goes by you start to say, ‘All right, we’ve got to take that double-edged sword away.’”

 

This process began in earnest with the band’s fourth album, 1989’s The Headless Children, a record Lawless today describes as a “protest album”. Its 1992 follow-up, The Crimson Idol, went one step further – a heady concept album dealing with the downside of fame, it was released at a time when most bands were only concerned about Cherry Pie. Fifteen years on, Lawless has resurrected the album, and last year embarked on a world tour in which WASP performed it in its entirety, before taking a 10-minute break and returning to the stage to perform a set of classics. This is the show fans will witness when Lawless brings the band to Australia for the first time in their 26-year career.

 

“You’re going to see something pretty unique,” he starts. “There was a full-length film that went with the album, and this film plays behind us the whole time it’s being performed. We shot it in ’92 and it was supposed to be a full-length movie, and it’s a really powerful piece of work, it’s quite emotional.”

 

Why was it never released as a film?

 

“When I finished the record, it took me years to get to the point where I could even listen to it cos it was such an intense experience for me. Making a record like this is quite different to making a regular record, because you have to flesh out the character, you’ve got to make him real. [The Crimson Idol centres around a fictitious rock star, Jonathon Steel, and his experiences of fame’s downside.] And I got to the point where I was really living the character while I was doing it. And it took me a long time when it was finished to get my head around what had happened with all that, it took a couple of years.”

 

Enough time has now passed that Lawless feels comfortable performing the album each night, before dipping further back into the band’s catalogue to perform a set of early classics. They’re songs, says the frontman, that carry many good memories.

 

“Yeah, I’m catching myself spectating every once in a while,” he smiles. “There’s been so much distance now that I can kind of look at them as though they’re somebody else’s piece of work, and you start to think to yourself, Wow, no wonder these songs were successful, cos these ain’t bad!”

 

 

 

[BACK TO INTERVIEWS]