This interview was done about  3 years ago (2002) by Thomas from Glow In The Dark Magazine/Fire Walk With Me Records, Yummy Record Store and thousands of other things.  Thomas is a great guy, I only just met him for the first time a month ago when he set up a show for Mr. Willis Of Ohio in Vienna.  He just kept cracking me up.  A little younger than me, he's one of those European icons, still here, still carrying the torch.  (I know that will crack him up) :-)

- how did you grow up and get into punk rock? switzerland always seems to have had some kind of scene of their own, with relatively few connections to the rest of europe/world/elsewhere, did this make things any harder? what were your role models/influences/inspirations (both musically and non-musically) back then, and how has that changed? what inspires and excites you now?

I grew up in a middle class home.  My dad used to make good money but he drank and whored it all alway, so we were always broke.  I never got any sort of financial aid when I went to college.  On paper we were doing quite well, in reality we were just getting by thanks to my dad’s mom who kept giving him money.

Until I was 14 I had to go to church every sunday, and then after that drive an hour to grandma’s who made us got to church in the first place. 

How could she force the entire family to go to church?  Well, by threatening to cut off dad financially, of course.  But those are the sort of things you only start to realise when you get older.

My grandma was a Christian Scientist, meaning she was not supposed to believe in material things such as money and doctors.  Christian Scientists believe that all is spiritual and everything bad is only material and not real, which means you supposedly heal yourself by thinking good thoughts and letting the other members of the church pray for you.  Kind of a freak show, but still nowhere near as bad as catholicism, if you ask me.  Christian Scientists are also straight edge and anti-authorian (at least they were in our church in Zurich), so not half bad, I guess.  Of course being forced to attend service every week, quickly turned me into an atheist.  That was back in the day, when there was school on saturdays as well - so you never got to sleep in.  Not once.  Saturday was school, Sunday was Sunday school.  14 years of this shit will turn anyone into an atheist.

I went to high school and got into hardcore relatively late, around the time I graduated when I was 18 or so.  I’d always been into independent, guitar-driven music, it just took me a little while to get into the good stuff.  I didn’t have friends or a boyfriend who was into punk, I had to discover it myself.

I suppose Switzerland, and Zurich in particular, has had a pretty good scene throughout. Plenty of shows at ever changing venues, some good stores, squats, labels, people who care etc.  Basically everything you need to have a good scene.  At the same time it’s typically Swiss to keep a low profile and not do anything risky or too outrageous, so what you get is quite a self-contained, confined little scene.  There aren’t even any contacts with the French and Italian speaking parts of Switzerland worth mentioning.  It’s quite sad, really, to live in a tiny little country and have only a radius of about 100 miles.  But we’ve descended from peasants, you know, maybe we just like to keep to ourselves. I, for myself find it a very constrictive, stifling environment, both geographically and creatively.  I don’t want to bash the place too much, there are plenty of genuine, nice kids here, but the scene feels quite fragmented and boring, at least in my opinion. 

What attracted me to hardcore was how underground it was.  It appealed to my sense of “hunting and collecting”, and I don’t mean record collecting.  Just getting out there, hunting down the bands, zines, records and shows that seemed interesting to me. I never enjoyed being catered to.  I never craved the obvious.  Hardcore was perfect for that, because it meant I had to become active.  If you don’t roll up your sleeves and get down to work, nothing happens in this scene, if you don’t do it yourself, noone else is going to do it for you.

The very first bands I listened to were Sheer Terror (not kidding), Underdog, Against The Wall, Face Value and Youth Of Today.  I read all the early Henry Rollins stuff.  Minor Threat, Embrace, early Fugazi, I loved that stuff.  I loved the entire concept of being “hard” - as stupid as that may sound now.  It was all about being different and uncompromising.  Up then everything in my life had been a huge compromise.  Just being Swiss is the quintessential compromise - I mean, come on, six million people and four languages?  You couldn’t make this shit up, if you tried.

YOT got me into vegetarianism, Dead Silence got me into veganism (I’ve since gone back to vegetarianism, though, sissy me), and the Hippycore releases, especially Pollution Circus and Seein’ Red got me into anarchism/communism.  As often as it seems nowadays, that lyrics about animal rights or any of the standard hardcore themes, seem redundant, I really think they’re not.  These points should be made over and over again, they should be screamed by kids all over the world..  There’ll always be somebody hearing them for the first time.   So, yes, this whole sense of urgency, this whole “fuck you, I’m not going to play along” is what hardcore meant to me then and what it still means to me today.  I don’t know when everybody got so fucking complacent and pleased with themselves. “Look I just released a new record and isn’t it pretty!?”  You can take “pretty” and shove it up your ass.  To me hardcore is about being ugly and dorky and weird.  It’s about spitting when you talk, and tripping when you cross the street.  It’s about falling down a lot and not taking yourself seriously.  And it should never, never ever be about being cool.

The things that inspired me then were probably more black and white than what’s important to me now.  When you’re young you crave easy answers, there’s no denying that.  If anything, growing older (and I just turned 34), means that everything and everyone is much more complicated than you would like it.  You can run around and hate everybody who doesn’t conform to your version of “righteous living”, but where does that leave you?  Are you going to hate your parents, your sister, your brother because they eat meat?  Are you going to hate the guy standing next to you at a show jobbing at a store that sells products that exploit the third world?  Where is all that contempt going to take you?

One of the things that I’ve learned is that you can’t change the big things, but you can change the little things.  And the very first thing you can change is yourself.  You can decide what kind of human being you want to be, you can choose what morals you want to abide by,  you can decide whether you’re going to be serious about this or not.  And just because you can’t change everything doesn’t mean that you can’t change anything.  Am I teaching moderation?  I don’t know, I just don’t want you to burn out half way through.  So many people burn out.    It’s fifteen years later and there’s virtually no-one left of all the people who used to make up this (swiss) scene.  Don’t go around pledging “true to life”, and all that other shit, don’t set up these fucking traps for yourself.  Allow yourself some room for failure.  Allow yourself some time to grow. 

It’s the same story over and over again; people set up these huge standards and sooner or later some of them realise that they can’t go through with it anymore.  They say they’ll be SXE (that’s just one example) for the rest of their lives and they make a big stink about it, then at some point they think that maybe a beer every now and then isn’t exactly bringing this world to a halt, but they can’t stop there.  They’ve gone back on their word once and then it feels like they can just go back on everything else and the floodgates open.  They do a 180 turn on everything.  Hey, if people are gonna judge them for breaking the edge, they might as well judge them for eating meat, doing heroin, hanging out a strip bars and - worst of all - growing a mustache.  Don’t let this happen to you.  Don’t let your life be ruled by other people’s expectations of you.

I know I make it sound very easy, deciding who you want to be and then going through with it.  In reality this is one of the hardest things to do.  Our lives are defined by that constant ambiguity, by that gap between who we really are and who we aspire to be.  Maybe hardcore is a means to make that gap smaller, because it empowers us to take control of our own lives and not be dominated by what the rest of society tells us to be. 

The things that inspire me now...  It’s the kids that are into it right now, at this difficult time, when hardcore has become so fragmented, so watered down, it’s the kids that get it.  The other day a sixteen year old ordered the coolest records (yes, vinyl) from me, told me how much he liked Yage and that just made my day.  It’s meeting people that take an interest who’re open-minded and nice.  And it’s not high concept bands or people, where everything is an act, and their attitude makes it so hard to get through to them.  It’s definitely about people that are nice.   I know it sounds too fucking stupid, but I’m just so incredibly tired of attitude.  If you can’t say a nice word to me, if you’re too fucking cool to even look me in the eye, then what do you think it is you’re doing here?  I have no respect for shit talkers and whiners.  I have no respect for people who are quick to blame and scared shitless of taking an open-eyed look at themselves.

 did you ever think about leaving it all behind - and if so, why didn't you do it?

I think I can honestly say that I never once thought about “leaving it all behind”.  I can’t really imagine it right now, but even if there was ever going to be a time when I no longer felt like listening to hardcore I would still carry with me the ideas and the beliefs that I got from this scene.  It’s become a part of me.  I don’t think I could leave it behind. 

Modern life is all about giving up power.  They want us to sit back and consume.  Nobody wants us to care.  Let’s just lean back and hand over all control to the pigs with the fat wallets.  Let’s give up every kind of responsibility, let’s shut up and look the other way. 
I can’t imagine losing that kind of understanding of the world.  If anything, with the years I’ve become even angrier at what is being done to us.  So, that is the “political” me.  On the personal front, I don’t know...  To quote country singer Iris DeMent:  “Easy’s getting harder every day”.  I often think of myself as a total fuck up.  I spent the last 20 nights since my birthday thinking “34”, “34”, “34” - an endless mantra that I can’t shake when I try to go to sleep.  I’m not happy with what I have achieved so far.  I think I’m capable of much, much more but I keep holding myself back.  (It’s of course, “vintage hardcore”, this self doubt, this gnawing feeling at the back of your head that you could have done so much more.)  The older you get the harder it is to change.  Sometimes I wish I could get somebody to shake me and yell at me:  “Come on, get up, old girl, you can do much better than that!”  But that never happens.

I think there is something very self destructive, something very mournful inside of me.  When it comes down to it, I think my life is governed by fear.  Fear of failure, fear of not deserving to be loved.  That is something I need to work on.  Unfortunately hardcore lets me live with this fear and cultivate it even further.  This is a scene that is very forgiving towards fuck ups and often times that’s not helping.

Then again hardcore has shown me that I can be anything and anyone I want.  It’s taught me a healthy dose of disrespect towards institutions, money, and people who think they’re more powerful than me.
What one man can do, so can another.  It’s all in the game.