If you’ve had even the most cursory encounter with JP’s discography – and that includes looking at pictures of any of his bands and deciding it’s not for you because they’re wearing the wrong t-shirts or wrong sized t-shirts – you’ll be familiar with one of the core tenants running through the abrasive yelping, swirls of feedback and binary riffing; confrontation.Just as The Locust leapt cat-like onto your face and tried to slice your nerve endings out with their sonic laser-scalpel, ‘From The Graveyard Of The Arousal Industry’, his autobiography, eschews meandering and preamble in favour of – bam – this is the deal, hitting you full-on with a menu of misfortune, bad decisions, prejudice and swagger. Despite being constantly dealt a bum hand by fate, Justin Pearson, bassist and/or vocalist of The Locust, Holy Molar, Some Girls, Swing Kids and the shirtless electro disco inferno that is his most recent project All Leather, isn’t after a cuddle and a hair tousle.
“Awe,” he says simply of the emotional reaction he hopes his text will provoke, adding, “Well just as I am with the music I’m part of, I don’t consider the people who check it out. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate people being interested in what I’m part of and what I do. But I don’t set out to appease people in any way. With music, we create what we want to create and if it’s received (good and/or bad) then great. The same mindset was part of my book as well. Of course, parts of it might ‘clear up’ that I’m not who some perceive me to be. But that is just a perk of the book existing I suppose.”
Though far from bloodless, JP’s retelling of events is almost from the perspective of an observer to his own life: calm, matter-of-fact and analytical.
“Since I’m not a writer per se, I just wrote little pieces here and there,” he explains. “I suppose it was set up like songs on an album for the most part. I wrote a story. Then another, and another. At some point, I put them together in a linear format, edited the crap out of it all, filled in some spaces that needed stuff added, subtracted some of the crap, then voila! For the most part, I guess I’m ‘detached’ from a lot of stuff. I suppose what one would assume me, or whoever writing stuff like I wrote, would need to be detached, I just realise that with the ‘heavy’ subject matter, I see that it can, or could always be worse. So let’s say my father’s death, perfect example. Yeah, it’s a horrible thing that I had to go though. But I saw it in a light that was objective. See, a lot of people deal with death. And a situation like that made me appreciate my mother more, and it made me appreciate life, circumstances, and ultimately it educated me, hardened me, and put me forth into the ‘real world’ at an early age. Going thought something like that makes getting your ass beat by jocks, skinheads and cops, not seem so bad. You know, I just say, at least I’m alive. And things will hopefully get better at some point. So I suppose that is detachment. But I’d like to just say that things I wrote about gave me the ability to put them into a worldly perspective.”
One recurring motif, shared by hardcore kuckledraggers and Cro-Magnon headbangers alike and closely related to their fear of the unknown and unconventional, is that of hardcore and metal’s last remaining acceptable prejudice. Racists are all escorted to a special subgenre tree house in which they can compose tuneless ditties about the master race in peace, but casual homophobia is as accepted as asking your mum to sew your patches on for you. Being naturally quite elfin is bad enough, but having the temerity to use a few cutting words when a spot of fist swinging (although there’s plenty of that in ‘…Arousal Industry’) would do, JP hears the words ‘faggot’ and ‘poseur’ so often they might as well be a ‘Shaft’-like backing track. He’s been embracing both of these things in terms of style and performance for a good long time, but his latest project in particular seems to be aimed squarely at tackling that final prejudice head-on.
“I think its a social issue that still needs to be addressed,” he insists, “you know, homophobia is the last accepted prejudice. I’m not gay, but I identify with the gay community, I’m part of it really. Plus punk ethics are rooted in gay culture. But ironically enough, I’ve been called the lowest common denominator of names, ‘faggot", from a really early age, maybe six or seven when kids first learned that was an ‘insult’ all the way up to maybe a few days ago. So yeah, it’s an important and relevant thing to bring up, be it in a book, or by a bands shtick. If an issue still exists, such as homophobia, then people who are progressive will find a way to combat that.”
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