OOS: “Belgium has a good hardcore/punk/trash scene with bands as Reproach and Shredder. Recently Kingterror released a split with Agathocles and now Cut Here! Released its first 7″ Circus on the French Who Cares? Records. Is Furious 80’s influenced hardcore punk on the rise?”
Christophe – CH: “I guess Dead Stop sparked interest in the ‘subgenre’ again a couple of years ago. So did the Negative Approach reunion. I’m not too sure if the Belgian ‘scene’ is still very much into that kinda stuff. But nevertheless, the last couple of years Reproach and Sunpower are finally getting the recognition for being awesome. In Belgium, but also abroad. And that’s cool.
The resurgence of fast and aggressive 80’s hardcore has, as far as I’m concerned, reached its peak and is on a slight down slide again. But the genre is still pretty popular in some places. Like in Holland, where they even have festivals devoted to fast and furious music.
And Dennis from Refused has AC4 now, which is actually some kind of Swedish version of Sunpower, I guess.
Furthermore, bands like Shredder, Kingterror, The Furious, … Those are just good guys.
Basically, we don’t really care what kind of punk/hardcore you play. As long as you’re good people, we might actually give a fuck about you. If you’re not good people, which is the case in 99.9 percent of the world population, we’d rather see you die as soon as possible.”
OOS: “We play fast. We are angry. We laugh. We drink. We only need fifteen minutes on stage to ruin your night. We suck. But you suck harder. This is quite a statement to introduce Cut Here! Don’t you think?”
Christophe – CH: “I guess that just sums up who we are. I spent almost 3 minutes on writing that ‘biography’, which is more than what we spent on writing some of our songs. And honestly, we never had the ambition to become a good band and we never really wanted to be taken seriously. Strangely enough, some people do think we’re pretty good and respect us for some of our statements. Idiots…”
OOS: “The history of Cut Here! is one with ups and downs. It all started as a side project from The Struggle (RIP) about tree years ago. Cut Here! went on a break and now you are back with a new line-up, new songs and a first release. Have you guys found your second breath?”
Christophe – CH: “Well, the break wasn’t really our choice. People just didn’t ask us to play shows. And if people don’t ask us, we don’t play. That’s probably the main philosophy behind this band. I’m not really sure if we even needed a second breath. We just say “yes’ to some things people ask us to do, and we’ll keep doing that as long as we have fun doing it. For example, we probably never would’ve recorded the 7″ if Ali (from Who Cares?) hadn’t asked us after one of our shows. Since he asked nicely, we agreed and went on to record our songs.”
OOS: “The 7″ is out on Who Cares? Records. How did you get in contact with that label and was there no Belgium label interested?”
Christophe – CH: “Well, funny story…. We played a very lousy show at JH Tessloo in February. Really, we sucked that night. Ali from Who Cares? Records was at that show, and for some reason he was impressed. Strangely enough, he wanted to put out a 7” because of one simple song we play at the end of our set, a song that took 5 minutes to write takes 23 seconds to play. It had the lyrics “Beer, drugs, sex… I just wanna…”. But Ali never really heard those three simple words and thought Captain Crack (our singer) yelled something that sounded like “Blap”.
We thought that was really funny, so we agreed to do the 7″ and we named the song “Blap” in honor of Ali.
I have no idea if there was a Belgian label interested, because we never even cared to look for a label. Like I said: we just do things if people ask us to do them and if we want to do them. Somehow, this works out just fine.”
OOS: “The songs are powerful and fast. The music is in your face hardcore/punk/trash. Is it the high grade of pop (the attitude, the fashion,…) in the hardcore punk scene that made you not to choose for some fashionable hardcore, bringing punk and hardcore back to its roots?”
Christophe – CH: “No. We all love pop music. Of course we have some interest in 80’s punk, hardcore and thrash. I personally think it’s probably the best period for hardcore punk. But we just decided to make fast and short songs because they are easy to write, easy to remember and easy to play. Once you know them well enough, you don’t need rehearsals anymore. We’re extremely lazy. Simple proof of that is that we still only wrote 10 songs. In three years time.”
OOS: “How are the reactions so far?”
Christophe – CH: “I don’t know. We’ve seen one review so far, and the dude thought we were “one of the best bands from the world”. Nice to read. And funny because he actually wrote “from the world”, but I thought that was a little exaggerated.
Anyway, I think we sold more than 100 copies just in pre-orders. So I guess people must like it. Or they just like the artwork. Which really the only aspect of the record that’s actually worth anything.
Captain Crack did the limited edition circus tent. And a talented friend and tattoo artist from Bruges, Jenzie, did the clown. Thanks Jen for making our record look good! http://www.jenzie.be/”
OOS: “What will the future bring for Cut Here!? Any special plans?”
Christophe – CH: “We have no future plans. We never did. So far, we have a couple of shows planned early 2011 and I hope to get a couple more. Hopefully we can do some outside of Belgium. And who knows? We might even write some new songs for some compilation or a split record or whatever. But don’t get your hopes up on that. Because that means we’ll have to rehearse. Ugh…rehearsals.”
OOS: “thanks for the interview.”
OUT OF STEP FANZINE 