Destroyers from Seattle

PETER URPETH gets the lowdown on a Gaelic punk band from Seattle ahead of their short tour of Scotland.

SEATTLE based Gaelic punk band Mill a h-Uile Rud, meaning ‘destroy everything’ in a basic English translation, announced their Scottish tour dates this week, and with radio time a-plenty and a secured fan base in the Gaidhealtachd, gig tickets are sure to be as close as the burgeoning punk /DIY / thrash scene north of the Central Belt border gets to having ‘must have’ status.

Working out of a base in a remote rural setting close to Seattle, that at one time was famously without modern communication devices other than the band’s instruments, this interview with the band was conducted via e-mail – a medium that, it turns out, is well suited to the erudite eloquency of the band. Mill’s member Tim supplied the answers.

Arts Journal: When did you realise that Gaelic was the way forward for the band, and why?
 
Tim: Sìne (our drummer) and I have been studying Gaelic for eight or ten years now and when we decided to put a punk band together, it was the obvious choice to do it in Gaelic.  My friends and I are involved in the underground DIY punk scene in Seattle and so “making it big” was never something that we were too worried about.  We just wanted to play in a band and have fun.  We didn’t worry that singing in Gaelic would get in the way of being successful.
 
Ironically, we are probably doing much better because we are singing in Gaelic.  There are a whole lot of little, grimy punk bands like us in Seattle and around the world, and many of them quite good, but there are only two punk bands that sing in Gaelic, us and Oi Polloi, and so we kind of stand out from the crowd that way.  Also many folks involved in the Gaelic revival have come out to give us tons of help.  Niall Iain at Rapal on BBC Radio nan Gaidheal has been particularly supportive, playing our record all the time.  There is a thirst out there for new music in Gaelic.  Everyone loves the old songs, myself included, but people, particularly young people, want new music too, loud music, wild rock in Gaelic.  The Welsh have it – why can’t we?

“A language is not something you have and keep like a treasure in a box.  It is something you use or it is nothing.  And in our sad world, using Gaelic is an increasingly radical act.”

AJ: What are you setting out to achieve?
 
Tim: We love playing punk and touring and meeting people.  First and foremost, we are doing this to have fun.  We also want to do our part to help Gaelic survive and thrive.  Gaelic is in rough shape just now, rougher than many realize, and rougher than some are even prepared to admit.  Gaelic is having a particularly tough time among teenagers and young adults and more rock and popular music in Gaelic can only help.  We are also a punk band and we have a philosophy that we bring to our music.  We sing about openness and pure freedom and a healthy distain for the hypocrisy of modern civilization.

AJ: Is there much of a Gaelic community in Seattle, and what do they make of it?
 
Tim: The Gaelic community is surprisingly large.  It is made up of mostly learners but there are a few native-speakers scattered in the group too.  I don’t think that there is much of an overlap between punks in Seattle and Gaelic-speakers in Seattle, so I am not sure what the reaction would be.  We have sold a lot of albums in the States however.  We have sold over a hundred albums in the one Celtic imports store closest to where we live.
 
AJ: Is Gaelic an easy language to bring to punk music?
 
Tim: Yea.  That was no problem.  Gaelic is a very wide and rich language and you can be saintly and poetic in it if you want to, or you can just as easily be foul and unruly in it as well.  I really enjoy working with the dark side of Gaelic because it is quite rich and doesn’t traditionally get as much attention, at least not in the last 200 years.  The Victorian “Celtic Twilightists” cultivated an image of Gaelic as a blessed and pure language that was fading over the horizon in the face of the impurity and corruption of modernity.  What garbage!  Gaels are humans and capable of being both good and evil, spiritual and worldly, the full range of human experience.  The poem “Moladh air Deagh Bhod” by the great bard, Alastair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, is as naughty today as it was in 1730 when it was first published.
 
AJ: Has there been any resistance to the band and its Gaelic in the States?
 
Tim: Not at all.  The underground punk scene is international and bands come touring through Seattle from all over, singing in every language from Japanese to German.  We also have a large home-grown Spanish punk scene in the States.  We played a show in LA with two bands from LA that sang in Spanish and two bands from Tijuana that also sang in Spanish.  We didn’t understand each other at all but we had a great time.
 
That received anti-Gaelic bias that is so common over there is a British thing, I am afraid.  We are not raised with it in the atmosphere so the punks over here only see Gaelic as something interesting and really, really cool.

AJ: Is Gaelic very politicised in the USA? Are you?
 
Tim: Gaelic is not politicised in the USA because there is no real context or meaning for that here.  We, however, are super-zealous about it.  We have lived in Scotland and Ireland from time to time (Sìne is from Scotland originally) and all our punk friends over there are crazy fanatic about Gaelic.  You just can’t learn this language and spend all those years of effort and not start to feel protective about it.  We are particularly good friends with Ruairidh, the lead singer of Oi Polloi and we will be going on tour with them in Europe.  They started their band in English in 1981 but Ruairidh has since learned Gaelic and the band’s last two releases are all in the language.  Ruairidh is quite zealous about Gaelic and he was one of the first people to teach us Gaelic years ago.

“The European punks are crazy by all accounts and Oi Polloi tours are world-famous for being completely out of control, so it should be a blast.  I hope we don’t get arrested.”

AJ: How did the band get together?
 
Tim: Sìne and I started playing together in Edinburgh in 2002.  It used to be that renting a practice room in Banana Row Studios in Inverleith mid-week was just £5 an hour, so we would get together with three or four other punks and make an awful noise for an hour or two and then go next door to the pub and get a pint.  When we moved back to Seattle, we hooked up with our old friend, Chris, on bass, and we started working on songs for real.  We have played all around Seattle and up and down the West Coast, but this tour in Scotland and Europe will be our first international adventure.  The European punks are crazy by all accounts and Oi Polloi tours are world-famous for being completely out of control, so it should be a blast.  I hope we don’t get arrested.
 
AJ: What were the founding influences on the music you play?
 
Tim: I have been a punk for a long time.  My first punk album was The Clash’s green album, which I got when I was eleven.  Since then, I have been doing punk in one way or another, playing in bands or putting on shows.  My friends and I owned a punk club on the East Coast of the States for a while in the late 90s and I got a chance to see every little punk band that was touring at that time.  It was at that club that I met Chris and Sìne who were also deep in the East Coast punk/emo scene.
 
I have very wide tastes both within punk and musically in general.  I listen to a lot of hip hop just now, and I particularly like stuff that is coming out of the Dirty South movement in rap, Ludacris, Outkast, Cee-lo and the likes.  I think there is some of that Dirty South style in our music.  As far as punk goes, I started out in hardcore, and then moved to melodic punk and emo as I got older.  I still listen to everything but I think Mill a h-Uile Rud sounds most like that early melodic emo, say like Jawbreaker perhaps.  Chris is really into the hardest of crust-core, and Sìne is into old-timey and bluegrass influenced punk.  I write all the lyrics, and Chris and I put the music together, although when we work out the final arrangement, Sìne has veto powers, as we can’t start the song until she yells a h-aon, a dha, a trì, a ceithir.
 
AJ: What can Gaelic offer the world that maybe lost if the language fails?
 
Tim: A language is a culture.  It is a growing understanding within the social sciences that whatever the connection between language and culture, when a language dies, the associated culture soon follows, and if anything remains, it is a pale shadow of the former cultural richness.  6,000 languages around the globe are threatened with extinction in the face of the over-whelming juggernaut of Anglo-American consumer culture.  Like all these other languages, Gaelic offers us thousands of years of human experience and inspiration, which cannot be retrieved if the language is lost.
 
I also believe that diversity is valuable in and of itself.  The world is so much more interesting and fun because there are so many different languages and cultures kicking around.  How much poorer the world will be if someday we are all speaking Californian English, eating Big Macs, and working at Walmart.  The way things are going, something like that really could happen in my lifetime.
 
AJ: Do you have a message for Gaelic punks this side of the Atlantic?
 
Tim: Speak Gaelic.  It really doesn’t matter where you are from, what’s the colour of your skin, whether you win a gold medal at the Mòd, if you are a respected bard, or even if you are the handsome and talented singer of a world-famous Gaelic punk band, when it comes to the survival of Gaelic, the single most important thing is speaking the language at every opportunity.  

A Gael is someone who speaks Gaelic.  That is the only definition of a Gael that has any meaning in these dark days, and I am not just saying that because I come from Seattle, but because the language depends on it.  A language is not something you have and keep like a treasure in a box.  It is something you use or it is nothing.  And in our sad world, using Gaelic is an increasingly radical act.
 
Mill a h-uile Rud play at:

• Mercat Bar, Edinburgh, Friday 18 March 2005
• Rapal broadcast, BBC Radio nan Gaidheal, Tuesday 22 March 2005
• Golf Club, Stornoway, Wednesday 23 March 2005 (tbc)
• 13th Note, Glasgow, Monday 11 April 2005

© Peter Urpeth, 2005