This is a longer version of an interview that will appear in an upcoming issue of Absolute Underground.

The Flatliners

Over the past decade or so, Toronto’s The Flatliners have proven themselves to be an unstoppable force in Canadian punk. Whether it’s as teenage ska-punk darlings or the melodic-hardcore hit-machine they are today, they’ve assembled an army of passionate fans both domestically and abroad. Absolute Underground’s Michael Luis sat down with front-man Chris Cresswell this past June in Vancouver during its iteration of the Levitation festival.

Absolute Underground: Pretty simple starter question, how’s the tour been so far?

Chris Cresswell: The tour’s been great. We started last week in Edmonton with two shows. One was with Choke and the next one was our own headlining show. We have a lot of great friends in Edmonton showing a lot of love there. It was cool, we kicked off the tour with four solid days in Edmonton just hanging out, but when we left Edmonton we felt like fuckin’ zombies – party zombies. But it’s great, man. We haven’t left out west since the fall of 2014 I think. For our standards, that’s a while.

AU: I want to ask you a bit about the band you’re bringing along for most of this trek, Together Pangea.

CC: Yeah.

AU: You’re both punk, but two different strands of punk. You’re a bit more from the melodic hardcore and skate punk side of things and they’re a bit more of the L.A., Burger Records-type scene.

CC: Totally Burger. Real Burger.

AU: So what’s that like, having these two bands from different punk niches cross-pollinating?

CC: Last night was the first show with them, but it was great. It’s the kinds of things we want to be doing these days, because there are so many great avenues under the punk highway. It’s funny to me that without really realizing it you can – there are so many bands that just tour with these types of bands. There are these bands that go one route and bands that go the other way. As much as bands do the cross-pollination, it doesn’t happen as much with smaller bands anymore. We are just fans of that band and saw that they were doing Levitation when we got confirmed for it, that we were excited to just try it out. We’ve been super lucky to tour with a lot of bands we’ve grown up listening to and stuff, but we are of a lot of different musical minds as well. It’s nice to show our fans this other side of what we’re into and that it’s okay to be into more than just “this kind” of punk and “that kind” of rock n’ roll, y’know what I mean? It’s just music anyways so there shouldn’t be any fuckin’ rules.

AU: I’ve always liked Fucked Up for that.

CC: Yeah, they’re a perfect example of that.

AU: They’ll do a tour with like Terror and some other nasty hardcore bands, then tour with some softer indie-rock bands.

CC: They did a tour with Alvvays. Fucked up is a great example because all of those guys are into so many different kinds of music and it’s cool to include every one. It should be inclusive rather than exclusive.

AU: So, you guys are on Fat Wreck Chords, and they’ve been making a documentary. I’m from Victoria and Greg, the film’s head writer lives there. I ended up meet him once at a record convention and we chatted about it. What was it like being a part of it?

CC: I did two interviews, because the first interview I was too drunk.

AU: Which is almost more appropriate for Fat.

CC: (Laughs) I haven’t seen it yet but the guy Sean – there’s Sean and Chris that were making it – they told me that there’s still a bit of the first interview in there and I think I’m just yelling and so fucking wasted. I’m kind of terrified to see it for that (laughs). But it was truly an honour. It sounds cheesy but it was. I’m 28 years old and grew up on NOFX, Lagwagon, No Use For a Name, Propagandhi and Good Riddance. Being a part of that family for almost 10 years now, it leaves an impression on you. There’s no right or wrong, no good or bad, just “this is who we are, be whoever you want to be, and we’ll support you.” That’s how Fat really does business. It’s just like working with friends. It’s crazy to be of this age and to have met, befriended, and toured with a lot of the bands that got us into this kind of music. I mean, through all of this, I’ve been able to forge an incredible friendship with Joey Cape who is a really close friend of mine now and he was one of my musical heroes growing up. He’s the guy that taught me through his songs that you can play in a fast, loud punk band and if you want to be wailing on your guitar, you can do that, but you can also have really good lyrics that are smart and you obviously thought them through and say more than just one thing in more than one way. It didn’t set in until I did the second interview for that documentary that “Shit, this is pretty real.” It just kind of seems like a dream world no matter what you’re doing, no matter at what level that you get to play with your buddies and tour. We’ve been a band for 14 years now and it’s always been the same four dudes. We’re all 28, we all started when we were super young, and no matter where we would’ve ended up, it would’ve been great. But the fact that it ended up [at Fat] is fucking crazy still. I wish the guys that made the doc all the success in the world. I think it was only a matter of time until somebody told that story. I’m glad they are because it could’ve been done in a really cheesy way. I haven’t seen it yet but I know these dudes and that they’re going to do it real well. It’s not all sunshine either. There’s got to be some fucking darkness in that story. I’m excited to see it.

AU: You mentioned you guys have been a band for almost 15 years now and you started when you super young. Do ever wonder what would’ve happened if you guys went to college and went a more traditional route? Does it ever occur to you that “shit, I’ve been in a touring punk band since grade 9”?

CC: Yeah, I think about that sometimes. I feel like – and this is crazy to think – that I’d be in more debt if I went to school than being in a touring fucking band which is crazy because you don’t make a lot of money. But I know so many friends from my school days who went to university or college or whatever and have these massive student debt and they’re working some shitty job they don’t want to work. It sucks, but that’s just the plight of our generation in a way.

AU: It’s a deeper social and political conversation (laughs).

CC: (laughs) I remember the first couple years we started touring, we were 20 at this point, and we’d run into people from school days and shit, people we weren’t necessarily super tight with, and they’d be like

“What are you up to these days?” and I’d be like,

“I’m still playing in the band with those guys.” And they’d be like,

“You’re still doing that?”

“Yeah, I’m having way more fun than you are. Go fuck yourself. I don’t give a shit what you’re doing” (laughs). There are a lot of friends of ours that you bump into and you’re like “Damn, you got your life fucking figured out, what have I done?” (laughs).

AU: They could be secretly miserable and you’d have no idea (laughs).

CC: That’s true. A lot of people probably are. There’s always those two sides, you know what I mean? I think if we all had gone off to school and still tried to make the band work, it probably wouldn’t have. It probably would’ve just fizzled out. We’d all become different people. We’ve all become different people anyways, but with that schooling we all would’ve gone in different directions maybe. I don’t know. I can’t say for certain obviously, but I have a feeling we wouldn’t be a band anymore if we did that.

AU: Fair enough.

CC: We learned about the real world instead of going to school. It’s funny, whenever we play a show at a college campus or university, we’re like “Huh, this is weird” (laughs). That’s the closest we’ve ever gotten to that environment. It’s kind of cool actually (laughs).

AU: I don’t think it would be a Flatliners interview if I didn’t ask you a bit about the ska days.

CC: Sure, man, let’s do it.

AU: I mean, I was a big fan of the first album. It’s how I got into you guys, and then as you went into the melodic punk stuff I was like “Hmm, I like this too.”

CC: That’s good to hear (laughs).

AU: But you guys ever still hang with some ska, in the van or whatever?

CC: Fuck yeah, man. Suicide Machines, Operation Ivy, Assorted Jelly Beans—

AU: And they’re back together, Assorted Jelly Beans.

CC: Are they really? What? Nice, I didn’t know that.

AU: They’re playing at that Amnesia Rock Fest in Montebello.

CC: Shit, all right, cool. But yeah, we still rock that shit all of the time. The Slackers, and like Toots, The Specials—

AU: Toots is playing in Victoria and Vancouver next weekend.

CC: Really? Is Dane [Roberts of the Victoria Ska & Reggae Fest” doing the show?

AU: Dane’s doing the show.

CC: Nice! Classic.

AU: For Ska Fest.

CC: Oh, yeah, duh, Victoria Ska Fest. Those are our roots and we’ve never forgotten them, and it was just a thing that we were so young when we started, and that was solely what we were listening to were those bands, and Leftover Crack, Choking Victim, I still love.

AU: They’re coming two weekends from now too (laughs).

CC: Nice! Still love those bands. And we run into the Leftover Crack guys every once in a while. I talked to some of those guys recently. I was trying to help out with those guys recently with merch shit for their Canadian tour. It’s cool, man. It’s such a supportive scene. It’s that whole punk umbrella that we’ve already talked about. If you want it to be [punk], it is. I think that what happened is we were 14 and we released Destroy to Create when we were 16 and that was basically the culmination of everything we had to that point. We finally had enough songs to put a record out. We did that, and we started touring right after high school, so we were 17, about a year after that record came out. Those are pretty formative years though. Your teen years, you’re really steadfast in what you believe, but you don’t know fucking anything. You think you know everything but you know jack shit. You’re really passionate about what you want to do, but something changes when you’re like 17 or 18 where you have that feeling that you’re finishing high school and you are getting older and you realize you’re about to get this dose of reality. So your mind changes and you don’t realize because it’s fairly subconscious, but it changes. It was around that time and we were just starting to tour a lot and we were meeting lots of different kinds of bands. We were always into punk too, but largely diluted down to the ska-punk shit, and we just realized in ourselves that there was another side to the story in it kind of just started to happen. We wrote these songs and we were like “This is weird right? There are no upstrokes. Is that okay?” (laughs).

AU: It wasn’t like “Today we’re not playing ska anymore!” (laughs).

CC: I remember the day in our old jam space, and it wasn’t weird; it felt great. In the end we just did what we wanted to do. And it was probably hard for a lot of hardcore ska-punk fans to realize and take in the fact that we were changing. A lot of them stuck with us, man and with every record we’ve changed a little bit. We’re working on a new record and it’s changing a little bit. It’s become over the years now, this natural progression I think. You want to push yourself and try new things. I love bands that put out crazy-different records from each other. I also love bands that put out the same kind of shit because they’re good. But there are a lot of bands that put out the same kind of record and it sucks. It’s boring. If you’re a great fucking band you can do that, but if you’re not, you can’t. We were kids and we were like “We’re not that great so let’s try some shit.” We just stirred the pot a bit and I think it worked out well. But dude, I would tour with Leftover Crack or do shows with The Suicide Machines again. I was away but [Flatliners drummer] Paul went and saw The Suicide Machines in Toronto recently.

AU: I had a buddy who was at that show. He’s from there and went back to see The Raptors in the playoffs. His buddies saw that he was going to lots of ska shows in Victoria and asked him if he wanted to see a ska show in Toronto. He was expecting some horn-laden Jamaican big band or something like The Aggrolites.

CC: Fuck, The Aggrolites are wicked.

AU: And he was given The Suicide Machines instead and people were going fucking crazy. He got fucked up in the pit I think (laughs).

CC: I mean that’s really the band. You can tell. Our first record sounds like a fucking Suicide Machines tribute record (laughs). But those guys took us under their wing huge: Mustard Plug, Voodoo Glow Skulls, Planet Smashers, Stomp Records, Big D and the Kids Table, all of those guys took us under their wing in such a huge way, and showed us the ropes. We’re forever grateful for that shit, man. It’s amazing. We grew up on those bands too. We were so young and all of those guys took such a huge chance, especially those guys at Stomp, putting out Destroy to Create. We were fucking 17! What the fuck were they thinking? I’m so happy they did it. Matt and Mike, those guys rule. They have our gratitude forever because it was such a huge risk for them, but they just liked the music.

AU: Yeah, they just sign what they like if it sells some copies then sweet.

CC: Exactly.

AU: I mean, they broke Bedouin Soundclash.

CC: Absolutely.

AU: You guys are working on new stuff and we’ll get to that shortly, but I want to talk about Division of Spoils. How did that come about? Because it ranges from demos when you were 14 to contemporary out-takes. It’s a big spectrum of material.

CC: Every record we’ve done aside from Destroy to Create, we’ve had extra songs. For Dead Language, we recorded 20 songs and we put 13 on the record. And so it was after we already recorded so many songs for that record and knowing we had a couple kicking around from the other ones we were like “We should probably think about at some point putting this collection together.” We’ve always loved doing the single seven-inch thing. There’s the song you release on the A side and then we’ll throw some unreleased song on the B side. We had pretty good success with that and people loved it so we wanted to keep it going. Then we realized how many we fucking had. It was like 20-something and then there were all these covers on these tribute comps and shit that we would do. It was a lot of fun putting it together and it was interesting in that we were going to sequence it new-to-old. And then the lovely and intelligent people at Fat Wreck Chords were like “you should sequence it like an album, so a lot of the people that have these songs on 7-inches, can get this and have those three exclusive Dead-Language-session songs and one demo from The Great Awake, they’d already heard them in that order, so you should shuffle them around.” I had a blast putting them in that order, and a lot of people who heard that record last year when we put it out thought it was our new record, after listening to it and hearing how different it could be, some of those songs. People were like,

“Killer new album!”

“Thanks, man!” We wouldn’t even correct them (laughs). I think that means we just did a good job throwing it together. So it’s exciting for us to – I mean we don’t put it on now, but we would put it on when we were going through it (laughs). We’re not sitting in the van listening to our B-sides record really, but we did when we were putting it together and it was exciting. It was this cool timeline. It was a memory lane thing.

AU: It was the Pulp Fiction timeline, everything out of order.

CC: (laughs) Yeah, it’s the Quentin Tarantino of musical history. Yeah, man. So, it was a lot of fun. Through releasing some of the songs and seven-inches, we’ve played some of them live over the years and now we get to play some more. It’s always difficult choosing the songs that make the record so it might be in the back of everyone’s mind although it’s always a bit of a consolation prize in the moment. It’s like “Well, we’re still going to put it out on something,” because we’re all different people and we all prefer different songs. That’s always a tough part of the process.

AU: I can how it helps with maybe wanting to play a B-side live, but being hesitant to do so because nobody in the crowd aside from three Flatliners nerds have heard it before. Now, the greater portion of the audience has it accessible.

CC: We started playing one song in particular, “Sticky Bastards”, on our European tour, or maybe it was on a couple shows before we went to Europe, a few months ago. I remember we were in our jam space going over it and we were like “Fuck, why did this not make the record?” We were stoked. But we recorded it in like 2009 and it’s 2016 and we were finally like, “This song is pretty good.” Sometimes it takes a while for it to sink in, even for the people that write it, to truly appreciate it.

AU: Now, you guys mentioned the new stuff, any expected ETA on that?

Drummer Paul Ramirez sits down and starts packing a weed pipe.

AU: Feel free to pipe in at any point, by the way.

Paul Ramirez: Pipe in? Nice pun.

AU: Unintentional.

CC: I like that.

PR: Those are the best puns.

CC: We always take our sweet-ass time working on a record. I believe we’re going to try our best to put something out before the end of the year. Hopefully we can make that happen. If not, it’ll be early next year. Last year our plan was to not really tour at all and work on this record. And then we ended up doing a few tours, because we just can’t not; it’s just in your bones eventually and you feel weird being at home for a while. We did work on the record a lot, but when we’re on tour we’re on tour and it’s hard to do them both. At the same time, I think the four of us write a little bit of shit separately, but we don’t really come together and do a cohesive jam or writing session while we’re on the road. The more touring we do, the longer it’ll take for the record to come out (laughs), but hopefully it’s not forever.

AU: You mentioned with every record, there’s always I slight change. Is that the case with this one?

CC: I think it’s the next logical step, you know what I mean? It’s not crazy different I don’t think. It’s always tough to describe it because it’s different to us than it would be to anyone else. It’s always hard to gauge, but the best way I could put it is that it’s the next logical step. Always trying to be better.

AU: With that, any final notes?

CC: Stoked to come back to Victoria, man. It’s been years. Sugar was back in 07, I think Logan’s Pub was 08 or 09, and our guitarist Scott wasn’t even there because he got arrested stealing beer at a festival and had a pending court date so he couldn’t leave the country, and we toured from Toronto into the US and out to BC then toured home. So we had a ringer. We had our buddy Pat playing guitar, so Scott hasn’t been out since 2007 so he’s fucking stoked.

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