London punk band

"A.S. hate The Countryside Alliance (Cuntryside Aliens), Huntingdon Life Sciences and all animal abusing scum, the BNP, NF and any other racist shitheads, all sexist, homophobic arseholes, those so called punks who have difficulty with the notion of people helping each other, the murdering heads of state of this world and every other fucker who derives any form of pleasure or feeling of power by the persecution of those they consider to be inferior or weaker than themselves."

When did you form?

None of us are sure of the exact date that the band formed, we only know it was around the summer of 2001. We do know that we had our first ever rehearsal on the 1st September 2001. We know this because the following day we went into a studio and recorded one of the songs we'd put together - My Foot In Your Mouth - for the Direct Action Animal Rights CD.

Why did you form?

Aside from the obvious reason of making some damn fine punk rock tunes, we formed with the intention of putting some politics back into the punk scene, something it did, and unfortunately still does, lack. Our basic intent was/is to inject the scene with something more than the apolitical (and quite often moronic) subject matter that quite a number of bands sing about. That's not to say that there shouldn't be some bands that do basically sing about nonsense, but we wanted to address what we consider to be far more important issues such as animal and human rights, anarchism and all the various types of bigotry that exist in our society. That's probably why comparisons are quite often made between ourselves and various anarcho bands from the 80's. We also wanted to try and make some money for the various organisations we support, such as the HSA and SHAC. That's why all the gigs we organise ourselves are benefits, and why any other gigs we do we prefer to be benefits. That's also why we release the Direct Action cds. We also believe though that it's very important to be able to laugh at things (including ourselves), which is why one of our basic mantras is that it is possible to have the politics AND the party, something which some overly PC people find a bit hard to swallow at times.

Where does your name come from, what does it mean?

Active Slaughter is a phrase that was banded about in the media to describe the mass culling of millions of farmyard (and other) animals during the foot and mouth outbreak in Britain in 2001.

What bands were/are you influenced by?

We all like different bands, from both the past and the present and for different reasons, but it's pretty fair to say we're all fans of people such as Crass, Discharge, Bug Central, The Ramones, Rancid and, oh, fucking loads of people :-)

What recordings have you released?

The album "Ave A Butchers". The Cdr ep "Smash HLS" and also one track - My Foot In Your Mouth - on the compilation "Direct Action Animal Rights".

Why was "Smash HLS" only released on CDr?

Simple - money! Or rather, lack of it. We'd have loved to have released it on vinyl as well (and if anyone can help us with that please get in touch) but as we're on a very limited budget CDr was the only really viable option. We're also more than happy to put it on tape for anyone without a CD player (email us for details)

It's been suggested you're a single issue band, how true is that?

It's true that quite a number of our songs deal with issues surrounding the abuse of animals, but if you care to look at our lyrics and the causes for whom we've done benefit gigs then you'll see we're far from a single issue band. We have always tried to address a whole range of issues - rape, patriotism, the police, the state of the punk scene etc - because we know that they are all interlinked to one another in some way and therefore need to be questioned and combated if need be.

Jake - Vocals

JJ - Guitar/backing vox

Goz - Bass/ backing vox

Trev - Drums

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