Thursday

NOFX: Secret Society



16 October 2012
by Poppy Reid

While NOFX fans were gushing over the release of twelfth studio album Self-Entitled, Mike Burkett (aka Fat Mike) was donning leather and exercising his trademark hedonism at Jamaican fetish event Kink In The Caribbean.

“It’s a rubberist's vacation resort where weirdos take over the whole hotel and the beach and get real weird,” Burkett explains nonchalantly down the phone from his home in San Francisco. “It’s fabulous. Are you kinky?” The forthcoming frontman has just returned with girlfriend Soma Snakeoil who makes a living from sharing his perversions – “My girlfriend is a dominatrix but occasionally we’ll switch, occasionally I’m her daddy.”

Although Self-Entitled sees the band take heed from the roots of American punk rock in the early ‘80s - both musically and lyrically (re: the track Ronnie and Mags about Reagan and Thatcher) – Snakeoil’s influence (I Believe In Goddess) and his embrace of the BDSM scene (Secret Society) show a new side to Burkett, quirks he likens to the type of album he set out to make.

“The BDSM world is super secret and fun,” he says before holding the phone away to shout, “we’re having steak tonight, two… It’s fucking dark,” he continues. “It’s very reminiscent to me of early punk rock, because it’s secret.”

It may come as a surprise that Burkett has had a dungeon in his home for over twenty years, but BDSM has been a part of his life since the age of twelve. “It was the first time I was privy to kinky porn,” he remembers. “My mum had a bunch of dirty magazines, you know Penthouse and Playboy and stuff, and none of it ever really did it for me. I read a kink magazine and it had some kinky story, I was like ‘oh, this is what being turned on is’.”

Burkett had been fronting NOFX for six years when he began to practice his leanings to the ‘scene,’ as he calls it. A dabbling which started with a magazine lead him to study Human Sexuality in college, ex-wife Erin – who remains his business partner at his label Fat Wreck Chords – and more recently to Snakeoil, who he now produces fetish films for.

“For me it’s a pre-requisite, there’s been lots of things that I would like to do that my partner didn’t want, and then we ended up doing it and it turned out to be awesome.
“Cutting was never my thing, I was never a cutter. But [Snakeoil], she loves medical stuff. Once she totally bound me and took a scalpel then carved an ‘S’ on my inner thigh. It was deep and she went over it a few times and spanked it, slapped it. It was cool because it was right when we first started going out and she put a permanent mark on me, and it was hers, she made me hers.”

Candid anecdotes like this are almost expected of Burkett, after his performance as alter-ego Cokie The Clown at SXSW festival in 2010 – where he used the stage as a cathartic sound-board to reveal personal experiences – NOFX fans saw Burkett as vulnerable and weathered for the very first time. This melancholy has only bled onto a NOFX album once, in the form of My Orphan Year, a track released a month after the SXSW debacle. Burkett does plan to release more “really dark personal songs” though, in fact he has enough written to record an LP.
 
My Orphan Year was about as dark as [long-time NOFX] fans had ever seen me go, and that’s not nearly as dark as these songs… I tell the stories I told at that performance, about my mother dying of cancer and how she asked me to kill her earlier so she wouldn’t suffer. “One of the songs is about what I went through to do that, in serious detail.” Burkett speaks clinically about his past as if one-step removed. “Another song is about a rape that me and our guitar player Eric witnessed,” he says. “But it was these gangsters in LA in this really bad neighbourhood and we didn’t do a thing to stop it; I talk about my roommate who hung himself and I had to cut him down, some pretty dark shit.”

While NOFX have watched music and each others’ lives peak and crash, fade and change over almost three decades together, they’re yet to release an autobiography, until now. Apparently it has been in the works for over a year, and is being penned by a journalism amateur known only as Jeff. “It’s pretty crazy how deep people are going,” Burkett says of his bandmates. “I can’t believe some of the stuff that people are sharing, I think it’s going to be a pretty good book… I’m pretty open about my life, I’m happy that the other guys shared stuff that we’ve always been so secretive about.”
With no book release timeframe set, and no plans to tour Australia until 2014, fans can be genuinely placated with Self-Entitled; an album that is as socially awake as it is crude, while nodding to early offerings from genre pioneers Bad Religion and the Circle Jerks – not that Burkett cares about the reaction anyway.

“I always need some kind of inspiration, and it never is: ‘What will I do to please my fans?’ or ‘What will people like?’, it’s not my interest ever,” he states. “I just wanted to make an album that sounded like: ‘If we were around in 1981, what would it sound like?' That was my inspiration, and however this ranks against our other records, I don’t really care.”

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