INTERVIEW BY JOE FITZPATRICK
PHOTOS BY BRENO CAROLLO, NUNO FANGUEIRO, AND MATT GILL
Since releasing their demo in 2006, the members of Washington, D.C.’s infamous straight edge hardcore band COKE BUST have been tearing up basements and house shows with reckless abandon, each time playing faster and harder than they had before. The band’s lineup currently includes vocalist Nick Tape, guitarist James Willett, bassist/vocalist Daniel Jubert, and drummer Chris Moore. In November 2013, they released their most recent LP Confined, and they have been touring rigorously all over the globe, including throughout Europe and Brazil. Currently they are in the process of writing songs for their second split, which is expected to be released by the start of the new year. We spoke with Nick Tape regarding the band’s upcoming split and South American tour, as well as their travels to Portugal, and their appreciation for younger bands stepping up in the local hardcore scene.
I saw that you guys have a split in the works with DESPISE YOU and that you have two of the three songs done. Have you set a release date for that split yet?
Not yet. We’re gonna try to record that sometime before the middle of December. So hopefully within a month or so [we’ll get it out]. We’ve got some ideas kicking around for the new song. We just kind of need to get together and throw ‘em all in the pot and see what happens. For that split, we’re gonna try and take a different approach. We’re recording those three songs with one of my roommates, actually. We’re gonna try to get a pretty raw sound for that split. We’ve been recording in the same studio for the past four records that we’ve done. It should be cool. I’m excited for it.
You guys have not released any new music of your own since you put out Confined in November 2013. Do you have another new record of your own in the works as well?
We try not to think too far ahead of ourselves, but we were kicking some ideas around for doing another LP next, which is probably what we’ll do. As far as the timeframe with that, I have no idea because we are all pretty busy with our other bands too. [Daniel] Jubert, the bass player, has his other band MISLED YOUTH, and I think they are trying to do some stuff. Chris, our drummer, has a bunch of other projects going on too. He also plays in a grindcore band called DISCIPLES OF CHRIST, and he also actually just joined the band REPULSION too, the “legendary band” I guess you could say. They are doing some stuff this summer, and then I will be busy with my other band called RED DEATH. We’re gonna be doing a huge tour this summer. When we actually map it all out (laughs), the earliest we could all get together and seriously write for that record would be like, July 2015. So it will definitely take some time, and I guess COKE BUST is gonna chill out for a little bit next year.
Can you tell me about your plans for the South American tour you have coming up?
We’re gonna start in late January, and we’re going to do Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile. We went to Brazil last January, and it was a super sick tour. We didn’t really know what to expect when we went down there. We didn’t really have any expectations at all, and we were completely blown away by how cool it was and how cool everyone else was. We just had such a blast. One of the guys that helped out with the tour ended up living in DC four months after the tour ended, and he was going to go to the fest that we put on called Damaged City Fest. But he ended up liking DC so much that he stayed for six months, and he actually just went home pretty recently. That guy, who is known as Chivero, is gonna be booking the South American tour for us again this time, and it’s gonna be really cool. Last year, we did a tour that only went in Brazil, and we didn’t really cover that much ground. We just mainly did Sao Paulo and a couple of the cities that are within driving distance of it. This time, we’re gonna really span as much of the continent as we can in a way that isn’t complete financial suicide.
What is the route that you have planned for this tour?
We’re gonna start in the north of Brazil and play three shows up there. Then we are going to fly over to Sao Paulo. Then we’ll travel by car for a little while and go up to Rio de Janeiro to Belo Horizonte, which is a another city a little bit more inland. Then we’re gonna travel back to Sao Paulo and go south a little bit. Then we’re gonna abandon the car, and then we’re gonna travel by bus to Uruguay. Then we’re gonna take a ferry from Uruguay to Argentina, but I have no idea how we are going to get inside Argentina (laughs). We’re gonna do three shows there, and then we’re gonna have to fly from Argentina to Chile. We’re gonna play one show in Palco, which is in southern Chile, and then we’re gonna play Santiago, the capital of Chile. Then we’re gonna fly to play one show in the north of Chile. Then we’re gonna fly home. Originally, we were going to try to do Peru too, but we did all the math and it was gonna cost us an extra $3,000 to play one show in Lima, Peru. It just didn’t make sense, so we had to cut it short, but the tour is gonna be awesome. I’m super excited. We don’t really know what to expect, which is kind of the recurring theme in COKE BUST in terms of our adventurous and sometimes overly optimistic (laughs) plans that we create for ourselves.
I also saw that earlier this year you guys played in Portugal. How is the scene there?
Portugal was cool, man. That was another tour that we booked that we didn’t know what to expect because we had done a handful of European tours. Before that, we had been to Europe three times. We kind of hit a lot of the same spots. We played Germany; played England a bunch of times; we hit Belgium, Poland, and Austria. And we were like, we’ve never been further west than Paris, so we booked a tour with the purpose of covering new ground and trying to hit the Iberian Peninsula. We did England; we played one show in Belgium; we went to France; and we did all of Spain and made our way out to Portugal and back up to England. That tour was sick. I had been to Portugal once before with one of my other bands, but this time it was totally different. It was really cool. Also, it was about a month after we had gotten back from Brazil too, so we knew a little bit of Portuguese. We played three shows total in Portugal — Lisbon, Porto, and a small city somewhere in between those two in the mountains of an orange farm (laughs). It was pretty crazy.
How do you guys afford to travel overseas so often?
It’s a priority and a goal for everybody in the band to do it. We try to be smart about money when we’re at home. We made a lot of money on a U.S. tour that we did last year, and we used that money to go to Europe immediately afterwards. Then we did a west coast tour, and that tour ended up funding a different overseas trip. When it came to the Brazilian tour, we lost money doing that. We had some money in the band fund, and we all just really wanted to go, so we did it. I also think we have been really lucky. The tours now are kind of self-sufficient, for the most part. I don’t expect the South American tour to be like that, but when we go to Europe and when we travel in the U.S., we typically do okay. We don’t make money with the band in our “normal lives,” but I guess the best we can hope to do financially is to break even and buy some food for ourselves along the way. That’s kind of how it works for us. We all feel super happy and super appreciative to have all of these wild opportunities, and to not lose a ton of money doing it is the coolest thing in the world.
As your band has increased in notoriety and fame in the hardcore scene, have the ethics of DIY still remained important to your band?
For sure. We still have the same principles that we had at the beginning. We’re not gonna play a freaking PBR fest, if that’s what you’re asking (laughs). We have always kind of done things ourselves since the start, and even if we were a bigger band than we are now, I’m fairly confident that nothing would be that different. For example, when we go out on tour, we don’t have guarantees that we ask from promoters. Since we do so many shows at home, we have friends pretty much all over the place, and we don’t really have to venture into that territory. We do our own mail order. We don’t put out our own records. I wish we did (laughs), to some extent, but working with Grave Mistake [Records] has been awesome. Alex [DiMattesa] is super cool. There aren’t even that many opportunities for us to “sell out” if we wanted to, and I don’t really know what we could do. We love punk, and we love hardcore. Playing shows in basements is the reason why we do this because that stuff is fun to me. I wouldn’t really want to go on a huge, packaged tour where we have to do sound checks, not even like that’s an option for us, but even if it was, I don’t think it would be as much fun anymore.
Since your band started in 2006, the hardcore scene in DC, VA, and MD has really exploded with a ton of awesome bands. Why do you think that is the case?
There has been an explosion of younger bands in the past couple years, and I think it’s because younger kids feel more welcome now, which is a cool thing. I’m not sure that was the case a couple years ago, but I actually give a lot of credit to Chris, our drummer, because he books a ton of shows. He always makes it a point to put younger bands on shows and to keep younger kids involved. I think a lot of his dedication to doing that in conjunction with us just being lucky that there were a bunch of kids being interested and coming out to hardcore shows, have led to a prosperous hardcore scene in D.C. Now there’s a ton of sick bands. I can’t even name them all, there’s so many, and they’re all with kids between the ages of 15 and 22. So it’s insane right now, but it’s a cool situation that the older people are being accepting and welcoming to the younger kids.
You mentioned earlier about Damaged City Fest in DC in April. Are plans already underway for the 2015 fest?
Everything is on as planned. Chris and I do that together, and this will be the third year in a row we are doing it. Right now, we are working on getting a preliminary update together to get the word out there. It’s gonna be the weekend of April 11, most likely at St. Stephen’s Church in Washington, D.C. — the same venue as the last two years. We’re working on ironing out all the details, but it should be cool and it’s definitely still happening.
