Interview with Scott before Camden Underworld (London) show...
Where about's did you grow up and what sort of place is it like?
Buffalo, New York. I think it’s got like a million and a ½ people, that’s just working class, pretty ugly, dirty, big on sports, sports teams are big.

Yeah? What sort of teams
Buffalo Bills football, hockey the sabres, chicken wings were invented there, its near Niagara Falls, it’s in New York State, you can get to Niagara Falls from Buffalo in like half an hour. Maybe six hours from New York City

What were you into at school?
Sports, up until eighth grade I was really into sports at that time I was really into Motley Crue & ACDC and then my year in the eighth grade ended and I started in the ninth grade which is high school that’s when I got into first it was more like Social Distortion & Minor Threat and then once I really got into hardcore, like my first year of high school I played football, basketball & la cross and then I quit everything. I just got totally into hardcore and I started drinking, smoking weed

At what time, age?
Uh 14, so I got really into partying and hardcore. I did shitty in school; I didn’t care about that.

So education didn’t interest you much?
Nah I just went because I had to.

How did being in Buried Alive prepare you for Terror & Terror’s rise?
We did one real album and one bullshit album; Victory put out demo shit that should have never came out

Like what they did with that Strife one (Truth Through Defiance)
Just bullshit, like I had quit the band and the band agreed to do it just to make money but I don’t think they got a penny from it so it’s really funny. I guess all the bands I did in different ways shaped me to know how to deal with situations, know how to deal with touring & how to deal with labels and shows all that stuff

Who handles all the stuff for Terror? Like organising merch? Label things
Everybody has different things that they take care of

Has it surprised you how quickly the band took off? And the fact that you were touring Europe quite quickly in comparison to a lot of others & of yeah some of the guys were in Carry On, what other bands has everyone else been in?
Our drummer Nick was in Carry On, I was in a load of bands Slugfest, Despair, and Buried Alive. Our guitarist Doug was in a band called Sworn Vengeance & Above This World & Carl was in Sworn Vengeance too. Terror from the start really put of our lives into the band, we played any where we could at any time, we didn’t worry about money or who else was playing or how many people would be there. We just said we were going to do this as much as we can, we didn’t start the band like with a certain style or sound that would get us to come to Europe…

I read somewhere (www.howsyouredge.com) in a John Lacroix interview was he practising with you guys (as in ex Ten Yard Fight John)
He was the person who after Buried Alive broke up, my girlfriend was living in Chicago, we wanted to be together but she didn’t want to move to Buffalo which is kind of a shitty city so I don’t blame her and Chicago’s kind of a cool city so we decided we were going to move to the west coast. We packed our shit up and first we stayed with my friend Mark from Arizona and we were kind of taking trips to California to see where we were going to move and John Lacroix was the person that knew Nick & Todd from Carry On and knew me and he called all of us and got us together & he was going to play bass but I was driving from Arizona like 6 hours, twice and he never showed up to the practises so we were like, dude can’t handle it so he got us together but never showed up.

What was it like playing Brazils liberation fest?
Its was amazing, we’ve been to Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, South America, Europe

What are the scenes like in places like Puerto Rico and South America?
We were only there for two days, so its really hard to judge but the shows were…theirs a guy down there Marko’s fuck I hope I’m not getting his name wrong if I am I’m a dick but he put out both of our records on his label down there so the kids (Liberation Records) he’s amazing, so they knew all of our stuff all our records and they went fucking crazy. I think 500 kids the first night and 700 the next night. It was insane, Puerto Rico’s really cool too, I’ve always heard of bands going there

What is it an island or something?
It’s owned by the United States it’s a little island below Florida, It was good weather, real warm, we went to the beach and saw many beautiful girls, my girlfriend doesn’t want to hear that, yeah it was just a lot of fun. For us in Australia straight up, is the greatest place on earth, hardcore wise and just being there, so for us just travelling, its halve the reason we do this, because we get to go all over the world to play our stupid music.

That’s quite funny. How do your girlfriends feel about you being on the road all the time?
Our girlfriends, mine is really cool, if I didn’t have her I’d be a mess, I’m already a mess and she’s the only reason I’m not a real mess.

Doe’s she come on tour?
Noooo, she goes to nursing school & she works, being on tour were scum bags and act like idiots and on top of that it’s hard sleeping, I mean when we all slept at your house it’s hard, everything thinks it’s fun but it’s not

Every night you don’t know where you’re going to be staying
You don’t know if you’re going to get to shower or if theirs going to be food, so it just sucks

Of course the next questions is, what are the most common misconceptions about being in a band on tour? Not just a band but a hardcore band?
That you make any money, that you ever get to sleep cause, that you get to eat cool food, that you get to hang out in the city cause all you do is drive, play, drive again. I mean sometimes depending on how the tour is booked, sometimes you get to hang out and sleep. Like tonight after the show were driving ten hours to Frankfurt, Germany. Drive, take the ferry to France (voice in background in a distinct German accent says…Dover-Calais Ya) then we gotta go pick up merch so yeah it’s insane.

Didn’t you all leave Doug at a gas stations and only realised two hours after he was gone? (Laughter)
I hardly ever drive and he in our van sits in the back and he’s addicted to his sidekick, so he’s never in the middle of anything so I just got in the van and took off (laughing)

Doe’s stuff like that happen often?
Nah, when it happened it wasn’t very funny but now it’s pretty funny

There must be a lot of insanity on both parts to keep you all motivated like for the next show, like you mentioned your driving for up to ten hours sometimes, what do you do to get busy?
Try to sleep, if you can’t sleep listen to music or read. Or sometimes no ones talking and we all start to get crazy and act like idiots.

So what excites you about going to hardcore show? What are your first memories of hardcore?
My first memories of going to hardcore shows, my brother was more into like punk rock like the Circle Jerks & Dead Kennedy’s I like that it was underground and kind of DIY and I liked the aggression and the music but I never really got into the whole looking crazy punk. That’s not me, I mean if your into that then that’s cool but its not me, so at the first hardcore show I ever went to I saw D.R.I. which was cool, but after that I saw 7 Seconds and that was like wow after I saw that I was hooked, never turned back.

Why do you think hardcore has got such a fanatical following?
That the scene’s real and it’s honest. For me it was important cause it taught me a lot of things like being open-minded and if I never found hardcore and the lyrics I don’t think I’d be the same person & that’s where I stand.
Well because of hardcore, Vegan with the whole Earth Crisis and that’s how I got into the whole of that, just lots of things like being anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti accepting what society tells you.
Just being your own person and trying not to really worry about how much money I have or if I had a nice car, I’m in band touring Europe and that’s more important to me, those were all things that were taught to me by hardcore bands.

You’ve got quite a few straight edge members in the band two of who were in Carry On.
One dude from Carry On’s out
Well they’re reforming soon?
Coming up this weekend
So your playing in Germany and then flying back to the U.S.?
They’re not doing it. Our one time guitarist who started the band with us isn’t in Terror anymore, he’s doing it & our drummer who was in Carry On isn’t doing it.

I’m interested to know what’s your opinion on the influx of crew mentality with Boston Beatdown creating a storm of both good and bad press. Do you think it gives hardcore a good name?
It seems like the scene is very conflicted on the subject…
I don’t think fights belong at hardcore shows and I don’t believe violence belongs in hardcore shows, maybe if a fucking nazi comes to a show he deserves to get smacked around, but I don’t think saying a crew is necessarily going to go out and fight all the time. I mean sometimes I’ve seen FSU (Friends Stand United) do a lot of good stuff and just for example we played in New Jersey just maybe two months ago and the person that booked the show, lied to our booking agent and booked a hall and said it was a birthday party and like 500 people showed up and the person who owned the hall was like this isn’t a birthday party and shut the show down. So were at the show with 500 people who wanted to see us, it was going to be amazing and it got ruined but the kids at FSU that we knew got on the phone and found a club half hour away got all the kids together and saved the show.

One of the original reasons why FSU started in the first place was to get the drug dealers and the nazi skinheads out of the shows
I think people want to blow things out of proportion and make it out to be something else. If someone who’s not in a crew beats someone up it doesn’t get as much shit talking you know, I think you’ve just got to judge each situation by itself.

I was going to say one of the things that appealed to me most was the lack of the jock mentality and you know fighting at shows, the thing that everyone goes away from the show thinking about is the fight
I don’t want to see that stuff, I mean I’m not going to sit here and lie and say I haven’t gotten into fights at shows before and sometimes you have so much aggression and the music you know there are a lot of fucking idiots in hardcore that just come to cause problems and sometimes they get what they deserve. I’m not saying that’s cool but it’s just reality, and I think hardcore also started out as a street level thing for people that are oppressed and pissed off

It is an aggressive style of music.
Yeah and when those people are in the same room and their music & dancing it’s bound to happen. People just have to keep level-headed and hope for the best.

Where do you draw your inspiration from, your lyrics are understandable aggressive and unforgiving what sort of things drive you?
For me I don’t usually just sit down and write lyrics, something’s got to happen something that usually pisses me off.

So you draw it off of an event?
It could be a personal thing or something that I see on the news, something that happens to one of my friends

The next part of my question was, what sort of things bother you most about human nature?
I think one thing that is really sad is that money, whether you want to admit it or not is everything and if you have a lot of money you may end up being a happier person but money can’t buy you everything but if you’ve got money you’ve got security and health care, stuff like that and I think it’s sad that that’s what has become the most important thing and then because of that a lot of people are really greedy and do a lot of things they wouldn’t normally do to get money like fuck there friends over

When you get money you always want more of it!
It really fuels greed and greed is probably one of the ugliest things that you see so I think that’s one thing that really bothers me. The place where I live, the neighbourhood I live in, I wouldn’t say it’s dangerous but if you walk down the street there’s just garbage everywhere. I mean how hard is it to throw garbage in a garbage can? And let someone take it away, but people are so just live for the moment and don’t think about the future and just don’t give a shit, on there own fucking street they’ll just throw shit. I’m not Mr “environment” I’m just like Mr “why do I have to live with just garbage everywhere” it’s just stupid.

Terror seems to be the working man’s hardcore band, a voice for the underdogs, I don’t suppose you’ll ever become complacent and start writing melodies? But what drives you to confront your anger and how do you think you’ll keep Terror’s unrelenting momentum?
I would say that right now I’m pretty much happy person

I read your last post on your Trustkill journal and you seemed pretty psyched about how things were going?
But it’s kind of limiting when you have music like Terror, I think like the song Overcome that’s the most positive I’ll ever get, cause that’s saying yeah life’s going to smack you in the face but we got to get up from it and be happy with what you have. So it’s kind of limiting with our music I can’t write let’s all be friends, hold my hand

It’s weird because I do actually consider Terror a positive band!
Anything I talk about and all of our lyrics say don’t let live get the best of you live it to the fullest, with the aggressive music and the words it comes across as a negative thing but it’s so far from that.

When you actually read into it properly and get to know it, think about it…
Especially the things I say on stage like lets have a good time together, that is super positive.

Would you ever consider writing an acoustic song?
(Laughs) fuck no…

What’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever seen at a show?
Although that acoustic song that was on the first Strife record that song is amazing, that slipping song that was a ballsy move by them and it’s fucking awesome

What’s the stupidest thing I ever saw at a show, like in concerts? Well this thing has happened on this tour and I encourage people to do it often, in between songs when there’s no music you go like crowd riding, I mean what the fuck is that? I mean that’s pretty fucking stupid.

I’m just trying to find which questions I’ve asked and which one I haven’t
Yes I’m an idiot

Is there anything you do to keep your voice in good condition? Having recently started out as a new to the game vocalist I’m basically fishing for tips…
I’ve gotten to the point where I’m pretty good. Like when we first came out here we did four shows in a row where we drove all night and didn’t really sleep so I think the main things are sleeping & drinking water. Other than that there’s a ton of things out there that can help like tea, throat sweets, chewing gum to keep hydrated – you just got to try them all and see which ones work for you. I have these little things that I take, and I don’t know if they really work but ever since I’ve taken them I’ve been good.

Funnily enough I was speaking to someone in Europe, who had been to see you the other day and he said your throat was giving you grief, do’s that happen often?
No, I’m usually good the thing that happens its usually when you start a tour and you have a break, but because I’ve been doing this so long I’m usually good but we had 4 days in a row with no sleep, so I was like dead.

Why was it you went four days without sleep?
Cause the people who book our shows put us in a van & book them all in one go. It was to play all these really big festivals, which was worth it but that takes a toll on you and if you don’t get any sleep your voice can’t repair itself.

Have you got new material one the way?
Yes, we probably have at least ten songs written already, we’ll probably write ten more and pick the best ones, we plan on recording in the winter after the New Year. That’s the plan but it will probably end up being like March or something, it always gets pushed back

Do you know why Nick had “fuck you” tattooed on his back and was it in response to anything specific, I saw it when you guys stayed round…
I don’t think it’s anything specific I think it’s to be offensive, to be a fucking low life idiot, but there may be more to it. But it’s funny because you know those Sworn Enemy shirts that say “Disrespect me and I’ll pound your fucking face out” he was in a restaurant and they asked him to take his shirt off and it said “fuck you” so it’s just funny. Like they would have never imagined that and it’s probably more offensive to have it permanent that to just have it on a shirt. I think they asked him to turn it inside out so he just took it off.