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WASP frontman Blackie Lawless has departed from his usually scripted between-song banter to deliver a polemic on free speech at London’s Eventim Apollo.
The eighties rockers, of whom Lawless is the sole original member, have been playing their 1984 self-titled debut in its entirety in Europe and each show has been more or less the same in terms of what the 69-year-old has had to say.
But on Sunday, September 28 at what used to be the Hammersmith Odeon, Lawless decided to wade into political waters – citing his own battles with the PMRC as he hoisted a union jack at the rear of the stage.
“It’s now 40 years since we played our first show on Great British soil,” Lawless told the large crowd. “And it’s changed here a lot in that time.
“We’ve maintained an office here and I’ve probably spent a total of three years here in that time.
“The way they treat people now if you want to speak a bit of your mind is a real worry. I had my own issues back in the eighties with the PMRC and there were some people who thought it would be better if certain people, certain bands, were not around.
“Let me tell you, if you let them take a little bit of your freedom, they will take more.
“You need to get onto your MPs asses about this or it’s going to get worse.”
Lawless discussed the issue two years ago on the Metalshop podcast, saying: “We were too young to really understand what it was all about but they quickly put us in the eye of the hurricane and then all kinds of bad things started happening — death threats and getting shot at and all of that,
“We became educated very, very quickly.
“I think it was Indianapolis — this girl came in to interview me and nd this was, like, ’87. And she had worked for the PMRC at one point. And she, at this time I was talking to her, was a journalist. And she goes, she brought in a cassette tape and she goes ‘I’ve got something I need you to hear’. And she played this cassette tape for me. And on it were Susan Baker (PMRC co-founder] and a few of the others talking about what their real motivation was.
“And their motivation was not to get stickers on records. Their motivation was to get Al Gore a platform to then run for president of the United States. So they were trying to create a political profile for him — because what better way to get attention, if you’re a political candidate, a southern caricature, which is what he was, what better way to get attention than to go after an attention getter?
“I mean, this is McCarthyism — you know, it’s no different. Richard Nixon did it. All these witch hunts that went on in DC for years. But they come to a generation who’s not heard it.
“So this thing comes around once every 15 years. The generation hasn’t heard it. They haven’t heard the same old lies that come out of it. So it sounds pretty good to them because it sounds sincere and genuine.”
“This country was built as a republic and a republic, contrary to what a lot of people don’t understand, is not a democracy. But what you have to do to create a republic, you have to have a certain amount of faith in the people. So, in other words, if you have a guy that’s spewing a bunch of hatred on a street corner or in a soapbox, you have to have faith in your fellow Americans that this guy is a lunatic and the vast majority of people are gonna find him out and not follow him.
“But what happens is when you start limiting that speech, then, like I said, you take away the ability of the people to decide for themselves, number one, who’s crazy and who isn’t. But even more dangerous than that, you start appointing these umpires that tell you what you can and cannot say. And it’s extremely dangerous. And you’ve heard it a million times but it bears repeating, our system is not set up for popular speech. It’s set up for unpopular speech.”
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