3. Black FlagMy War
I remember when my brother hit me up to do the Return: Beneath Arise tour. We do so many different projects, so I was like ‘man, I don’t wanna do this. This is like going backwards’. But then a week later someone told me that Black Flag was gonna play in Camden, under the name Flag. So, I go to The Underworld, buy my ticket, let’s see. I’ve been to so many reunion things and a lot of them were disappointing, but they just blew my mind. These guys were like 60-something. Man, I never had a chance to see those guys in Brazil and they played all the songs I wanted to hear. I was like ‘that’s it’. I called my brother and said ‘Let’s do it’. If a few people come out of our show with the same feeling I had, that’s cool. Black Flag made me do it.
Something always attracted me to Black Flag because they were one step ahead of every other band. When everyone had spiked hair and leather, they looked like fishermen. And when everyone shaved their head, they looked like Charles Manson. They were never what you expected. With Sepultura we always had that thing where we were pushing boundaries, and by doing that you get a lot of pushback. When I started doing Mixhell you get, ‘Oh man, this guy, he’s gay now’, or ‘they don’t look like they used to look in ’84, they don’t wear the makeup’.
It’s good to push people, not be comfortable and it worked. So Black Flag are one of those bands that taught me you can have that attitude. Like this album, My War, it has the punk thing but there’s something else in there that’s not the norm. And that’s something that, for a lot of people, it doesn’t make sense. And I like that.
We discovered Black Flag a bit later because in Brazil everything has a bit of a delay to it, and so we didn’t separate the punk from the metal like a lot of people in Europe or America. A band like Black Flag or Amebix would sit on a tape with Celtic Frost or Hellhammer. Sepultura would try to incorporate those things, and again a lot of the typical heavy metal guys, they hated it.
I think coming from a from a small town or a country remote like Brazil, there were cool things about it. We would’ve loved to have been in New York and London to see those bands, to experience them but maybe that was good for us as a band to take those things and create our own style without the influence of a big city.
