If I Had A Gun

If I Had A Gun
If I Had A Gun
	If I Had A Gun, 2003
Background information
Years active	2003-2004
Associated acts	Deaf Terrorists, Numbskull, Padded Cell, Stalker
Past members	Blair Jones (vocals), Kathi (vocals), Gwilym (guitar), Adam (bass), Nick (drums)

About

Interview with Gwilym Evans

Forming

Gwilym

I’d started jamming with Nick Oakes in college over energy drinks and weed. We were both in a school band, which sucked. I had to play the clarinet like a fucking squid-wad.

I was mates with Blair Jones who was a coordinator at the Karori youth centre down the road from where I lived. Blair had a blue mohawk and organised punk gigs there and he’d also buy us beer. This was a youth centre mind you now, a safe place for young kids to go hang out because their parents were sick of them. He was totally dedicated to music and the punk scene. I was already into mainstream punk and beginning my foray into the crust, anarcho, thrash, grind side of things.

Nick and I had an improvised super-metal side project, Narcoleptic Flesh (AKA Paroxysm) and I was also in punk band called The Perpetrators when I was 12; we were kind of a big deal. Blair Jones had been in the infamous Deaf Terrorists, Padded Cell and numerous other bands. Adam Cohn was briefly in the Carnys, a Nirvana tribute band called Aqua Sea Foam Shame and several other projects.

Adam was living with Blair at the time and that is the sole reason he got to be in the band, purely out of convenience and because we needed a bass player. We’d started writing songs, and everything was going great , then Kathy Gott jumped on board and that really escalated our status from mere minions, to warrior types. Kathy’s greatness was so powerful, it ended up being the force which eventually caused us to implode under our own gravity.

IIHAG started jamming at Blair and Adam’s house in Newtown. Nick and I were more on the metal/ thrash side of the spectrum, Adam had some quirky experimental ideas he insisted on implementing, and Blair just wanted to violate the mic with his tonsils, while incorporating strange political concepts that only made sense to Blair. To be honest I really didn’t give that much of a fuck about creating solid artistry, it was more like kick-boxing night where you just let out some steam from the week, which is why I guess so many parts of our songs are whack. I was trying to be cool and democratic allowing these clowns to put ska riffs next to thrash bits while they squealed about loving and killing everyone. We should have just gone pure crust-thrash. Instead we incorporated punk, metal, thrash, grunge, hardcore, grind, ska, doom. In the end I think that was one of the reasons people like it, it was weird and refreshing.

June 2004

First Gig Our first gig was at Alternative Routes, a wicked street festival that Blair organised on a truck trailer next to the Kensington community gardens (Kensington Street) before that fuckwit hell-demon mayor Kerry Pendergast shat concrete all over it for the motorway development. I think the event was fairly uneventful, we just made our appearance, became local legends, and the rest was history.

Worst Gig Story Our worst gig was definitely in Dunedin on our winter tour. My sister, her partner and then two year old nephew were driving us around in their super spacious house bus. Shit started getting hairy in Lyttleton after word got through to the bar manager that we were underage and we were screwed out of that gig. Then the bus broke down and something caused the windscreen to smash so we all had to hitch with our instruments to Dunedin.

We got a lift from these bone-head looking dudes. I was a bit suspicious of them at first because they seemed like they could have been the racist skin variety and we were all anarchos. The guy driving didn’t speak much and seemed like he was recovering from a strong mushroom trip, while the guy in the passenger seat did all the talking. They decided to take a detour to a mates place which was always a bit unnerving when you’re a young teenager hitching with strange bogans.

So we get to their mates pad which happens to be a tiny church out in the middle of nowhere and he’s even more bogan then they are, but he’s got the fire going and rolls twenty massive bud spots and we all get stoned as shit before continuing the journey. The talky guy turns out to be on parole for fuck knows what so he gets dropped off, then the dude driving goes AN HOUR OUT OF HIS WAY just to get us to the gig. Turns out the dudes weren’t bad after all.

When we got to Dunedin decided to have a drink to take the edge off a little. By the time we go to play we’re all pissed as, like seeing double, stumbling, fucked to the brim. Adam started smashing his guitar. Blair was going even more more mental at the audience than usual. Proper GG Allin minus the body fluids. There was a drunken tension between us and the sweet gentle dwellers of Dunedin. It turned into a bit of a ruckus between us and the audience. Chairs were being thrown, fights broke out. Nick got up and walked off, I think the show only lasted 15 minutes. It was fucking terrible.

Activism

July 2003, Hanson Street

Other than the odd fund/ awareness raiser, we weren’t directly involved in much social activism. A lot of punks come from broken families and human society is like one big broken family in a way. The amount of drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence, suicide and mental health issues in th punk scene is pretty frightening. I honestly think music and musical communities save lives and give people a positive outlet when one might not exist.

The punk community is fairly inclusive and empathetic to the needs of people who have gone through tremendous suffering and don’t feel like they fit in other places or have anywhere else to go. Blair was massively inspiring to me when I was younger, given his ability to organise and get shit done and help build a community through music. Punk is a kind of therapeutic support group for poor, fucked up and disenfranchised kids.

Personally I was involved in social activism outside of the band and most of us were to varying extents. Adam and Kathy were hardcore vegan animal lovers. The (second) Iraq War had just kicked off; Brian Tamaki was doing his family values rallying bullshit. Nazi’s were around, the anarchist movement was still alive (before it was overwhelmed with insufferable people). There were direct action training camps in Wellington to resist the bypass, etc. The punk and activist scenes were united. It was a more vibrant community back then. Ask any of the punks who were around then and they will likely share similar stories of how it fell apart.

Endings Us 15-16 year olds, me, Nick and Kathy were all mild mannered and civil while the old cunts, Blair and Adam, were having tantrums, fighting and being emotional the whole time.

Audio

Live at Valve, May 29, 2003
1.Love/ Lets Kill Everyone, 2.Eat and Excrete, 3.Exploitation, 4.System Addiction, 5.State Hate, 6.Blew (cover), 7.War Media