Texas Tales

Dave Dictor's got a set of balls on him. It'd be one thing to start a band called Millions Of Dead Cops in today's 'impossible to shock' musical environment. But doing this in 1981 – in Texas – and in the middle of Ronald Reagan's conservative revolution? As I said – dude's got balls.

“Yeah, we pissed a whole lot of people off,” admits Dictor, down a very dodgy phone line somewhere from the backwoods of Texas. “At the same time it was also very exciting because so many of us were restless and exploding inside. All these bands, Black Flag, Minor Threat, Dead Kennedys, Agnostic Front, D.O.A., us, Circle Jerks – so many others – were doing our thing because nothing around us in popular culture interested us. What we were doing was new and nobody quite got it – the music press ignored us and tried to keep that whole dinosaur, stadium rock thing going, but the hardcore movement just kept growing and growing. A lot us thought that something wasn't right in America at the time and we reacted against it in the only way we knew how.

“As for people hating the band because of its name – well just as we pissed them off, they pissed us off,” continues Dictor. “Down south in our neck of the woods you still had the Ku-Klux Clan who were viciously attacking Mexican farm workers and black churches. Basically they did what they wanted because they were aligned with the police – you'd even see them hanging out together. And of course the police at that time would often break up hardcore shows and just start beating people up for no reason. We were originally called The Stains but then we found out there was a band in Los Angeles with the same name – so we had to change it. Choosing a new name was a no brainer when you considered how the police of the time behaved.”

Unlike many of their contemporaries, MDC survived the ravages of time and have been an ongoing concern for 30 years. In 2006 the band got a real boost in the arm when the documentary American Hardcore was released and generated a renewed interest into the genre's roots.

“That movie really helped us,” admits Dictor. “When I was asked to be involved I said 'cool' and did some interviews and thought nothing of it. Then the next minute we'd be in the middle of New Mexico or something filling up the van and people would come over and say 'Hey are you Dave Dictor from that movie?” he laughs – “unbelievable.”

That MDC are finally getting the chance to tour Australia is exciting for fans and the band alike. Dictor promises that although the band are now considered veterans, that collectively, they still have a hunger for hardcore.

“We're going to play our arses off for you – I can tell you that,” he says. “We've been wanting to come to Australia for so long and we're really looking forward to playing the shows. Obviously we'll be playing a lot of the early material – people seem to like that – but overall it'll be something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. This band has lots of individual 'eras' and we want to show people a little bit of each one so they know what MDC is all about.”