The Church in Washington DC that links Fugazi and Turnstile
When you put hardcore Baltimore band Turnstile and Washington post-hardcore band Fugazi together in a sentence, the last thing you’d think would link them is holy ground.
The bands share a bold, daring exploration of the ambitious side of hardcore, pushing the genre into new waters while focusing on the community-driven aspect of alternative music. It’s a comparison that Paramore frontwoman Hayley Williams has explicitly picked up on, hailing the Never Enough rockers as “my Fugazi”, as, in her words, both bands show up “exactly as they are. Which is probably why all kinds of people can belong at their show”.
Let’s do exactly that: let’s picture what a Turnstile show might look like. Recent reports have highlighted the absolute mayhem the Baltimore five-piece bring to the stage, as a Virginia show ended in agony for a 15-year-old who, like many others thrashing around in the pit, was invited on stage to dive back into the sprawling mass of undulating bodies. He was pepper-sprayed by a security guard, an incident that Turnstile deemed “cowardly” in an official statement.
This isn’t the first time a security guard has fucked with the end of a Turnstile gig. The ‘Birds’ musicians might be right at the top now, after their impressive winning streak at the Grammys this year, but they’ve been slogging in the industry long and hard for a good while now, no more so than in 2016 on their Move Thru Me tour.
During this tour, some days before Halloween, Brendan Yates and co appeared at St Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church in Washington to bash through a ferocious 13-song set that opened with ‘Drop’ and ran into tracks like ‘Death Grip’ and ‘Gravity’. When they took to play their last song, ‘Keep It Moving’, a brazen security man ruined all the fun by shutting down the show. Turnstile will forever butt heads with the establishment, but the sacred site made this all the more intrusive.
Evidently, the band owe a thing or two to Fugazi, in the way their sounds collect and clatter like an avalanche first bursting forth into the snowy day. But what the band might not have known is that the very church they fought with security in was an important site in the long Fugazi history.
Incredibly, Fugazi frontman Ian Mackaye grew up attending St Stephen’s church. He was even baptised there. Plus, he’s returned to the unlikely punk haven plenty of times over his lengthy career, to forge the punk community that was so instrumental for Turnstile in the 2010s.
The church’s importance to the DC punk movement grew bigger than Mackaye, and is bigger than Turnstile’s footnote in the story. As more punk bands played riotous sets on the hallowed grounds, the community organisation Positive Force hosted their first benefit concert in 1985, with a mission to squander the increasing levels of violence and hate speech in punk culture. A baptism, a shut-down show, and a community organisation walk into a bar…out walks Turnstile and Fugazi, or something like that.
