The mystic origins of Joe & The Shitboys: the “politest” punks in Faroese history
Midway through our mild discussion, Joe & The Shitboys humbly disclose that they’re quite possibly the “politest” band in a long line of queer, vegan shitpunks from the Faroe Islands. Well, everybody needs something to make them stand out. Being queer, vegan shitpunks from the Faroe Islands with songs that fail to break the 90 second mark, all titled stuff like ‘Save the Planet, You Dumb Shit’, is standard-fare, but being polite into the bargain, now that’s unchartered territory, that’s as rare as a scientific term for the back of the knee.
These guys are mavericks, that much is clear. I first encountered their post-normal sensibility about a year ago when I randomly ran into their frontman, the Shitboy himself, Joe Shit, at a musique concrète rave in Tórshavn, a port town on the brink of the Arctic Ocean. While this might sound inexplicable, it’s actually quite commonplace when you’re visiting a capital with a population that floats around 13,050 people.
I was introduced to Mr Shit as a foreign dignitary sniffing around the bellowing music scene. I told Joe I was a great admirer of his band, and if I had time before heading off to the airport in the morning that I might pop up to the record store and buy the latest Shitboys album, The Reson for Hardcore Vibes Again. He not only told me that he, like many of the musicians on the island, was working at the record shop that day, he checked his damn rota. Joe Shit scrolled through a fucking spreadsheet to hold me to my off-hand remark. ‘Now there’s a man who knows his way around self-promotion’, I thought to myself.
This manner of savviness, a daring drive to be different, has cut to the chase in an era of convoluted waffle. In a time when the merits of eating meat have been ran through the mill, a statement as succinct as the song title, ‘If You Believe in Eating Meat Start With Your Dog’, is very refreshing. The song in question is one of their more pleasant numbers, and it comes in at 41 seconds. Much like all of their music, it does, indeed, capture ‘hardcore vibes’. As it turns out, this is an ethos derived from the mystic origins of the band.
It all began when guitarist Ziggy Shit was demolishing a school. “Everyone is in everyones band, so you’re always looking for something new,” he says, reflecting on the fact that it’s a quirk of Faroese existence that the bassist in a folk group can also be the drummer in a drone band, captain a fishing vessel in summer, and delve into bank management in the winter. This creates a merry-go-round of ideas. The latest one to hit Ziggy one idle afternoon with a sledgehammer in hand was “to make a really terrible punk seven-inch record and call it Joe & The Shitboys.” He found the inspiration for the project amid the rubble of a geography class.
“So a teenager, I presumed, had made this terrible painting that I thought would work great as the cover art for this imaginary single. That was it. I thought, ‘Okay, this will be funny for me and maybe one other person’.” Alas, now the band have a legion of fans all over the world. And it’s all thanks to the bored scribblings of a high school kid.
The mystic painting in question includes the immortal, typo-clad phrase that has become the band’s doctrine: “The reason For Hardcore vibes”. “That’s why we always come back to that sentence. That’s the core that the band was built around,” Ziggy says. ‘But it’s nondiscript nonsense’, I muse, they simply laugh in response. “That seems about right”. The weapons that also adorned the painting are incorporated in their work merely by virtue of a certain sense of musical punchiness.
While the painting might preside over the band’s output like a beacon, the Shitboys have tried to chase it down, but are always left with a mystery. “I have Googled that phrase with and without the typo so many times, but I can’t find anything other than techno,” Ziggy explains. That simply leads to more questions. Joe posits that the weapons on the image were all from “GTA Vice City, so it must be from around that time.” While that observation might round down the age range, none of the 50,000 Faroese folks in existence have come forward to say that they are, indeed, the scribbling Svengali behind the Shitboys. “That would mean taking ownership for that terrible painting though,” Joe posits as a possible explanation.
Nevertheless, since Ziggy found this relic and was moved to create music to match its mood. Magical punk has been happening ever since. Even the band can’t quite explain it. After Ziggy proposed his plan to some friends, Joe says, “We met up for two hours. We had never played together before. We wrote, rehearsed and recorded two songs, and there was just something magical about it. It was just so fucking easy.” Instantly, they wanted to do a live gig. But two songs for Joe & The Shitboys usually equates to about three minutes of material, so they had to get to work if they were going to put on a release show that “wouldn’t piss everybody off.” Thankfully, they “average one hour per song from starting the writing process to finishing up with a recorded song.”
However, as Ziggy stresses, this speed was merely inadvertent. “That happened naturally,” the remarkably laidback and unhurried guitarist adds. In this regard, the Shitboys are nothing like you’d expect. They drink tea before a show. They wipe their hobnail boots before entering a venue. And they always say please and thank you. The flipside is that they’re also, accidentally, the most pure punk band perhaps there has ever been. Their forthcoming material was recorded in the Icelandic wilderness after a road trip that was never meant to be. And on stage, they’re goddamn maniacs of the highest order. They are the mild-mannered face of anarchy exemplified, and it’s all largely by accident.
“You never know what you’re going to get,” Ziggy says of their live shows. “We never even know what we’re going to get!” Joe continues: “For us, it’s all about creating a room. What can we do with the atmosphere? What can we do with the specific people here? There’s a lot of crowd interaction and whatever the crowd gives us back, that’s what we feed off. That’s always fun because we like to push people into odd situations, and we react to how they react. It’s loose in every sense of the word.”
That loose volley of acerbic wit is enrapturing and utterly welcome. “There’s no fat with the Shitboys. These songs are very anorexic. They’re anorexic songs. But they cut right to the point, and we try to do that live too,” they say. “This makes the whole thing very fun, it makes it more alive.” Indeed, when they take to the stage and conjure a maelstrom of chamomile-fuelled hardcore vibes, it hits like an Arctic wind. And you can feel the full force of the Shitboys’ stinking gale as they head over to the UK in the coming days.
Joe & The Shitboys UK tour dates:
- Deadpunk Special, Bristol – 11 May
- The Shacklewell Arms, London (w/ Full Flower Moon Band) – 15 May
- Waterbear, The Great Escape, Brighton – 16 May (3pm)
- Fiddlers Elbow, Brighton – 16 May (1.10am)
- Hope & Ruin, The Great Escape, Brighton – 17 May (1am)
- Moth Club, London (Wide Awake pre-party w/ C.O.F.F.I.N + JJUUJJUU) – 24 May
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