Anarchy in the Mile High: UK Punk-Rock Legends Subhumans Play the Oriental

Punk-rock stalwart Subhumans burst out of England more than forty years ago, with angry, intelligent socio-political anthems such as “Parasites” and “Religious Wars.” And while fans of hardcore punk might believe Subhumans emerged fully formed from a Wiltshire sewer, singer Dick Lucas (who also fronts Citizen Fish and Culture Shock) says he was actually into Black Sabbath, Frank Zappa and even (gasp) David Bowie, before punk-rock group Crass blew his mind in 1977.

“Feeding of the 5000 was lyrically the most profound record I’d ever heard up to that point, and it just opened this door to a reality where there was such a thing as ‘the system,’" Lucas recalls. "I didn’t know what a ‘system’ was. I didn’t know what capitalism was. I didn’t know what corporate actually meant, and never considered the church to be anything other than dull and boring. Suddenly, [Crass] was a band not only thinking outside the box — they destroyed the box completely, and the music was just right in your face.”

Lucas says having his mind blown and his worldview expanded by Crass informed the way he wrote lyrics and how seriously he took many issues from that point on. “It was a major boost," he adds. "It moved me from just being spikes and safety pins and silliness to spikes and safety pins and seriousness.”

Early Subhumans albums, especially The Day the Country Died, quickly became punk classics not just in the English and American hardcore scenes, but with curious, question-everything teenagers worldwide, expanding their mindsets just as Crass expanded Lucas’s. But while Crass played razor-sharp hardcore with lyric after lyric and nary a melody or chorus, let alone a guitar solo, Subhumans’ talented guitarist, Bruce Treasure, married the influences of classic rock and even prog rock with Lucas’s socially conscious lyrics.

“Bruce is a very, very good guitarist,” Lucas says. “He knows exactly what he's doing, and he's got some really wacky ideas, and he's got a really good guitar sound. He works on it."

Subhumans disappeared in 1986 after four searing, thought-provoking albums and a slew of EPs, and Lucas focused on his love of ska with Culture Shock and then, more prolifically, with Citizen Fish, which had more mainstream appeal than Subhumans but the same level of consciousness and creativity.

Lucas says that Citizen Fish was a godsend because “from the singer angle, you could be more understood when you were singing. You could sing angry songs to happy music and it felt refreshing. It was really, I think, a good mixture, and you could dance to it.”

Subhumans reunited in 1991 and 1998, and then for good in 2004, snowballing into a tight, road-tested live band as captured on 2004’s seminal Live in a Dive album on Fat Mike’s Fat Wreck Chords. The band is now on tour, and will play the Oriental Theater on Monday, November 6, with Denver's Cheap Perfume and Poison Tribe. (The show was originally slated for HQ, but was forced to move after that venue was flooded.)

Subhumans' resurrection has lasted much longer than the group's initial, impactful early years. The band has put out two full-length albums: 2007’s Internal Riot and 2019’s Crisis Point, which both juxtapose heavy guitars and blasting drums with Lucas’s takes on world affairs without making a caricature of the Subhumans legacy.

“We never really set out to say, ‘Let’s do another song that sounds like "Subvert City"' or whatever,” Lucas explains. “Firstly, there's whoever creates the actual tune, which is either Phil [Bryant] or Bruce — largely Bruce. It all totally depends on what's going through his head and what he's got into lately, and Bruce can get quite experimental, with 3:5 beats, this sort of thing. It can get a bit complicated. Somebody needs to just take a step back and get more into the 4:4 and thrash out a bit. So that's how our songs usually end up having little quirky bits, weird moments in some of them where things suddenly change into something you might not have expected to happen. That keeps the songs usually fairly different from each other.”

One of Lucas’s most iconic Subhumans lyrics comes from the song "Reason for Existence": What’s your reason for existence / Do you believe in anything? / Or does your lifestyle contradict / The words you write for the songs you sing?

Asking him those questions more than forty years after the song was released elicits a thoughtful response, particularly in a time when everything from having a phone to owning tennis shoes typically means supporting soul-crushing capitalism and even child labor.

“Everything we do is wrong from somebody's angle,” Lucas says, “especially these days, when the truth is really hard to pin down and even the facts can be contradicted just by making stuff up and getting equal airtime. I'm not going to say there's no truth anymore, but it's very hard to find it under layers and layers and layers of opinion. That aside, we can all be self-contradictory and hypocritical now and again. That's anarchy. If you could give yourself such rules that you don't let yourself do anything on the basis that you are going to criticize yourself for doing it…you've got to loosen up around the edges.

“Everybody should set up where they feel comfortable, and the less damage they do to humans or animals, the better it is," he concludes. "And I could be doing better. Yes, I've been a bit hypocritical, but if you shut yourself down from being a little bit hypocritical, you don't say anything at all. That's a lot worse than saying something that slightly jars with how you actually live.”

Subhumans, 8 p.m. Monday, November 6, Oriental Theater, 4335 West 44th Avenue. Tickets are $20.