User:Fritigern

Administrator and founder of this here CPI wiki, this is my personal space where I do stuff.

Introduction:
Hello, allow me to tell me a bit about myself. I am known by several names. Peter Punk, Balaam's Miracle, Fritigern Gothly, Daddy and "hey you!". I am 46, married and I have 2 girls, born 20 months apart and I love music. I mean, seriously, I LOVE it. Underground genres are the genres that I feel most passionate about. Punk, Gothic, Industrial, Ska (1st and 2nd wave ska only!) are at any given moment my favorites. I have always wanted to be in a band, but I have never had the opportunity for it. I fancy myself to be a bit of a drummer, as in that I am not at all great but I can usually keep a beat and I can play various genres. I think my general playing style can be best compared to Mel Gaynor from the Simple Minds. I don't set out to play like that, it's just my instinctive or natural style. Although I like to think of myself as someone who drums (as opposed to a drummer, who actually knows what they do) it has been nearly 20 years since I last touched a drum kit.

I am rambling, but that's okay because this is my personal page and my writings on this page don't have to be coherent :-)



The Beginning
Now, let's see... When I was 15 and still an atheist, I got into what was then known as New Wave, bands like the Cult, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Strawberry Switchblade and the Simple Minds were my favorites. I wore my hair just like my idol, Siouxsie Sioux (some would compare my hair to Robert Smith's, but meh) but one day my mom decided that it has to go. I was given a haircut, whether I liked it or not. Within the span of a few minutes, I went from "hey look at my cool hair!" to Prince Nerdmeister. I hated it. I hated it so bad that I decided to turn that hair into a mohawk, because if then she were to try and cut it, my next step would be to become a Skinhead, and surely she wouldn't want that!

Fast forward a couple of months. I went to an open air rock festival and had a blast. At some point (no idea what band was playing), a pogo pit formed and someone pulled me in. That's my very first pogo experience and I LOVED it! Sure you got pushed and pulled and you dished it out as well, but the amazing thing was that If you fell (and that happened a couple of times), there was always someone to pick you up, and push you back into the pogo pit! Mind you, at that time, I still had no idea of what Punk music sounded like, although I felt that surely Billy Idol was very punk!

Somehow, I managed to make some punk friends, and they made me a few tapes of music. PIL, Dead Kennedys, Black Flag and at some point I bought a Varukers album and the Kings of Punk album by Poison Idea. That was basically all the music that I had.

Conversion
Then in 1987 I gave my life to Christ, how I got there is a very very long story and gets so complicated that even I have a hard time keeping track of what happened how and when. So after my conversion, I got told that I had to get rid of all of my music because it was part of my old life. My punk clothes and hair style had to go too. I didn't realize it at the time, but it was actually my pastor who wanted to transform me into a "decent boy" with a "Christian" look. Unfortunately for him, I was this 17-year-old rebellious kid who had just sworn off anarchism but who was still not very inclined to blindly play follow the leader. So a few months later I was back in my punk clothes, my hair was growing back and I was ready to take on the world again!

Only this time, I did not have matching music. Here I was, a little punk rocker kid for Christ, but what am I to play? Off to a Christian bookstore I went and picked up a copy of Stryper's Soldiers Under Command album. Sure, it wasn't punk, but it was better than nothing.



Starved for Music
My musical dry spell lasted pretty long, because in the Netherlands (where I was born and raised) we did not have the kind of access to Christian underground music that the kids in the US had. But in due time I got my hands on a few tapes by the Lead, the Warning and the first album by Nobody Special and supplemented my musical needs with Daniel Amos, Bloodgood and other kinds of white Metal, and I even had Adrian Snell's Alpha and Omega album.

Then in 1989, the Crucified's debut album dropped and it blew me away! This was the energy, the anger, the rawness and the speed and the message that I had longed for! I wrote the band they sent me a flyer which showed that they still had demos for sale. So I ordered those demos, and although the band sounded different on those recordings, they were still just what I wanted. I never had much money, and it was even rarer for me to have some money left to spend on stuff like music, so I had to make do with what I had, and the occasional windfall of someone copying a tape for me, which was usually even a copy of a copy of a copy. It remained very hard for me to find the music that I liked, and although I occasionally bought demos from the US (Childhood, Death Denied, Sanctified Noise, Point Blank and others) most of them left me wanting, or the recordings felt like they were lacking something musically.

Goodbye to Punk
I kinda carried on, and the 90s came and somewhere in that decade came along the "new interpretation" of hardcore in the form of music which sounds as if it should be much faster, but which I feel just drags on. I was so bored with it all, I looked around for other genres. For some time I got my focus on 80s music in various genres. Initially, it was mostly top-40 music, but gradually moving into the underground in the form of coldwave, industrial, post-punk, etc. One day I heard an album by Apoptygma Berzerk and loved it. And although Apoptygma Berzerk is considered EBM (Electronic Body Music), it is much appreciated by people in the Goth scene, and that marked the moment when I fell in love with Gothic, Industrial, and EBM to such a point that I started a fairly successful website dedicated to the Faith-based versions of these "dark" genres which I held for 7 years, until my health forced me to abandon the site cold turkey.

Well, hello again!
And then, about two years ago, I decided to check out the current state of Christian punk and stumbled upon the now defunct website Caustic Fallout which featured many awesome bands. Bands like Headnoise, the Deal, the Havoc, Our Corpse Destroyed, Infirmities and a ton of other awesome bands which are now featured on this wiki. Hearing those bands made my blood flow faster, it made me believe in Punk again, it made me want to find more, more, MORE!

A wiki is born!
And now, the result of that desire, or greed if you will, has led me to start this wiki in the hope that others who may be living in the kind of musical wasteland as I have, may find scores of bands that they love, that it will rekindle that fire that they once had, either for punk or for Christ (preferably both) and inspire them to become part of our community. One last thing before I wrap this up: You'd think that after all this time and experiences with punk, I would be an expert on punk (sub)genres, and know loads of bands. But I am not. See, only since a short while do I realize that there are loads of subgenres. I always just divided punk into two subgenres, Punk Rock and Hardcore and that was it for me. Now I know that there is D-beat, Crust, Crunk, Oi!, Steetpunk, Skate punk, and a load more and quite frankly, I don't know how to tell Crust from Streetpunk but that's okay, because there are people on this wiki who *do* know the difference, and they are tagging the bands accordingly.

Personal wiki stuff

 * My sandbox : User:Fritigern/Sandbox
 * Where I go to sort stuff (should be empty) : User:Fritigern/Sorting
 * My band list : User:Fritigern/Bands
 * More bands/albums : User:Fritigern/Bands2
 * Bands saved from FB : User:Fritigern/Bands3
 * My TODO list : User:Fritigern/TODO
 * My Ramblings: User:Fritigern/Random quotes


 * Links to unlisted bands will be redirected to this page: Unlisted