Pat Flynn’s scream of “U-S-M-A!” hangs in the air at the Underworld in Camden, London. A guy in a billowing white T-shirt dives from the stage and is held aloft by the crowd – a typically energetic snapshot from a hardcore show. Except that, on this occasion, it’s not all that typical. With that roar, the Fiddlehead vocalist isn’t preaching positivity or inciting the pit: he’s remembering his father, whose acceptance into the the United States Military Academy almost six decades ago had a profound effect on his life.
Hardcore and the military aren’t obvious bedfellows, but Flynn is among a number of musicians for whom the two are inextricable. He was an army brat – his father studied at USMA, commonly known as West Point, before he served in Vietnam, and taught there afterwards. Later, Flynn bounced between Germany, Connecticut, Arizona and Washington DC with his family before settling in Massachusetts. “It created this misfit thing, moving all the time,” Flynn says, sitting in a coffee shop before the show.
