Pioneering underground rock act Fugazi’s hiatus won’t be ending anytime soon, but band members are not ruling out regrouping at some point in the future. The quartet released its last Dischord studio album, “The Argument,” in 2001 and has only played a handful of live shows since.
“We don’t have anything planned right now, but none of us rule it out,” drummer Brendan Canty tells Billboard.com. “The door is not closed. Maybe we’ll revisit it in a year or something like that. We purposely didn’t say we’re breaking up. We needed to take a break for logistical reasons.” Chief among them is Canty’s burgeoning family, which now counts three sons under the age of seven.
“Fugazi was six months on the road, every year, for 10 years,” he says. “It was insane. When I started having kids, we trimmed it way back. Eventually it was down to three-week tours. But for Fugazi, it was like, we’re barely even working. For us, it was still working at 20% capacity. When I had my third child, I had to cut it back even farther.”
Despite Fugazi’s uncertain future as an active entity, the band plans to continue offering soundboard concert recordings as part of its Fugazi Live Series, which is overseen by bassist Joe Lally and available exclusively online.
“I think the second set of them will be a little tighter,” Canty says. “They’ll have nicer artwork, and less glitches in terms of track lists. We thought it would be a small, easy thing to do, but then we had 18,000 hits in three days. It was ridiculous. That’s the thing that astounds me. You can be totally isolated here in D.C. if you want to. We’re not in New York or Los Angeles and we’re not interfacing with industry people at all. So when there’s that big influx of interest from fans, it’s exciting and affirming.”
“That’s the only way we can gauge people’s interest in us,” he concludes. “The live series has helped maintain some sort of relationship with fans and allows us to interact with people more than we would have otherwise, which is probably none, since we’re not touring right now. We’ll just have to see what happens.”
