“The March Of Man's True Destiny”
Douglas Pearce interviewed by Brian Clark via email, 2006

One thing that most recording artists today are all but universally terrified of, is the accusation of being a "Nazi" or of having fascist sympathies or anything resembling latent "racism." For the last several decades, the entertainment industry has been afflicted with a sort of puritanical political correctness which insures that anyone involved in that industry who strays from the accepted norms (one of them being anti-fascism and anti-racism), quickly finds themselves out-of-the loop in regards to distribution, promotion, and backing. For instance, the Swedish pop band Ace Of Base went from a chart-topping international pop act, to relative obscurity, when it was discovered that one of the band's members had been involved with some sort of "Neo-Nazi" organization in his youth; likewise, the American singer Glenn Danzig was dropped from his major label shortly after writing a track called "White Devil Rise" (which was never even released commercially).Amid this sort of neo-McCarthyist hypersensitivity in the music industry, Douglas Pearce of the genre-defining neo-folk band Death In June has never wavered from his course in dealing with the subjects and imagery relating to Europe's war-torn history, and specifically to Nazi Germany. For decades now, Pearce has never bowed to criticism and rarely explained himself publicly, even when his concerts have been protested and cancelled due to pressure from Anti-fascist / Anti-Nazi / Anti-Racist groups. Pearce is one of the very few contemporary artists who's not only unafraid of being perceived as exactly that which most other artists are petrified of being seen as, but who's even managed to use such perceptions to his own advantage. This is a markedly iconoclastic approach to art, and surely a very difficult one to maintain for such a great length of time, regardless of the motivations behind it. What many people are unaware of about the man behind Death In June, however, is that previous to that project's incarnation he formed one of England's most ardently left-leaning punk rock bands of the late 1970s, Crisis. During Pearce's late teenage years, Nazism (or what the public perceives as "Nazism") was a subject of genuine concern in the lyrics he wrote for Crisis, and ironically the same subject has led to much controversy surrounding Pearce's subsequent work with Death In June in the decades since. The apparent disparity between Pearce's two projects has been a source of much intrigue and speculation among fans and critics alike over the years, and continues to this day...

� Brian M. Clark