Australian punk rock luminary Dane Tutty has been screaming bloody rage for some time now. As the frontman for seminal political punk troupe Liberation Front, Tutty forced audiences to witness and understand some of the bigger global issues so often ignored. Now, in a solo capacity, Tutty is once again addressing the unaddressed, though this time not on a global scale, instead covering a topic so specific, so individual and so molecular that it too remains largely unaddressed – Borderline Personality Disorder.
For his new single, ‘BPD’, Dane Tutty has pressed his nose right to the coalface of the generally misunderstood condition, after it seeped its way into his world in one of the most devastating fashions – through a close friend who suffered from the baffling whims of BPD leaving Tutty and others in their support network feeling utterly useless. Today, Dane shares the official video clip for ‘BPD’, which comes in the form of a deeply personal short film produced and directed by Samuel Kriesel.
“I didn’t know much, if anything about Borderline Personality Disorder until I was faced with the consequences of an undiagnosed friend’s actions,” Dane Tutty explains to BLUNT. “Quickly, a bandwagon was built and people wanted my friend cancelled. My friend was receiving death threats from strangers on the internet. While I don’t condone the things my friend did, telling another person to kill themself is fucking heavy. After they were diagnosed, I spent time learning about the disorder so I could try and support them through their rehabilitation.
“I didn’t so much learn about the disorder to write the song. My life was just so caught up in their vortex, it was easier to write about that than my own life at that stage. Sometimes loving someone with BPD is hard, but that doesn’t make them any less deserving of that love.”
‘BPD’ is the second gem to be unearthed from Dane’s brand new EP, Bend And Break, out now, which was a labour of love compiled alongside Anti-Flag’s Chris No. 2, who took the role of Dane’s Guy-In-A-Chair. A tattoo artist and single father, Dane experienced two of the extremes from the ongoing pandemic climate, forcing him to stick and move to survive.
“I think this was Chris’ (Chris No. 2 from Anti-Flag) favourite song on the album,” he adds. “We talked about putting it first on the EP for a bit. It was such a great experience sending my demos to Chris and being sent back the instrumentations he wrote. Chris took my songs to a whole new level.”
Recorded on opposite sides of the world, themes of distance, isolation, and struggle exhume through Bend And Break, but through those cracks shine stories of survival, endurance and strength, making this truly an EP of the times.
