Spiritual Cramp’s punk rock odyssey

It happened in sparing drops, gently letting Bingham know it was there. There wasn’t anything particularly spectacular and grand about the storm’s beginnings. It started with the radio – his father’s – which “every once and a while,” would “give him something like the Goo Goo Dolls,” Bingham tells me, dialling in from his Los Angeles apartment. But when he came across something his father liked that incited a distant crack of thunder in the nascent punk storm, he would scurry away to listen to it again and again in private: “I would listen to my dad’s CDs and I would find what I liked about it. I think that I found a way to escape in that.”

It wasn’t the rumble of punk on Bingham’s doorstep that called for a safe haven, but the inner turmoil of his own home life that began to shake the family’s religious foundations, allowing for the sound to sweep him away when the time was right.

The gentle sprinkle grew into a more pronounced drizzle with Bingham’s integration into the skateboarding scene – a breeding ground for baby punks – as he grew older.

“I got into skateboarding and I started passively ingesting this music through skateboarding,” Bingham reflects. “My identity wasn’t based in music at that time – it was based in skateboarding.” Spending time outdoors and away from home, Bingham founded relationships of his own that started supercharging the atmosphere around him, drawing those impending clouds nearer and nearer. “And then I met someone in middle school who liked skateboarding, but they also were punk. And that was the first time I was ever introduced to the idea that you could identify a part of yourself with the music you listen to.” Bingham’s eyes go wide at the memory.

He finds himself recollecting a day that seems rather simple at first: his friend knew some “good shit,” and turned him onto said “good shit” – “It was [AFI]’s Black Sails in the Sunset. And he also gave me a Misfits record.”

And then the heavens opened.

Michael Bingham found himself smack dab in the middle of a cloudburst of music that spoke to him in ways no music had before, capturing pieces of himself he had yet to figure out how to articulate, like standing outside with a bucket. “I remember they were singing this really caustic, kind of sad [music] – this was the first time I ever heard emotions like confusion and anger and darkness and that was something I really related to at the time,” he tells me. Being a young teen is difficult. Add an unstable homelife to the mix, and it feels like there’s a hurricane brewing on the doorsteps of any young mind. “I had a pretty tumultuous home life and I was pretty angry and I was looking for something to connect to. And then I heard Bad Religion. I heard these bands who were singing about the way that I felt. And it just so happened there was an identity attached to that. I could be a punk and I needed to be something,” he shares.

Belonging somewhere, being something, someone – it’s what every child not only wants, but fundamentally needs. “I needed to be [something] other than who I was. And so I was able to look at the way they dressed and be like, ‘Okay, that’s what I am and I’m going to go and buy a studded bracelet and I’m going to paint my nails black,’” Bingham recounts. “And that was the first time I ever found an identity in music. And then it just seeped into every aspect.” It’s hard not to get sucked in by the idea of belonging, further intensified by the feeling of being seen, recognised, understood. “You see this thing they’re talking about verbalizes how you feel and that’s the first time you’re exposed to these outside ideas, these subversive ideas.

“And if you’re in a place where [you have] a rough home life,” Bingham continues, “you maybe don’t have an identity yet, maybe you’re looking around being like, ‘I’m confused and I don’t know who I am. I think these people around me are wrong, but I don’t have any way to identify that there are other people in the world who believe what I believe.’” As a kid questioning everything they’ve ever known and been told, that experience and level of empathy felt priceless – “really, really powerful,” Bingham says, “as someone who’s looked desperately [for it]. You put those headphones on and you hit play, and you’re taken away from where you are – and I needed that so bad. I needed to escape what was right in front of me.”

Even as the years led Bingham into his own experiments with music, the punk raincloud never stopped following him: he tried various groups and projects – including Creative Adult – that never quite seemed to give him the same feeling of standing in that storm for the first time. Even though his previous projects didn’t give him the exact feelings he was looking for, both in childhood and adulthood, music gave Bingham the ability to survive beyond just growing up, to survive the transformation into young adulthood where your sense of identity can stray even further.

“Music was a survival mechanism for me,” Bingham shrugs his shoulders, but in an accepting rather than careless way. “I was just grasping for anything. And it just so happened that those four men in AFI – they kind of looked like I did, but cooler – were talking about really sad things that I could connect with. So I was particularly vulnerable, but if you’re a child and there’s no one else to look out for you, you’re going to find something that you can guard yourself with.”

It’s a guard that Bingham has never dropped, given it taught him how to really advocate for himself and learn who he was beyond what he was told, or what he experienced, as a child. “And I found a middle finger, you know,” he says. “I was like, ‘Oh, I can put my middle finger up at people and even if they tell me not to, I can do it anyway. And I can fight and scream and kick and steal.’ I had to find it 'cuz I didn't have anything else. It kind of saved my life for better or for worse.” But it wasn’t just the music he found, it was the ethos and the way of living within the alternative sphere: “I found an interest that could at least [give me] some armour that could protect me until I found myself.”

Now, he hopes Spiritual Cramp will do the same for that kid who’s living a life that mirrors Bingham’s own: “Hopefully there is some kid out there who is living in a one-bedroom apartment with his family who has no money and who has no idea who he is and the people around him are telling him he’s worth nothing and [they’re] going to see this, and they’re going to be like, ‘could that be me?’”

Young Michael Bingham would never have imagined he would be fronting his own band that appears on the cover of Alternative Press, just like his heroes did. Or that he would garner attention and acclaim from every publication under the sun. That he would open for Rise Against, Bad Nerves, and Iggy Pop – punk rock royalty – touring all over the world. That he, the young child so desperate to be seen and understood, would be the person that children now look to for guidance, for armour. And that Spiritual Cramp’s forthcoming album, RUDE, will be heard by more people than he could even fathom.

“And maybe it gives someone out there something to hold onto, because that’s what I found in music,” he says of RUDE. “I found the same thing because I needed something to hold on to. I needed a train to just latch myself onto or I was going to die of starvation. And because I found that train to hold onto, it saved me. And then I ended up in this beautiful space, a life beyond my wildest dreams.”

Because there can be safety and security within the rain, as long as you embrace the storm.