Mar 24, 2021
NOFX have just released Single Album, their 14th studio record since forming in LA in 1983. At that point Fat Mike was known as Mike Burkett, and was still cutting his teeth in the LA punk rock scene.
As he explains in this interview it was a violent scene where being stabbed at a gig was not uncommon. But in punk rock he saw a family of like-minded misfits – a family which he didn’t really have following his parents’ divorce when he was young.
With his dad wanting little to do with his upbringing Mike lived with his manicurist mum, but was largely left to his own devices. And that’s where punk rock came in.
We talk about his entire career in this interview, and nothing is off limits, from his drug use to his love of cross-dressing and BDSM, from surviving the LA punk scene to the early days of NOFX, from founding Fat Wreck Chords and his memories of the mid-'90s punk explosion, to the time his mother asked him to end her life.