In Conversation: Mike Bingham of Spiritual Cramp
After six years, Spiritual Cramp made a deceptively complex debut album worthy of the wait. Mike Bingham has been working on himself for at least as long. It turns out he's deceptively complex, too.
With last year’s release of their self-titled debut, Spiritual Cramp crystallized a sound that embodies street punk, hardcore, and mod music with the kind of versatility that can handle a wide range of subject matter—adding dimensions that we rarely get to see in one band, much less one album. Before this interview, I’d never met singer Mike Bingham before, but almost immediately after we started, that all made sense: He reminds me so much of the kinds of people I met when I first got into hardcore—the tough kids with the soft hearts who lived for this culture. These were the kids with the work ethic to make things happen, but they also quite often set the tone.
Despite going on seven years since the release of Mass Hysteria, Spiritual Cramp’s debu…