In Conversation: Porcell
For the 30th anniversary of Anti-Matter this week, we're revisiting one of the best interviews ever from the original zine.
John Porcelly is best known as Porcell, the guitarist behind some of straightedge hardcore’s most seminal bands, including Youth of Today and Judge. His recorded tenure is coming up on forty years of music, and just last week he released his latest album, with a new band called Values Here. But things weren’t always so great.
Back in the early ‘90s, Porcell was a man in transition. By the time Youth of Today broke up in 1989, the band had launched straightedge as the biggest global movement hardcore had ever produced. But as the decade turned, so too did straightedge’s popularity, and Porcell was faced with a crisis of identity: What was a perennial man on a mission supposed to do when there was no longer a mission?
We originally recorded this conversation in my East Village apartment, in 1995, for the fourth issue o…