That's the way to do it

Fugazi release music only on their own label, refuse to employ outside management and don't regard making money as a priority. Is that the secret of their success? Garry Mulholland gets frontman Ian MacKaye to spill the beans

The biggest news in British pop recently is that Robbie Williams has been paid a reported £80m to sign a new record deal. Of course, what these reports rarely mention is that this obscene sum of money is an advance, out of which marketing, promo videos, stylists and the huge army of peripheral troops needed to wage war on the marketplace has to be paid for. In short, our very own king of pop is deeply in hock.

There was some discussion before the signing about whether Williams and his people would go it alone; effectively start their own label and become an "indie". This didn't happen, mainly because modern pop stars need that promotional army to remind themselves of their status as much as modern politicians need a party machine to get their message over.

The issue of artistic control is ever-present in music. The prevailing attitude is that it is impossible to compete without taking enormous loans from corporate entities in order to facilitate playing a few songs and staging a few shows. Which is why an artist and businessman such as Ian MacKaye is so valuable. MacKaye writes, sings and plays guitar for a band called Fugazi. They're just one of many bands he's been in, but they're the only one that sells upwards of 200,000 copies of each album they release after 15 years together.

He is also co-owner of an independent label, Dischord, which has been releasing punk records out of Washington DC for 22 years and has just put out a three-CD boxed set called 20 Years of Dischord. Neither Dischord nor Fugazi employs any outside management or takes funding from major music corporations. Yet they are thriving. The talkative MacKaye ("Sorry – I'm a verbose fellow", he apologises after one long and meticulous reply) is suspicious of the word "proud", but is defiant about Dischord's cottage-industry triumph.

"What we do is supposed to be idealistic and untenable. Well, we've been here for 22 years. We employ full-time staff on full benefits, including healthcare. We own our own houses and have families. We're all alive and doing fine. The American theory of expansion insists that if a business isn't growing, it must be dying. That's just nonsense. An excuse for greed. I believe that you can set up an operation that is sustainable and makes you a living without shutting down the competition, or trying to absorb everything else, or doing things you disagree with, or accepting money from any corporation or faith, or hiring out your product or personality to sell other products. People get lost in the gathering of money and believe that's the only way it can be done. The way we have operated is a clear example that this is incorrect."

MacKaye and his fellow Fugazi members (Guy Picciotto, Joe Lally and Brendan Canty) play a kind of punk rock that may not be familiar to those who expect thrashing, hollering and attitudinal outrage. There's definitely a career-long influence from British agit-punk, particularly Gang of Four and The Ruts. But the latest album The Argument has as many moments of beauty as it does aggression. Complex grooves abound, tempos change, harmonies build and decorate, emotional content is high. MacKaye doesn't like to analyse the songs, but does explain what The Argument itself is and who it's between.

"There's always an ongoing debate about war. A lot of the time that debate gets caught up in details. Someone said to me once, so – you're a pacifist. I said, yeah, I suppose I am. He said, if your mother was being attacked by someone, would you use violence to stop it? I said, yeah, I suppose I would. So violence is OK, he said. This is typical – someone trying to catch you out in terms of your principles. The point is that there may be times when violence seems necessary, but it's never OK. And I don't care whether that's planes being flown into buildings or bombs being dropped on people. Those who are pro-war generally end up dead. If they don't end up dead physically, they end up dead spiritually."

MacKaye was born in the Sixties and brought up in America's capital by politically active, anti-war, pro-civil-rights parents. "I assumed it was normal to question authority, but by 1980 rebellion was limited to intoxicating yourself one way or another. I was lost until I heard British punk rock. The Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Jam were on major labels, but what a lot of us got from them was a sense of challenging conventional thinking on all levels. Like all great ideas, it wasn't dominated by the marketplace. So, when we started our bands and our label, we had no desire to be accepted by the music business."

In 1981 MacKaye formed a band called Minor Threat, which inadvertently kick-started a movement. The impact of a MacKaye song called "Straight Edge" is coated in irony, because its subject matter threatened to destabilise MacKaye's self-determination through the controversy generated by MacKaye's rejection of traditional rock'n'roll rebellion. "It was about my personal decision to not drink or take drugs. I still don't. One of the biggest reasons why I didn't get with drugs is because I'm a huge Jimi Hendrix fan. Not only did that poor fellow curl up and die on drugs, but I kept meeting people who'd seen Hendrix. And I was always like, 'What was he like?' And, without fail, they'd said they couldn't remember 'cos they were too stoned. I decided that I didn't wanna forget the things I do in my life."

But some took MacKaye's expression of personal choice for a set of rules that must be obeyed. "They seemed to think I was going round slapping beers out of people's hands. But the idea did resonate around the States and around the world. A few years later, people were talking about 'Straight Edge' as a movement, and it started to attract an element who had an issue with violence. They were looking for lines to draw in the sand over which they could beat the crap out of somebody. But I was never connected to the movement. I was clear from the beginning that the song was a celebration of an individual's choice in life. But I don't distance myself from those who did feel connected to that song. I'm really happy that, if I wrote a song that led to anything, it was that and not 'Smoke Crack'."

But perhaps the key thing, for MacKaye, for Fugazi, for Dischord, is that they don't feel they are more important than their audience, or anywhere near as important as what they choose to discuss in their work. The sleeve insert in The Argument includes a shot of the memorial stone for Sandra Scheuer, one of four students shot dead by the US National Guard at an anti-Vietnam War protest at Ohio's Kent State University in May 1970. "We just wanted people to keep these things in mind," says MacKaye. "This record was made in 2000 and early 2001 before everything went to hell. Now authority in America is completely out of balance. We had an anti-globalisation protest here in Washington DC last week that was insane. Two windows were broken, yet 600 people were arrested. You figure it out."

'The Argument' and '20 Years of Dischord' are both out now on Dischord. Fugazi begin a UK tour in Brighton on Oct 20. Details can be found at www.southern.com/southern/band/fugazi