Considering he’s the frontman for a band called Fucked Up, Damian Abraham is a surprisingly normal fellow. He is a huge wrestling fan (the real kind, not the soap opera shit) and a compulsive record collector. He and his wife, who are expecting their first child this May, have a strictly regimented reality TV-watching schedule. Having recently survived a massive pan-continental tour, including shows in Japan and China, the only apparent damage to the notoriously self-destructive singer is a bit of a sore tummy.

“I’m hoping it’s just a parasite, because I’ve never had one,” he says, “but I’ve kind of got a feeling it might just be some kind of food poisoning thing. It’s almost like I just can’t digest the food. I won’t get into the gory details, but believe me, it’s not very pleasant. Like yesterday, I vomited up french fries and I was like... if they weren’t covered in vomit, I probably wouldn’t mind eating these again. They still looked perfectly good.”

OK, so Abraham might not be completely normal. Nevertheless, he’s not that far removed from the mainstream. One of the hottest hardcore punk outfits in recent history, Abraham’s band has attracted attention from folks not normally drawn to hardcore screaming. Crediting a sweet record deal with Matador and the band’s willingness to embrace whatever publicity they can get — even with industry titans like MTV and Vibe magazine, often snubbed by the hippest of the hip — Fucked Up have become something of a household name. Earlier this year, the frontman was invited to appear on FOX News by an anchor who happens to be a massive fan of their breakout LP, The Chemistry of Common Life. And just when he thought things couldn’t get weirder, the album was nominated for a Juno.

“If only I had been there,” he says. “I really needed the vacuum.”

Wait, what?

“A couple weeks ago, I was having dinner with some people, and Brendan Canning from Broken Social Scene was there, and I told him we were thinking about going to the Junos. He’s like, ‘Yeah, you get a free vacuum!’ And then we didn’t get the grant money to go, because the government pays every band to go there except Fucked Up, apparently. Speaking of which, why was Holy Fuck the only fuck band that got to benefit from the carefree early days of a Conservative government? I think we’re the only Canadian band to have never received any Lib-grant money. I should start an advertising agency in Quebec — maybe I’d get some then!”

Heady Canadian political humour? Could Abraham be next in line for Russell Peters’s plum Junos hosting gig? If nothing else, we know he can work a crowd. Known for whipping hordes of fans into a frenzy of slam dancing and mosh pits, he has earned a reputation for being willing to do anything and everything to make a show worthwhile. At the band’s first ever Calgary gig during last summer’s Sled Island festival, his antics were so intense that the outcome was an emergency trip to the clinic, and it was a far cry from a touch of food poisoning.

“Someone handed me a pint glass, maybe three-fifths of the way through the set, and I smashed it into my face,” he recalls. “I’ve broken glass enough on my head that I knew what was going to happen, so it wasn’t like I was shocked at the outcome, but this time I actually crushed it into my head. Then I pulled a piece of glass out, and that’s when the blood just started. I was covered in blood. So I took my shirt and kind of cinched it around my head and turned around to the band and they’re staring at me. They’ve seen me bleed enough, but even they knew this was not what normally happens. So we played two more songs and I kind of hung out for a second, and then I thought maybe I should go to a hospital.”

Fortunately, the story ends with Damian getting stitched up by a friendly Calgary doctor, but he was left with a huge scar and a shard of glass that remains lodged in his head — although he’s thinking about having it removed so he can give it as a gift to the FOX News dude. If nothing else, it raises the question of whether he’ll be able to up the ante at this weekend’s show at the No. 1 Legion.

“Sometimes there’s no blood,” he says. “Sometimes I won’t climb somewhere stupid and hang upside-down. But it’s always going to be different, hopefully, and I don’t want to shy away from anything because I owe these people a full monty, if you will. Except not the full monty, because I don’t ever want to show my penis. I have a grower, not a shower. I’m not scared, and under the right circumstances I’d be willing to show it, but not when it’s flaccid.”