Creeper: The cult band who became the nemesis of the Westboro Baptist Church
The cynic in me wants to call The Westboro Baptist Church one hell of a marketing agency.
They’ve jump-started many careers in their time. I think the first time many of my generation heard of Louis Theroux was his documentary on them, The Most Hated Family in America. An evisceration so profound that Theroux found his deceptively amiable way into the Westboro Baptist Church’s very scripture as a vessel of Satan himself. Something which Theroux probably took a near sexual degree of relish in.
However, part of the conflict that Theroux detailed in his follow-up documentaries on the Phelps family was the fact that by depicting them, Theroux had made them famous. The Church was no longer a curio confined to one small corner of Topeka, Kansas, but a national, and in some cases, international concern.
These hateful voices were amplified thanks to Theroux’s involvement, a fact that caused him no shortage of sleepless nights.
However, in the meantime, many other folks have taken their turn in dunking on the Phelps family and their nightmarish offspring. The Foo Fighters went viral for driving a truck up to a Westboro protest outside one of their concerts and playing a country song about anal sex to them, rather marvellously. Touché Amore printed a T-shirt of family patriarch Fred Phelps’ face after he died with the caption “GOOD RIDDANCE”.
Few of them pissed off the church enough to warrant a response, though, until Southampton goth-punks Creeper joined the Warped Tour in 2017.
How did Creeper piss off the Westboro Baptist Church?
In a way, there’s few bands that are better suited to riling up the Phelps Family than Will Gould’s morbid rockers.
The band take after primary influences My Chemical Romance in taking the whole “being a sanctuary for misfits” aspect of life in rock ‘n’ roll deadly seriously. They’ve spent their entire career standing up for the kind of people that the Phelps Family have gotten very rich off abusing, and when the church went down to protest a date on the 2017 Warped Tour, the band decided to kick back.
When Gould heard about their plans, he told Vice that he thought, “What the fuck have they got to picket? We’re just a bunch of kids having a good time and enjoying the music. We went down to anti-protest them. Everybody made their own signs and stormed down there.” Blackcraft, the alternative clothing line, had made up some T-shirts saying “Fuck the Westboro Baptist Church“, so everyone donned them and got to telling these bigots just where they can stick their signs.
Which is great. The church itself got very pissy about it and tweeted: “Creepers are going to hell, they are 100 per cent Satanic. All they have is death”. Which, obviously, Creeper themselves put on a T-shirt and spent the rest of their Warped Tour run selling. Wonderful stuff. One has to wonder how much oxygen one is giving these vermin by constantly clapping back. The Phelps know better than most that this is an attention economy, and the more time you spend letting people know about them, the longer they’ll exist for.
Is this a reason not to engage? Or just ignore them? Absolutely not. Something must be done about these monsters; the only question is what?