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Warren Kinsella is a punk.

He's a 45-year-old punk who drinks Starbucks espresso doppios with three sugars, plays bass in a band called Shit From Hell, works as a lawyer and consultant, and lives in Toronto's Beaches with his wife and four children.

And if you don't get that, he doesn't care.

Of course, to a Conservative or to anyone who sat on the Martin side of the Chrétien-Martin Liberal battle line, the fact that Kinsella is a punk comes as no great shock.

He has lobbed his share of bombshells into the media arena, many on behalf of former prime minister Jean Chrétien, whom he advised in the early 1990s.

Also included in his political repertoire are books Kicking Ass in Canadian Politics and Party Favours.

What will come as a shock is that Kinsella has spent the past 30-odd years compiling interviews with punk legends, including Johnny Rotten and Joe Strummer, for his new book, Fury's Hour: A (sort-of) Punk Manifesto.

"I never entirely stopped being a punk in politics," he said.

In fact, he credits the punk subculture with getting him involved in both politics and journalism. Punk, he explains, empowered suburban youths like him to change the world.

"Punk makes you think you can do anything," he said. "Of course, you never really do."

His start in journalism came from the music industry. Kinsella wrote a "snotty" letter to a Calgary-based music magazine lamenting its misrepresentation of punk. The editor called his bluff and told him to write stories.

From there, Kinsella would eventually go to Carleton University's School of Journalism and become a beachhead against the neo-con agenda, writing op-ed pieces and columns for the National Post and The Ottawa Citizen.

As a columnist, his work was as partisan as his defence of punk was devout.

In the 1970s, Kinsella, infused with the spirit of punk petty rebellion, organized anti-racism rallies in his hometown of Calgary.

After seeing the Conservatives at the time "playing footsie" with Western separatists -- and ethnic nationalists, during the National Energy Program controversy -- he signed up for the Liberal Party.

"Some people say [punk has]given me the desire or the conviction to change things," he said.

As much as punk purists will often exclaim that the music from the anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment subculture shouldn't be about politics, almost all major punk bands eventually took on a political agenda.

"You can't get into punk without getting political," Kinsella said.

He and his band practise in a new music studio in the Beaches that smells of prefabricated furniture and fresh wood.

His bandmates, who all seem to be productive members of society, wear T-shirts bearing the logos of punk groups such as the Buzzcocks. Nary a piercing nor a twentysomething are to be found.

Shit From Hell's CD -- expected to be released in about a month (hard on the heels of Fury's Hour) -- could be a huge embarrassment.

On this mild Tuesday afternoon, Kinsella said they sounded "like shit," completely out of tune -- a fact he blames on an earlier photo shoot's attempt to have him (sort-of) smash his red guitar.

On this day, he said punk is not dead. But it's not the same punk as it was.

"You can't be a punk the same at the age of 46 as the age of 16 or you'd go mad," Kinsella said.

Punk is an angry movement. It's about young people getting angry and trying to fix what needs fixing and of DIY -- doing it yourself. "Youth subcultures can do great things," Kinsella said.

But eventually, the punks grew up. "You take elements of it and move on," he said. "The only ones who remained unchanged were the ones who died."

Some did. Punk got ugly in the 1980s.

Ask Kinsella how he got the scar on his upper lip. "In a fight I lost," at a Calgary bar in 1984.

Kinsella said he didn't know the owner of the fist. Just that it was a bigger guy.

And after that fight, he left the punk scene, though he would continue to play in bands.

Punk had been flooded by skinheads and macho types who were more interested in the fights than the music.

"The gigs became super scary," he said. "I saw some guy hit another guy with a lead pipe that popped his eye out of his head. That was nuts. That was crazy."

Other bands turned their backs on punk philosophy by selling out to corporate culture.

The Clash and Iggy Pop will forever live in infamy for selling their tracks for TV commercials, he said.

"There are some people who lost their soul," he said. "Who traded their creativity and honesty in for money."

But has Kinsella, a lawyer and former adviser to one of the longest-running Canadian governments -- a man firmly entrenched in the establishment -- sold out?

"I don't know," he said. "I'm content to just let people buy the book, hopefully in great numbers, and decide for themselves."

In truth he probably doesn't care. That's what makes him a punk.

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