Particularly when it comes in the form of Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland. Röyksopp’s latest album is Senior, the much anticipated follow-up to Junior, a poppy, blippy and toe-tappingly fun affair that hit the shelves in March of ‘09. But what was cool about the launch of Junior is that fans of the techno twosome were told fairly right away that Senior was also coming down the pipeline. Talk about planning. Where Guns n’ Roses take 13 years to put out one album, S&T already had two in the wings.

So Senior is a darker (check out that near-black album cover!), foresty, swooshy, introspective affair. It’s no less wonderful and fills the void out there with its intensely pretty beeps. It’s lush and swoons. First single “The Drug” harkens back to the heyday of great chillout. There’s rain on the album and a few birds. And a delightful slight crackle that you only get on vinyl. It sounds great when coupled with a hangover, comedown or Sunday. Inspiration apparently came from Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou – otherwise known as VANGELIS.

Röyksopp are pretty awesome live and I can only pray (DO YOU HEAR THAT, TROMSØ?) the boys get their act over to the Best Coast and tour N.A proper in time. Particularly as the last time I saw them was, oh, the UK Homelands festival in 2002, where I, rather “refreshed”, bumped into Torbjørn and insisted that as a result of my Danishness and his Norwegianness that we were somehow interconnected. And then I told him I was going to be his biggest cheerleader down the front. I was.

Without further adø, here’s Senior.

It’s available on September 13, but you can preorder it here.  On first listen, I’m thinking it may be a contender.

Hear it for yourself: \m/

BUT THE BACKSTAGE RIDER’S LOGO IS THE DEVIL’S HORNS! HER TAGLINE IS A CRIB FROM A SEBADOH SONG! IS SHE ON CRACK?”

Calm, kids! Yes, I’m on crack. But here’s why I love Crowded House.

Since oh about 1985 or so, Crowded House (borne from the ash-end of New Zealand’s Split Enz and made out of Neil Finn, Nick Seymour and Paul Hester) has crafted impeccable pop songs.

Neil Finn, I’d wager, is among the top songwriters of his time. Wholly underrated. Crowded House songs make toes tap and your ears relax. Which is fine. Their songs are mostly a comfort, often poppy, occasionally beautiful, sometimes surprising. And truth be told, once and while a bit too AOR/MOR. But ultimately, Crowded House has cornered the market on simple prettiness.

The BSR Backstory
My history (of course, there’s always history) goes back to 1987. I saw the three-piece perform four songs at a charity AIDS hospice benefit in Toronto. It was their first time in Canada as CH. Met them two years later, in 1989, and this time got autographs. Paul drew a little house with three heads coming out of it and told me to “Stay real”.

In 1991, I ended up befriending the band’s crew (no, not like that). I took their sound guy and tech Angus and Brad shopping at Toronto’s Eaton Centre for new headphones for the boards then ended up backstage at Massey Hall chatting to folk legend Richard Thompson and a depressed and drunk Tim Finn (who’d joined little brother’s band for a spell around the Woodface era). When I asked Finn the Elder about how it must be nice to tour with his family (it was also nephew Liam Finn’s 8^th birthday and he was on tour with Daddy and Uncle), he said: “I have no family and I am quite possibly going to slip into a coma. I need a change. Something drastic.” All was clearly not well in Finn-land. He left the band soon after.

Paul Hester
That night in 1991 was the second-last time I’d see Paul Hester. This time, he told me he was “checkin’ me out.” It was an improvement on “Stay Real”.

A couple of years later he would remember me, and hug me backstage at a MuchMusic live performance before rushing off, looking stressed. In 1994, when I saw the band again twice, Paul was no longer a part of Crowded House. He rejoined the band only for their farewell shows in 1996.

And on 26 March, 2005 Paul Hester hanged himself.

A couple of nights later I was sitting in the 6^th row of the Royal Albert Hall in London (where I lived and would meet and see Neil Finn play live several other times over the years) witnessing an intense and emotional reunion between Neil and Tim Finn, Nick Seymour and Mark Hart, who flew in for the show. So yes, I have history with the band.

But that’s the past.
In 2007, Crowded House reformed with “newest guy” Mark Hart and Matt Sherrod on drums and released an album called Time On Earth. It was a sort of Neil Finn-solo-with-a-side-order-of-the-other-guys album.

And now it’s the present…

…and I’ve dialled in the FUTURE as it sits in New Zealand a day ahead of me. Neil Finn is prepared to talk about Crowded House’s latest – and sneaky – platter, Intriguer. I type “sneaky” because it started off a bit meh, then grew, and now moves with its own charms. It is a comfort. It is pretty.

Neil Finn, let’s chat.

The album is stripped-down, sort of dusty Americana. There’s nothing wasteful on it. But did the music start and stay that way during recording or do you pile on, then peel back?
It’s an unfolding process and there’s not a lot of mystery involved. But it’s just trying to be in the day, really. A song that starts off complicated can end up simple. You sense that something in its nature wants to be stripped back and similarly, songs that may obviously sound like a simple country song can be transformed by the group and I love those moments, I like the unexpected shift.

Were there any like that on Intriguer?
There were, actually, quite a number, like the song “Either Side of the World”. Taht started with a very conventional rock beat and actually became much more aligned with the feeling of the lyrics so I’m really happy with that one. And “Twice if You’re Lucky”. Although it started off pretty much as you hear it now, we went to on a convoluted journey to make it a much more complex song only to realize that it wanted to be simple. The song “Isolation” bears no resemblance to the one we used to play…and it’s really worked and is now one of my favourites on the record.

In some of the songs there’s a sense that you’re pondering the notion of being adrift. Like on “Isolation” and “Amsterdam”. Is that a fair assessment?
There’s a little bit of that, seeking connection and needing to closer to the ground a bit and things that are adrift. Sure. I don’t think it was something I was conscious of in terms of writing in a theme on the record or aware of when I was writing lyrics, but there’s quite a bit about looking at things from the perspective of getting older. I don’t think, and I certainly hope, that it doesn’t sound designed or any way complaining about it, but I’m trying to acknowledge that coming through…

You’ve got 35 years or so combined with Split Enz, Crowded House, the Finn Brothers, solo…what wisdom have you gathered?
It’s a funny business. In a way you do learn a lot and you get stuff out of every experience you have, but it’s really different when you start the process of writing. You really have to dream away to and drift to capture something that makes you feel…it’s such a mysterious process and that’s why it’s so wonderful in a way. It’s like the first time you hear music, it really is invigorating. You need to love it in order to be able to do it. You need to think it’s the greatest thing you’ve ever done and you need to have a feeling attached to it otherwise I don’t think it can be real music.

What do you miss most about Paul’s presence in the band?
As much as anything, I miss him as a friend. There’s obviously things he did in the band that were unique to him and it’s a sad thought to know that we’ll never be able to do those exact things, nor would we try to resemble it any way. It’ll always be a sad and mysterious thing and I can’t really say more than that.

Liam’s now a well-respected performer in his own right. Does he come to you for advice?
We talk a bit about stuff. We understand both the struggle and we give each other a bit of comfort and inspiration but it’s quite a weird business and I don’t think that I could advise him with any certainty because he’s got to work it out for himself. And my experience doesn’t necessarily count, nor should it…

So a few people out there on the Interwebs have questions for you. One is, “what song would you sing around a campfire?”
Oh wow. Hmmm. There’s a song that we like to pull out at family occasions that’s Van Morrison, and it’s “Your Own Ones.” Sorry, I mean it’s called “Irish Heartbeat”. It’s a great campire singalong…though it’s not quite a campfire singalong time of year now but get a nice fire going and that’d be good enough.

Another wanted to know if there is somebody you’d like to collaborate with that you haven’t yet had the chance to?
There’s always a number of people I’d like to play with… but I just had a chance to play on stage with David Byrne in New York on a couple of his songs. Having done that, it’d be awesome to collaborate on something new perhaps, but that’s just a little wishful thought…

What is your greatest sense of achievement around Crowded House? What makes you happy these days?
I’m enjoying this a lot. The shows have all been really good on this tour. One of the nicest things is that we’ve got a community of people who’ve gone a long way back with us, so in a way they give us a lot of latitude. They want us to play the hits sure but they’re also excited to hear things from the fringes…and that gives you a lot of freedom. And it’s a nice feeling.” \m/

It was by the MANTIS DANCE TROUPE, aka DNACEVENOM aka a sillystupidfun “thing” that Jason Hill from LouisXIV has been doing with his time since sort of coming out of seclusion last year. Yeah, if it reminds you a bit of the bastard child of something like Justin Timberlake/Andy Samberg’s “Dick in a Box” and OK Go’s officially awesome “Treadmill” video, then you and I clearly share the same small brain.

THIS VIDEO IS WHAT ALL IKEA INSTRUCTIONAL VIDEOS SHOULD BE LIKE.

As my friend Karen said:  “Sing it in the Key of A (for Allen)”.

There’s also an uncensored version with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it blooper at the end.

And because that’s no’ all, we wanted to find out how the HELL THIS CAME ABOUT. Over to you Jason Hill:

“The video started from the song, I just wrote it one night really just for fun.

It sort of pervertedly fell out of my mind, very quickly. I wrote it about as long as it took to write the words down on paper.

Then a few months later,  my friend Adam Barker -  he and I have been making stupid videos together since we were kids – were sitting around laughing over ideas. He told me that his wife’s friend Trish [Sie - Grammy Award-winning choreographer] was really funny and the one that choreographed the OK GO video with them on treadmills. Randomly, she told Adam that LouisXIV was one of her favorite bands to dance to or something. But she said it not knowing that Adam and I had been so close since we were kids.

So we all got together and hatched this idea. The building of the shelf was Trish’s idea. Her thing was that there was nothing that turned her on more than when a man assembles something mundane like an IKEA bookshelf. [Editor's Note - I have the same one. A Black "LACK"] So we put it to dance and just had fun.

It was really for no reason at all and quite hysterical that we went to such trouble, as we never planned on doing anything with it. It was just to make ourselves laugh. The best part of that was the whole group, from the camera man to all the people in the video and Trish, we all put so much effort into getting it down, it’s so ridiculous. The funniest moments were after hours of rehearsing and trying to figure it all out, to build and do a routine in the time of the song, was the arguments between Adam and Mark Leone, the other dancer. It got pretty heated on who was slacking on their moves. I think we’re going to do another one when I get back from the UK.”

Take note, Particle Board People….THIS IS HOW YOU BUILD SHIT. \m/

• Twitter: @backstagerider
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• Email: mikala@backstagerider.com

IMPORTANT NOTICE: The pic has to be of you and/or your mates and not something you found elsewhere on the Interwebs. And I’d prefer to see faces. But hey. This is CUSTOM, people. Rock on! \m/

I started out as a fan. That’s me with the band, above, in 1990. Cute, no?

Then I became a friend. There was the time when drummer Chris Hooper and I got drunk together at the 1990 Much Music Video Awards. There was the time when I sat in a bar at Ontario Place in Toronto with Chris, his brother/bassist Tom Hooper, singer/guitarist Kevin Kane and friends, after a huge gig, singing “Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown” by Jim Croce as we polished off pitchers and cried with laughter. There was the time when I smuggled Chris – my closest friend to this day – past the waiting girl gaggle into Massey Hall in Toronto after we’d done some post-soundcheck, pre-gig drinking at McVeigh’s Irish pub down the street. There was the time we sang “Corn Circles” by the Waterboys and songs by Pansy Division in the back of a van. There were times at bars, hotels, clubs and backstage.

There were so many times with the Grapes of Wrath.

For me, and for probably a lot of people of my generation in Canada, the 1990s belonged to these Kelowna, BC boys. It belonged to their Beatles-y songs, their impeccable harmonies and guitar rock, and their amazingly curly hair. It belonged to tracks Peace of Mind, Backward Town, I Am Here and All The Things I Wasn’t.

But in 1999 the band more or less dis-banded and after a fight about the name, continued on as Ginger, minus Kevin Kane. It’s been about 11 years since the original trio played together. But they’ve buried the bullshit. On July 17 in Surrey (a Vancouver suburb), Hooper-Hooper-Kane reformed for a summer festival.

15 songs. And for a lot of us, so many memories. Click on each photo to embiggen. And scroll down for the set list. For more information on the Grapes of Wrath or to get in contact and book them for a giant, well-paying show, visit their Facebook page.\m/

July 17 Set List:

• Peace of Mind
• Stay
• Backward Town
• The Time is Here
• Traveling
• Away
• A Dream About You
• Misunderstanding
• You May Be Right
• All The Things I Wasn’t
• What Was Going Through My Head
• O Lucky Man
• Do You Want to Tell Me
• I am Here
• Lucifer Sam (Pink Floyd cover)

Barlow’s currently wrapping up an NorfUhMerican tour for his latest bit of musical goodness, Goodnight Unknown. He’s out on tour with his buddies The Missingmen (Tom Watson and Raul Morales of Mike Watt fame) and The Backstage Rider went along for the ride – well, at least to Seattle and the most excellent Tractor Tavern. Best way to spend the first day of summer, really.

Here’s what we got up to…

Afternoon soundcheck at the Tractor Tavern. “I’m sounding muddy,” Lou said from the stage. “I really wished I’d thought of this eight years ago when I recorded the songs. You know, sing higher.”

What do you mean “this picture requires some explanation?” It’s pretty self-explanatory, isn’t it?  On the left is Liz, a friend of Jason Loewenstein of Sebadoh. Liz and her husband Carlos graciously invited Lou (and I) over for dinner at their place in Ballard. Carlos is doing a book project on lo-fi cassettes, which Lou used to record all the time. The little dude in front is the product of what happens when a two-year old superhero makes his own chocolate milk out of edamame and a half-bottle of Hershey’s chocolate syrup, then runs to the sofa, puts on “Thomas the Tank Engine” on the TV…and well, sorta passes out. We took the opp to commemorate the moment.

Hanging backstage, Lou was enormously pleased to return from dinner to find this merch poster that his bandmates had created for him. “Look at the fucking cat,” he said. “He looks terrified.” WOULDN’T YOU BE?

Live, Lou Barlow and the Missingmen are acoustic, then loud, then acoustic, then loud, then ukelele. Included in this package was “Natural One” by Folk Implosion, Sebadoh’s “The Freed Pig” “Soul and Fire” and “On Fire” plus all the newer solo stuff, including the legendary “Legendary”, a driving “Goodnight Unknown” and quite a bit more. Also on the bill: Lou singing about why you should buy his t-shirts to the tune of “Too Much Freedom”.

Lou got the wristband thingie in Texas. He liked it so he kept it on. The turquoise guitar was equally kinda wonderful. At this point I was tucking into Pint #47 I think. I believe several were Fat Tire and Mac & Jack’s African Amber. This is also around the point where local blogger Mike Johnston tweeted: “Lou is laying down some straight up badass right now.”

Guess which one’s Lou and which one’s me? I smile a lot when I am IN THE ROCK…

…apparently so does Lou and Raul (left). I would give my least-useful finger to remember what was said to bring forth this life-affirming laughter. But I am so ridiculously witty that it hardly matters. #joke

And finally, to end the night. The gift of rockhands. From Lou to the BackstageRider to you. Straight up and direct. Delivered by The King of Lo-fi. It came wrapped in some dubious brown wrapping paper. \m/

For more information on the one, the only, the most prolific lo-fi-indie-bass-rock-god, visit www.loobiecore.com

I’d met JT  a few times previously but this was my first opportunity to sit down with his cheekbones for one-on-one time. I was/am a major Durannie. John Taylor has been in my life in some way or another for about 26 years . How much of a Durannie? I nearly puked in the hotel lobby from nervousness. It was the first interview, but it wouldn’t be the last. I’d interview him again about a year or so later….when Taylor went solo.

Which is why I found the interview fascinating. Held at a pretty interesting and volatile time in Duran’s history, things weren’t going so well. It was three years after “Ordinary World” and the Wedding Album. The band had kicked at the coffin back in’ 92, climbed up through the dirt and was rediscovered by the mainstream market. The music had been good.

But it was now 1995. The top 10 Billboard Charts were filled with TLC, Coolio, Boyz II Men and Mariah Carey. In England, it was all about Oasis, a band Taylor raved about.

In his personal life,  his marriage to his first wife, Amanda DeCadenet, was showing signs of strain and in our chat he took a few potshots – talking about how she only came on tour to cities that had Chanel shops in them.

He also mentioned how the band was working on new music. Little did we know at the time that two years from then, in 1997 when Medazzaland came out, John Taylor would no longer be a member of Duran Duran.

But he was relaxed and funny and generous with his time with me….even when I pulled out a picture of me at 10 years old, standing in front of a Cannes, France realtor agency called “John Taylor”. “I know where that is! It’s on the Croissette!” he exclaimed. He tried to push my thumb – covering up the tomboy in red trainers and what I called my “Roger Taylor shirt” – out of the way. “My, my Mikala…..” he said, his eyes glinting, “…how you’ve changed.” He laughed readily.

THANK YOU: WHAT THE FUCK?

And so…to Thank You. Oh, poor Thank You. What a mess that album was, sadly. It had covers of Public Enemy, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Grandmaster Melle Mel, Sly & The Family Stone, Elvis Costello and The Doors on it. I know. You’re thinking: WHAT THE FUCK? DURAN DURAN? DOING “911 IS A JOKE? Seriously?”

(It must be said, however, that their cover of themselves – a reworking of their original classic “The Chauffeur”- and their take on Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” and “White Lines” by Melle Mel were pretty good).

“Every week in the NME it’s been like a running gag up to the release of the album,” he sighed, curled up in his chair. “And finally, the week before the record came out, they gave two pages – two pages!!!- where they called up Led Zeppelin’s tour manager and asked him to review ‘Thank You’, and they called up this rap DJ and asked him to review ‘911 is a Joke’. And I think they expected it to be a unanimous trouncing, but it wasn’t. Even though the editorial slant was negative, it couldn’t fight the fact that some people actually liked the stuff we’d done.”

Thank You was supposed to Duran’s version of Bowie’s Pin Ups – a tribute to the bands that inspired them. Taylor acknowledged that releasing a covers-only album was a bit risky, especially after winning back their original fan base and gaining an new one.

“It’s such an achievement just getting an album finished and getting it out there. It really is difficult, so it gives you a tremendous amount of inertia. When you get it out, it’s like ‘Oh God, I don’t have to create for another two years now!’ You know, you get the right to lunch for another year,” he laughs. “And I was thinking, I’m sure Pin-Ups had bad reviews when it came out.”

“I’M WIDE AWAKE NOW, AND FEELING EVERYTHING…IT’S INTENSE”

“Henry Miller once said that music is a beautiful opiate as long as you don’t take it too seriously.” How serious are you right now about your music?”, I asked.

“Terribly, terribly serious,” said Taylor. “Yeah.”

How do you think that’s changed? It was fun for a while and now it seems like it’s work to you?

“It’s always been work,” he said. “It’s just that we were fucked up most of the time we were working. It’s like I’m in a mid-stage of recovery and I’m wide awake now and feeling everything. And I don’t know what to do with the feelings half the time. It’s really intense. It’s like I’m having to do a lot of things I don’t want to have to do anymore.”

Like interviews?

He laughs. “No, I didn’t say that. I don’t like over-promoting. We’ve always fought about it. I don’t like spending lots and lots of money making records.”

It’s that kind of 80s debt to electronics that Duran have got. I think that the traditional band thing is really where musicians play and the whole thing just about hangs together and if something falls over, the whole thing falls apart. Our musical direction was really forged with a lot of Kraftwerk and Georgio Moroder stuff and we’ve always used sequencers on stage, tapes and click tracks. And it’s too sure of itself. It’s like a tram or a bus. You know it’s not going to break down. I learned that really early on. If something happened and I broke a string or my guitar went out of tune or whatever and I stopped playing, the beat kept going. Which is okay at first, because it means you can get completely fucked up and it wouldn’t make a difference. But actually, it’s not what a band’s about. I’d like to see us return to that primal thing. We’re trying to get there.”

So you can get back to playing funky basslines again?

“I’m not even into funky basslines anymore. And I went through SUCH a period of doing that and that’s why I’m so grateful for this new punk, because it’s like ‘oh god that’s where I’m from.”

“I HAVE NO FINISHING POWER”

So what does it mean, “trying to get there”?  “We wanted to get a band feel to the writing so we did what we always tended to do, which is jam. We’ll do a few weeks and just play and Simon will lie on the couch and just wail and we’ll just jam. And then we’ll make up a tape, after a month, with all these fragments on it, and see which stuff really sticks. And that’s the bit I like the most, really. I’d be quite happy to do that every night.”

I called him on that. “But you’re a perfectionist, so…”

“Well, yeah, and the only point of real perfection is that initial moment [he snaps his fingers] when it’s all happening and everybody’s in the same key and then it immediately becomes pedantic. Then it’s all, like, ‘well, we’ve got to organize it.” I hate organizing, I’m really immature like that. I have no finishing power, I like the initial stimulus. I’ve never been really good with paperwork (laughs).”

But was there anyone you were really nervous about giving these songs to? Having, say, Ray Manzarek from the Doors listen to it? Or Lou?

“You know, I didn’t care. I didn’t give a damn. I thought it was really contrived, quite frankly. Have you got the press kit with all the quotes? I mean what are they gonna say? They’re not going to criticize it, are they? The cheque is in the post! Their manager’s got their arms behind their backs going ’say something nice about it.’ I don’t know. I thought it was milking it. It was a little lacking in humility. Like ‘come on! come! give us a quote!’. First it was, like, ‘Give us your song! Then it was ‘we can use your photograph to put on the cover, right?’ Then it was ‘we need a quote! On film please!’. Now they better come to our party in New York or they’ll be off the second pressing!’” Taylor giggled.

ON ROGER’S (BRIEF) RETURN

But JT got serious when asked about (original drummer) Roger Taylor returning to play on this album. “Well, we’d been asking him – we’ve always asked him – but this time out he was ready. He played on “Watching the Detectives” and “Perfect Day”. It was…..interesting. He actually learned a lesson, I think. He actually played on several other songs but his tracks ended up getting wiped. And I had to explain to him, ‘well, when you left, the dynamics of the band changed enormously.’ Everybody became a drummer, everybody’s a computer programmer and the way that we approached writing changed when Roger left.

If I’m the first one in the studio, I’d be tapping out a little rhythm and it’d be like, okay, well, that’s the groove. So there was this massive grey area. Then somebody would say: ‘I don’t think it’s the right drum vibe, let’s get someone else in’. And I think it was quite educational for him to see how things have changed. How much less spontenaiety there was. But for me the best aspect of what he did on Thank You was the video for ‘Perfect Day.’ The images that have stuck with me is me sitting around watching him on the monitor filming a close-up. And I felt really sad. And we just realized that it’d been 10 years since. I remember thinking ‘10 years? What have I done in 1o years? What have YOU done in 10 years? What the hell have we been doing in 10 years?”.

It’s fairly obvious to any music fan what TaylorTaylorTaylorRhodesLeBon were doing over the past 10 years. Does he ever resent the fact that the band are always now measured against their 80s successes rather than seeing the music as a continuum and change?

“IT WAS TOO HARD NOT TO PARTY”

“I do, but I think of us like misappropriated company funds at a very early age. We weren’t very responsible as artists and musicians. It was just too hard not to get down and party and do all sorts of bad things. We’d have to be like priests to side-step that. So I kind of understand why people had a hard time taking us seriously. And maybe I’m being spoiled to expect that. I don’t expect that, actually.”

How did it effect you to be written up in every 16 magazine, every month?

“I’M PISSED OFF ABOUT SPIN MAGAZINE”

“I never read 16 magazine so I never thought about it. But I’m pissed off about SPIN magazine, cos I like SPIN. So when they give us a two out of 10 now, I’m pissed off. And nobody else in the band understands that. Cos they don’t read SPIN. But I do. And the same goes for the NME. Why is that the fucking magazines that I like to read criticize us so much? Nobody else in the band feels that. And that’s probably because they’re more in denial than me. Or maybe they’re less interested in what’s happening in today’s music scene so they just shut off. The Sunday Times, in London, gave us a magnanimous review. It was review and it was the best thing that’s ever been written about the band…. but the Times sucks. I’m glad it’s out there people will read it the day before the album is released…but….I guess it’s part of my upbringing. It’s really easy to earn the failures but it’s harder to earn the successes.” \m/

Been a long time since I’ve gotten this excited about a band. Ergo, you should too.

Becky Black and Maya Miller’s latest album is We Kill Computers (out on Mint Records) - a speedy, bluespunk rock platter made amazing by Miller’s A-NI-MAL!!!! drumming and Black’s otherwordly and voluminous howl. It’s currently sitting in my Top 10 for ‘10.

Live, the twosome are supercharged gritty awesome. Expect random Converse shoe changes, pausing for a shot or two, crawling on speakers, cowbell assaults, headbanging, jokes and, most importantly, tracks from We Kill Computers or their two earlier efforts, Funeral Mixtape and TinType. You may even get to buy some cool merch.

The Pack a.d. are on tour in the US and Canada (with two stops at NXNE, in Toronto and a Vancouver Commodore slot with the Anti-Pop Consortium) now and likely forever more. Have a listen and pick a date on MySpace. And when you go, say hi to them from me babble babble babble… \m/

“Uhh, we haven’t played live in a month because we’ve been recording our new album,” mumbled singer Christopher Owens. “So you’ll have to excuse us if it doesn’t sound as tight as the Jonas Brothers…but then again, we don’t have backing tracks, so…”

Awww, what? No KevinJoeNick slickness? DISAPPOINTMENT! And where’s Hannah Montana when you need her?

But seriously. Vancouver’s swiftly becoming a bit of a “soft-launch” sort of city for bands both indie and ginormous that are looking for a way to ease into their tours with “no pressure”.

Fans say: “Woohoo! We get to see the first gig in a while!” Sceptics say: “Great. I’m watching a band’s rehearsal.” And if the trainingwheelness is confirmed by the band itself (as it was when I chatted with bassist JR White after the show – who apologized again for the gig’s unevenness and explained how tired he was), one can’t help but think, “errr, could I have a do-over?”

But Girls didn’t have to be so tough on themselves. Mostly the gig was a sedate, though still charming, runthrough. Debut album (called, er, Album) is a hodgepodge of 50s60s70s sockhop romance, stoner surfabilly and fuzz-pedal rock, so it was unsurprising the show followed an equally ragged road.

(What was surprising, however, was Owens’ hair. Formerly the owner of Rapunzel-like beach blonde locks, Owens now sports a poofy 80s-Anthony-Michael-Hall thing, and was dressed in high-waisted, rolled-up cream chinos and rolled-up shirtsleeves. The new look caused one audience member to lament: “WHAT DID HE DO? He had such beautiful hair!”. But she needn’t've panicked THAT much. He still has nice tattoos.)

ANYWAY. Girls’ songs typically have that “Gee, Beaver, let’s go for a root-beer float!” vibe about them, which,  is actually kinda sweet. Owens’ natural inclination is to sing about girls, romance, summertime blues, hopes, fears, etc so first tracks “Laura”, “Ghost Mouth” “Heartbreaker” and “Headache” bopped, with JR nodding along sleepily, the “other three” keeping the pace and Owens holding one leg up in a sort of flamingo pose for most of the show. B-side “Solitude” was pure 60s harmonica prettiness. “Lust for Life”? A great indie summer song.

Yet it wasn’t until “Hellhole Ratrace” faded into the crunchy “Morning Light” that the mood (kinda thankfully, the audience were sorta getting too dreamy) shifted a gear. “Big Bad Mean Mother Fucker and “Lysandre” sounded tremendous and wrapped everything up in a thrift-store rock sweater. Nice little punk edge there, Girls, niiice.

But then, as if to remind us where their hearts really lie, came the ender: a cover of The Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to do is Dream”. And we all sort of batted our eyelashes and swooned once more.

Beaver Cleaver: Do you really like me, Wally?
Wally Cleaver: I guess so.
Beaver Cleaver: Do you like me a whole lot?
Wally Cleaver: Look, don’t get sloppy on me. I might just slug you one. \m/

Cast your mind back to 2000-2003 and you’d see Turin Brakes all over Europe – playing enormo venues, posh-backed seated theatres, festivals, doing interviews every waking minute and occasionally acting a little arsey. (Like the time I interviewed the band back around 2002 at the Virgin offices in London. One half of the band, Gale Paridjanian, wasn’t having any of it, read a magazine through the entire interview and bit my head off.)

But bygones, really, because Gale and childhood mate Olly Knights continue to make simply pretty music. Still, it’s been five years since Turin Brakes has been able to tour North America, their last album Dark on Fire wasn’t released here, and anglophile-love on UhMerica soil only goes so far. So it’s a different world now for Turin Brakes.  A smaller, no major-label, we-can’t-afford-to-bring our drummer on tour world.

And yet, they have a lovely new album Outbursts out and the feeling that, you know, it’s worth it to keep on trucking.

I caught up with the relaxed and all-smiles Olly and Gale in Vancouver on the night of their first North American tour in yonks to talk about 10 years, why Outbursts captures the spirit of their much-adored The Optimist debut and…uh…Take That.

You seem so much more relaxed since when we first met. It’s a different band.

Olly: We’ve let go. [laughs]

Really? Like in therapy?

Olly: Yeah, pretty much. We never realized how much pressure was being put on us back then. It was ridiculous. We’d get rung up in the morning by our very antagonistic manager at the time and he’d just want to wind us up. You’d feel the pressure and feel like everyone was focusing on you and you weren’t really equipped to deal with it. And I think neither of us feel naturally that that is what we particularly want out of life. But now there’s far less people focused on us…

Gale: [laughs]

Olly: …so the pressure is off. It actually suits us. Say whatever you want, but it suits us. It’s been five years since we’ve been back anywhere in the Americas and we’re just happy to be here.

Gale: If it works out, it’ll feel really empowering. The main thing is that if the shows are good, we won’t be worrying about the rest of the stuff.

So the pressure’s off? How about live? I recall seeing you at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire and Olly had a panic attack and had to leave the stage.

Olly: Oh and you saw that? Yeah, yeah, I remember that…

You always said that you had a bit of a love/hate thing with playing live. But from one gets the sense that you’re really enjoying it now. Just getting out there?

Gale: Before people were endlessly booking us into things and we didn’t really see the reason, whereas now we’re doing it ourselves and we’ve been kind of aware that every show has the potential to be really good. Whereas before, we didn’t even really register it. It was just get on and play the shows and get off. But now we’re trying to enjoying it because it might go away tomorrow. Which means that we’re probably connecting a bit more. Having said that, tonight we might just still just look at the floor [laughs]

But why would you think that it could all go away? It’s been more than 10 years, 5 albums.

Gale: It’s been 5 years to get us back to America, for example. And it’s taken a lot of planning and it’s all sort of teetering on bankruptcy. It’s a very fine line. Like do we pay for parking or not? [laughs].

Outbursts is the third self-produced album you’ve done.

Olly: Yeah. And quite a conscious return to the earlier stuff, but not literally. We didn’t sit there thinking, okay, how did we do that? But when we produce, we have a particular way of doing it and we have a shared feeling about it. When we worked with producers it was always a great learning experience, but I think producing is part of the whole thing. It’s almost the same as writing the music and performing it. It’s about following it through to the end, for us.

But sometimes you can over-paint things.

Olly: Sure, yeah, you can. But, actually, we tend to underpaint.

Gale: Yeah, that’s actually our problem. We don’t do enough.

Olly: We leave things at 80% done. Because we can hear what we want and say, ‘okay, that’s great, done.’ Then someone else will come in and go ‘uh are you sure?’ So sometimes we need a little of help at the end to force us to finish things properly.

How was it different then this time?

Olly: We just knew it would be. It’s been 10 years since the first one and the technology we were using was very different and we recorded it all on a laptop, and it’s almost the same technology people are using to make electronic music, but you can use it to make acoustic music and that’s what we did. So everything was different really. And we were doing things with vocals and sound that were different. I actually really love this one. I really do. I don’t always feel like that. But I feel really close to it. I feel like it’s ours. And it’s really beautiful.

Lead track “Sea Change” seems like a rallying cry. Not just because of the larger implications and environmental messages but it seems to be a bold statement. Does it also speak to a sense of perseverance for the band?

Olly: You mean “If we don’t do this, somebody else will?”

Gale: Yeah, but…

Does it feel like that to you, Gale?

Gale: There are other tracks on the album where I feel like that more. Because of all the artwork and the video, I really think of it as about waves and volcanoes and stuff and toy soldiers…

Olly: That feeling was around a lot for me. When you’re writing and you’ve got no manager and no deal and you’re in your kitchen with a guitar, you do have to find courage or an idea that there’s a point to this. A lot of our songs have threads of that going through.

Gale: For me, it’s “Never Stops” – it’s kind of about getting on and doing it yourself and it doesn’t matter if there is no end product. Maybe we could just keep going even if we lost our studio and if we couldn’t pay for our parking and get anywhere, maybe we would return to the way we used to do it when we were kids. We could do that for the rest of our lives.

There’s so much talk about this new album being marking a return to the earlier Turin Brakes. Take me through the where were your heads at over the past four album lead up to here.

Olly: The first album was us really sticking our flag in the ground. Even though we didn’t feel at all part of any scene when we made it, we were completely in our own world and we trusted it.

Gale: It was 1999 that we made it, but we’d got a record deal based on a four-track demo we did so we were just elaborating on those…and because there were only four tracks it was totally pared down and quite essential. No ear candy.

Gale: And the dance thing was winding down and people were sort of running out of ideas and we were making a point with The Optimist that we could be acoustic but not be fey. That we could be fierce.

Olly: You know what it was? It was almost the attitude of a rock band but we replaced the electrics with acoustics. That alone sounds kind of special and didn’t sound like anything else. Like the drums on The Optimist are SO punchy. Really, fucking full-on.

Gale: Our manager used to always say we were folk and I used to say, ‘but why do people have to think we’re folk, just because we’ve got acoustic guitars? Everyone can handle Nirvana Unplugged, can’t they just think of it in that way?’

Well, but everyone needs a label to describe you. Like the New Acoustic tag. Or the New New Acoustic…

Olly: Or the New New New Acoustic! Okay so on album two, I kinda think we went into the studio to kind of do part two of The Optimist. We never really talk about this, but we went to Chris Difford from Squeeze who has this studio, and went to his place in Rye and it was gorgeous. We started trying to kinda make the next step of that same thing…and it just wasn’t there. We just weren’t excited. It was cool, it was a nice time but it wasn’t coming back out of the speakers at us in this fresh way. And that’s a big thing for us, we really have to buzz. So then we met Tony Hoffer, and thought, let’s just do exactly what we thought we’d never do and let’s go with this guy and make something with a different kind of edge. And he really wanted to push us out.

Gale: He said “I heard The Optimist, but I thought it was a bit boring”, and we were like….uh…

Olly: But that was perfect for that time, someone who was bored of it and thought they could recognize something else in us. So we turned into this sort of prog-folk thing.

Frog?

Olly: Yeah, that’s it. Frog rock! We were playing with Beck’s bass player and Air’s drummer…and there we were in Los Angeles living a hilarious life and it was good fun. And actually, I think the record Ether Song, some people love that record, man. It was a strong as The Optimist, but it was just SO different and some people that had bought the first one, were, like, “what the fuck? What’s this?”

So then Jackinabox was like us going on holiday with our music. It was us going “let’s not keep getting heavy with our music, cos we were getting dangerously into that territory where it’s getting really dark. I listen to Ether Song now and it’s just so dark.

Gale: Yeah, there are some really dark patches…

Olly: Like “Panic Attack”! Or “Little Brother”! Fuck! It’s a bit too much and we really didn’t want to live that 24-7 for two years, and that’s when we were playing live that it got a bit too much. And that’s probably that night when I walked off. So then Jackinabox was us making a summer pop album and really being okay with that. After that we made Dark on Fire…

Gale: And they all react to each other. We started off not producing, and then Tony produced the second one and it’s dark, and then we produce the third and it’s summertime and then Ethan [Johns] comes in and produces something and we’re just constantly ping-ponging.

You recently wrote a song for Take That. Could you ever see yourself writing songs for other people in future?

Olly: …for money? Yeah, definitely! I don’t think it did any harm to do it. We’re known as songwriters as well as Turin Brakes so it was great fun. We were saying to someone the other day, once you take away how you present yourselves and once you meet these people then they’re just cool. And Gary Barlow is a blinding piano player.

Did you give them a song you weren’t going to use? Or write one specially?

Olly: Howard said ‘we really like your vibe, we’d like to get a bit of it.’ And we said, ‘well, what do you like about it?’ And he specifically said “Above the Clouds” from Jackinabox. So I went home, played that song and sort of went down the fretboard a bit and found something else. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Take That so I ended up writing all these weird boyband harmonies into it. And I was sitting there thinking, ‘they’re going to think I’m talking the piss’ but then we walked in with them and we did it and it was perfect.

Gale: It was exactly what they wanted.

And yet, you two have a symbiotic musical relationship and here you are writing with a bunch of strangers in a megaband…

Olly: …and telling Gary Barlow to re-sing it. “That wasn’t right, Gary, just sing it more like this.” And he’s actually listening!

Gale: He’s very matter of fact, Gary. He’s like “right, you’ve got a song for us? Great. Sit down. What’s your name? What you got? Awww, that’s fucking brilliant….” [laughs]. It was really great how he cut out all the crap.

Stuff like that finances your art, then?

Gale: If we were selling millions of albums as Turin Brakes, then it’d be a different story. But if you don’t do something, you won’t be around very long.

Olly: Even a band as small as us, it costs a shitload of money to do it at any level, to do it in a professional way.

If you could back and undo something or unwrite a part of the Turin Brakes history, what would it be?

Gale: God, maybe the re-releasing of Ether Song with a new single on it, when people and the label really wanted another “Painkiller”. The experience was really good, they made a video, because they flew us around and it was really exciting and we were really busy…

Olly: …but a hangover is what we put out into the world.

Gale: And we really should have said, ‘find someone else. Forget it, we’re not interested.’ I think we should have put our foot down. What I’ve realized is that the thing that sticks around is integrity. And every time you drop a little bit of it, it never comes back. You might have taken a dip for a few years, but you’ll still be around in 20 years, because you made your own decisions. \m/

All photos by The Backstage Rider, Mikala T.

Turin Brakes are on tour in the US now.  Have a listen to them on MySpace. Turin Brakes are also on Twitter (@the_real_TB) and Facebook.