A wake up call from Torquil Campbell of Stars

Not every interview is that great. Sometimes the artist doesn’t feel like giving you much to work with, sometimes the interviewer is under the pump and doesn’t have time to find something decent to ask. But every so often you conduct an interview, or at least I do, where the person on the other side of the phone is so full of life and passion that can’t help but feel inspired and rejuvenated about your own lot.

Talking to Torquil Campbell was one of those interviews. I had been stood up a couple of times trying to make this Stars interview happen in the days prior, but when it  finally did happen on the 18th of the 12th of the 2012th, the frontman was exuberant and animated in his views, which was nice because it was 7.30am and I was at a stage in my life when that time of day was unfathomably early.

I then went and saw the Canadian indie rockers at the Perth Festival and they put on the type of live show every band should aim for: they left us in a much greater mood than the one with which we walked through the doors. I was probably in a good mood anyway, but I liked the show is what I’m trying to say. It was good fun.

Here’s my chat with Torquil, he was fresh from leaving the stage. I think he was in Germany.

What brought on your Twitter war with your Prime Minister Steven Harper?

You can’t get in a Twitter war with the prime minister! He’s much too busy for that. Rock’n’roll is a fucking game, and being in a band is a form of being in a gang or a church, and you take on other gangs. So art takes on power, and that’s all I’m doing man. That’s what people have been doing since the start of rock’n’roll. The possibility of explaining of what you said on a graffiti wall erases the purpose of writing graffiti.

The new album The North (which was praised by the official Twitterer of Steve Harper) seems to be a whole lot more upbeat and hopeful record than The Five Ghosts – what lightened the mood, and what kind of pop music were you listening to at the time or writing?

The lack of death in our lives! After you get over 40 years old, a good year is where nobody dies, basically that’s the deal. Nobody died, and we have young children, and I would think those are the two reasons why everybody felt better. If you drive a bus or whatever you do in your life, your job is going to be affected by the way feel and people don’t know what’s happening inside you. You walk by people in the street, and you look at people and you judge them and you say ‘this is the kind of person they are’, and ‘that’s the kind of person they are’, but you have no idea what’s happening to them. If someone is rude to you or something doesn’t work out, maybe it’s because those people are going through a hard time. It’s the same with music, and it’s the same with anything, and we just had a really great time making this record, and we believe in pop music. It’s a very simple, childish thing to do, and we had a great time making a pop record.

Hold On When You Get Love & Let Go When You Give It has some great lines it – What do you mean by Let Go When You Give It?

Basically, don’t be fickle. Love is something that we all seek in life, and we’re all hungry for love. I think it’s an aspirational idea; when someone sends you love, hold onto it. If you have love to give, give it freely without guilt or without complication. Now, I don’t live that way, it’s hard to live that way, but it’s not a new idea. It’s basically the golden rule of life, which is do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I don’t live by it, but it’s a great fucking chorus.

It’s reminiscent of the great Beatles line at the end Abbey Road.

Yeah!

The photo on the front of The North is amazing – the Habitat 67 building – have you spent much time at there?

I’ve driven by it. It’s an apartment building on the south side of Montreal. On a little island actually, between the main island of Montreal and the south island. It’s a building that was built for Expo 67, the World’s Fair in 1967. It’s just a very playful, a very utopian piece of architecture, and we grew up in a Canada that was very much about that aesthetic. I think it’s quite similar to the way Australia was in the ‘70s and into ‘80s, you know when the Sydney Opera House was built. These big public projects that were designed to be a distant place, an economic backwater so to speak of a small but prosperous country. Australia and Canada have a lot in common that way, you know. And in turn it was designed to build on that dream. Now we find ourselves in a fucking oil conglomerate run by corporatists and Canada, as a basic idea, is being torn apart by neo-conservatives. So we’re not a protest band, we’re lovers rock, so we don’t want to make that point on the nose but maybe if you’re a playful person and you see that building, you think of Canada in a way and you realise that it ain’t that way any more, and I guess we’re just trying to reclaim that idea of what ‘the North’ is.

I dug up your version of Cattle and Cane last night. How come you chose to cover that song?

Well we were asked to do a song for a Go-Betweens tribute, which a lot of great bands worked on. I think Cattle & Cane, just at that time in my life, I think was an incredible song that was incredibly beautiful, and also it was that we needed to do it fast, and we needed a song that worked acoustically, and that was kind of one of the perfect Go-Betweens songs that worked acoustically, and other bands on this record had taken other songs, so there was only a limited number of tunes that we could do. I had heard that Cattle & Cane was voted one of the best Australian songs of all time in some poll about five years ago. The Go-Betweens are just such a beautiful and important band, and really an example of what a band means, which is friendship and finding the thing in you which is kind of weak and kind of weird, and that’s what you make your band on. That’s why rock’n’roll music is a beautiful art form, because you can take a thing about you that is weird or strange, and people don’t expect, and you can make that your flag that you fly. The Go-Betweens did that very beautifully with a lot of artfulness and a lot of wit. I can’t possibly say enough about how much I love that band.

You also share a title with the Go-Bees in last year’s album with Memphis – Here Comes A City – it’s also a Go-Betweens song, was a conscious decision?

Yeah, exactly. I love ‘em man. They’re big for me. Really, to be honest, everyone has that rock star who dies and that really affects them, for me the biggest one in my life was when Grant McLennan died because they had gotten back together and they were making such great records and I just felt like it wasn’t fair that someone who was bringing that much beauty in the world was taken in that way. It struck me very deeply. And Robert Forster’s record after he died is one of the most devastating albums, I mean, I can’t listen to it most of the time. And that’s incredible because it’s just too filled with emotion, it’s so powerful, and it’s very hard to listen to.

Post-script: I concur.

Stars have a new album out called No One Is Lost. Listen to it or listen to their old stuff.