Swoony Canadian indie-pop band Stars will return to Australia for the New Year’s Pyramid Rock Festival, and a short run of dates. Faster Louder caught up with their literate co-vocalist and self-described – œtalkative motherfucker’ Torquil Campbell …
Stars come across as a band that has a very close connection with their fans. Do you have much direct contact with the fan base?
I think we do. I mean, I can’t measure it by what other bands do, but I think we make a great effort to have a very direct relationship with them. We try and exploit the technology that we have to form direct relationships with them. I think that’s a really important part of having a longish career in music is that you treat the people who are kind enough to listen to what you’re doing as valued customers, just as if you were a tailor or a baker or anything else. You try and stay in touch with them, and how they’re feeling and what they’re thinking about. It’s a conversation between you and the listener. I think we go out of our way to do that, for sure.
Was it like that you were a young music fan, did you always want to meet your musical heroes?
You know, I was talking about this today, to my wife. I didn’t. I never waited around after the shows or anything. I was obsessed with them and obsessed with music but I didn’t want to meet them. I don’t know why I didn’t. It never occurred to me, I guess, that you could actually meet them. It all seemed so huge and otherworldly I don’t think it occurred to me they were human beings [laughs]. I kind of wanted to keep them in my mythology, you know. I’d sure never like to meet Morrissey.
I was just going to ask that…
What could he possibly say that would be better than what he’s already said to me?
Do you resist explaining what the songs are about? Do you think there’s value in everyone having their own interpretation?
I don’t really resist that, others maybe in the band do. I’m happy if people have an interpretation, that’s great, but I’m often surprised, actually, by how difficult it seems for people to get what I’m saying. I feel like I’m trying very hard to be direct. It’s an interesting thing with language and songs in general that, no matter how much they mean to you specifically, they take on a meaning for whoever is listening that is, potentially, completely other. I think that’s something you have to embrace; otherwise it would drive you crazy. And sometimes it has driven me crazy. In the case of a song like Barricade for example, I was absolutely gobsmacked that anyone could think that that song wasn’t a joke, but maybe you just had to be there [laughs heartily]. It seems pretty obvious to me it’s a Dusty Springfield song about gay fascist soccer hooligans, but a lot of people saw it as me being really sincere…
Is 14 Forever (from the Sad Robots EP) about being in a band, and that relationship you have with the fans?
Yeah, I think it is. I think it’s about pop music in general, that strange phenomenon of being in a band and realising that you get older and the kids stay the same age. You are, as Metric said, in the prime of their youth, and you’re capturing moments for them. It’s very much about discovery in a rear-view mirror. I mean it’s a beautiful thing to do, but there is a kind of wistful aspect about that. There is certainly a part of everyone in a band that wants to preserve themselves in amber at that moment, when their friends and their music was the most important thing to them. Being in a band is an attempt to delay that moment from ending. There’s a great song by The Smiths about that called Rubber Ring and I guess I was inspired by the notions in that song.
There’s another song on Sad Robots sung in French. Living in Montreal, is that culture something that indirectly influences you; the willingness in French music to put so much sincerity and emotion into songs?
Yeah, I mean you develop an attachment to, and an affection for, the chanteur tradition in Quebecer culture. Those very open-hearted, and very simple songs that are, in a way, completely generic. But what makes them special is the singers and the emotion put into it. [French] is a very romantic language, and it bears a lot more poetry than English, which is quite a specific language, and quite a tricky language in a lot of ways. When you’re in Montreal, you hear French all the time, and when you speak it as badly as I do, it’s a mysterious thing to you. But I think Amy [Millan, Stars co-vocalist], in writing those words, was trying to express herself in a language that maybe isn’t natural to her, but that she hears all the time. It becomes part of the subtext of your life, I guess.
Sad Robots was initially a digital only release. What was the idea behind that, was it simply to get the music out there quicker?
Well, we paid for it ourselves. It’s the first release we’ve put out completely on our own, and we just wanted to get the music out there and have something to sell to the people who were maybe coming to see us for the second time in a year. For us, it was just a chance to take stock of where we were musically and where we wanted to go. We didn’t want to make a huge deal out of it, it was just a group of ideas we had which that we hoped would send us in new directions.
We’re trying to figure out, as everyone else is, how to sell records in a world where nobody buys them anymore and how to get people to spend money instead of stealing it, so we continue to try and experiment with ways of putting out records and try and figure out what the listener wants, whether they want to buy music any more. I think there’s a generation of people that now feel it’s kind of just out there, and they have a right to it. I agree with them to some degree, I think art should be stolen. But it makes it bloody hard to make a living. But again you have to embrace that because it creates an incredible level playing field in terms of the access you have to people. I would much rather have someone love the music and have stolen it then have not heard it at all.
Do you think it’s a bit sad that songs are increasingly being downloaded on their own and the idea of listening to a record in its entirety is dying out?
Well, I try not to be curmudgeonly about it because I think in a way pop music started that way. The LP was not something really thought people really thought about. In the ‘60s there was a whole bunch of great music put out on 7 inch, and I love that aspect of pop music, that it’s instant, and it’s disposable, it’s a brief experience. Those are all things that really appeal to me.
I’m a big fan of Northern soul music, and dance music. There’s a lot less of a desperate need to make a grand statement in those genres and I kind of admire that – you can make a grand enough statement if you think about it enough, in three minutes. I don’t think people will stop making records, I just think that pop music has to naturally evolve and not hold onto anything. That’s sort of what the art is. If it doesn’t change and doesn’t become something else, it turns into one of the establishment arts, which are beautiful too, but don’t have that anarchic energy to them. It’s important, I think, for pop music to continually irritate and offend as many people as possible.
In the past you’ve talked about the songs being very character-based. Would you say the people you write about are acquaintances, or strangers, complete figments of your imagination?
I think say they’re very much figments of the imagination. I think they’re a kind of stock company of characters in my head that show up again and again. It seems to be a rather gritty genre, filled with drug addicts and drug dealers, serial killers, transvestites – people down on their luck. My life has been beautifully pleasant and middle class and I guess in some way I was always obsessed with… the idea of people taking a step that leads them into another world, into a darker world. That’s where those people come from I think – with my obsession with people having done something wrong and never being able to come back from it.
It’s very different from the people you associate with being Stars fans – young idealists and lost souls…
Yeah, I think we attract more theology students and people who want to help animals [laughs]. People who are more like we are, I guess. I can’t generalise about our listeners, but of the people who listen to our music and who I’ve been lucky enough to meet, I think there’s an amazing openness to involve themselves in other people, and in life, and in emotional experience. I think that’s something you kind of have to have to enjoy the band. If you’re someone who’s uncomfortable with that, you’d probably find us insufferable. I think our listeners are quite passionate and quite open people.
Sad Robots is available now from sadrobots.ca. Stars play the following dates in Australia.
29 Dec-1 Jan – Pyramid Rock Festival, Phillip Island
Fri 2 Jan – Corner Hotel, Melbourne
Sat 3 Jan – Factory Theatre, Sydney
Sun 4 Jan – The Zoo, Brisbane
to listen to their music now on 