Fubar star lives his heavy metal fantasy with album
Fubar star’s new Nightseeker record revels in heavy-metal parody
It was a moment of perfect popculture symmetry.
A few months back, actor-writer-musician Paul Spence discovered that Derek Smalls, the fictional bass player made famous by the mockumentary This is Spinal Tap and played by actor-writer-musician Harry Shearer, was releasing a solo record. In fact, it was coming out within weeks of Spence’s own record, which he was releasing as Dean (the Deaner) Murdoch, the fictional bass player made famous by the 2002 mockumentary Fubar.
So Spence requested an interview with Shearer, who stayed in character the whole time. The resulting piece, which appeared on the Vice website last month, was headlined Spinal Tap Bassist Derek Smalls Reveals His Cure for Erectile Dysfunction.
Like most musicians, Spence is an obsessive fan of Rob Reiner’s 1984 comedy classic This is Spinal Tap, which follows a disastrous tour by the fictional British heavy metal band.
Near the end of the interview, he told Shearer/Smalls about his own upcoming album for his band Nightseeker: 3069: A Space-Rock Sex Odyssey.
“It was totally surreal,” Spence says from his home in Montreal. “I mentioned it to him and told him that he was always my favourite in Spinal Tap as a bass player. I said, ‘Well, what do you think of the band Nightseeker?’ He just kind of rolled with it, he’s such a great improviser.”
It led to long-haired, moustachioed heavy-metal bass player Derek Smalls singing the praises of a new album by long-haired, moustachioed heavy-metal bass player Dean Murdoch.
“I can’t wait for more Night. Waiter, bring me more night, please. I dig it,” Smalls offered, which is now quoted in the promotional material for Nightseeker’s opus.
As film scholars know, This is Spinal Tap spearheaded the mockumentary sub-genre and was at least indirectly responsible for films such as Fubar, Michael Dowse’s Calgaryshot, no-budget masterpiece that chronicles the dim-witted adventures of Cowtown metalheads Dean Murdoch and Terry Cahill (David Lawrence). They were characters that Calgary natives Spence and Lawrence created as teenagers on the stage of the improv company Loose Moose Theatre.
Fubar became a sensation at the Sundance Film Festival in 2002, attracting enough of a cult following to justify a sequel, 2010’s Fubar: Balls to the Wall, and most recently a TV series for Viceland that found Dean and Terry discovering the Internet and other computer magic for the first time after fleeing the Fort McMurray fires.
But while the main premise of last year’s eight-episode Fubar: Age of Computer was certainly amusing, Spence thought it was a little thin to carry the show. So he also brought Dean’s fledgeling music career as a falsetto-voiced bass player front and centre, which led him to writing a bunch of songs for Nightseeker.
“I didn’t see enough in Terry and Dean meet the Internet,” Spence says.
“To me, there wasn’t enough motivation to getting the story going again without something new, which to me was the band because we had never really explored that angle in either of two movies. Sure enough, that for me was the most fun aspect. All of a sudden we were writing songs and now we have enough for an actual record.”
While the songs on 3069: A Space-Rock Sex Odyssey may not be quite as self-consciously goofy as those found on Spinal Tap’s 1992 record, Break Like the Wind, they do share some common ground with the Tap. Specifically, it’s performed by musicians with stellar skills. Musical incompetence isn’t particularly funny. As with Spinal Tap, much of the humour comes from the fact that fairly silly songs are presented with full-on musical ability and studio polish.
“We were so fortunate to have a little bit of a budget,” Spence says. “You listen to our record and, in many ways, I’d like to think you’re blown away by the production values. It’s not four guys in a garage with a two-track recorder. It sounds really big, that’s what I was going for. That’s why we didn’t do a record until now, because we wanted to do it right.”
All of this is wrapped in glorious, Queen-like multiple-tracked vocals, thunderingly fast rhythms and complex guitar riffs. The music is not inauthentic or a joke for Spence, who says he became a fan of heavy metal while putting together the soundtrack for the original Fubar film.
“Once you get past that the first layer of hard rock from the ’80s and ’90s — Metallica, Aerosmith, Guns N’ Roses — there’s a whole bunch of other stuff behind it,” he says.
“I was like a garage-rock nerd, I’d shun stuff that was popular if it was on the radio just for the fact it wasn’t unknown and cool. I slowly came to realize that not only was this stuff good but I really, really identified with it. Headbangers, when we first made Fubar, were totally parodied. None of us were headbangers. We saw them from miles away, these guys with long hair, moustaches had muscle cars. We were nothing like them. We were suburban punk-rock listening kids and they were a joke. But the more I listened to it, the more I realized I was totally in tune with what rockers were doing and they were having way more fun than anybody else.”
So Nightseeker is now described as a “non-fictional band of fictional character Dean from Fubar.” Still, there are no plans at the moment for a whirlwind tour. On Saturday, the four-piece Nightseeker will play an album release party at Toronto’s iconic Horseshoe Tavern and some Western Canada dates may eventually happen.
3069: A Space-Rock Sex Odyssey will be released on April 20.