Torq Campbell and Stars keep lighting the way
Considering some of his savage tweets of late, you might expect Torquil Campbell and his band Stars to get angry on their upcoming new album.
After all, no sooner did Campbell’s nemesis Stephen Harper vacate the scene than Donald Trump arrived, giving his Twitter page almost daily fuel.
But that’s the enigma with Campbell — his band doesn’t reflect his punk rock spirit. Heading into their second decade soon, Stars are as reliably warm and melodic as ever on their eighth album, There is No Love in Fluorescent Light, set for release Oct. 13.
It’s the sound of Stars calmly facing the storm with intelligent pop instead of more volume. He credits producer Peter Katis for resisting that road.
“Peter wasn’t interested in making that record with us, and I’ m ultimately very glad that we didn’t do that,” says Campbell, who spends much of the year in Niagara-on-the-Lake, where wife Moya O’Connell performs at the Shaw Festival. “The world is so f--ing nuts, and it’s not a political situation, it’s a human soul situation. Like, we’re actually getting back to fundamental questions about what human decency is. I think it would be very hard to make a record that kept up to the pace of the chaos.”
As an example, he points to Arcade Fire’s recent release Everything Now — which he loves — as a topical album dwarfed by the storm it’s commenting on.
“In a noble attempt to try and capture the zeitgeist, the zeitgeist had already grown 10 times darker than anything they could possibly imagine,” he says. “Other people had a problem with it … because it was a very brave attempt to try and say what is happening right now. No matter what’s happening, what doesn’t change is the human heart. And its both f---ed up and beautiful motivations. There is a private world inside even Donald Trump. There is this private heart, and whatever mangled state it’s in, he’s making decisions based on what’s happening inside him.”
Stars’ response to the zeitgeist is more impeccably crafted songs such as Alone and Privilege, showcasing the dynamic between Campbell and singer Amy Millan that have made them one of Canada’s most sturdy and beloved indie bands.
The album’s title is a rallying cry to stop losing ourselves in the soullessness of our daily lives, giving the human heart more time to play.
“I think everybody who isn’t nuts at this point, or too dumb to realize what’s happening … it’s not about left or right any more,” he says. “This is literally about, like, are we actually going to act like f---ing animals again? Are we going to burn crosses? Are we having to fight Nazis again? I thought we all agreed on this. So, it’s terrifying to open up the portal of public life and see that kind of discourse happening. It’s tough for everybody to just get through the day right now without feeling depressed or angry or confused.
“Obviously, Donald Trump is a product from and a benefactor of social media culture and the Internet. And we’re really seeing the malignant, disgusting, lowdown crap that can come from this technology and the platforms it supports.”
While Campbell sees Stars as a “dark pop band,” they are still very much pop. Formed in 2000, Campbell say she lifted the idea of a male/ female tandem on vocals from English band The Beautiful South.
“It allows you to have both sides of the story,” he says. “The Beautiful South did this great thing of making these very palatable and embraceable pop songs that were laced with the poison of human relationships. I loved that, I thought it was funny. I come from a theatre background, and I loved how much drama it gave you the potential to explore within the context of a pop song. If you look back at Tammy Wynette and George Jones, they really exploited that dynamic as well.”
Campbell is the son of the late actor Douglas Campbell, and the brother of veteran Shaw Festival actor Benedict Campbell. Earlier this year, he returned to the stage with the one-man show True Crime at Toronto’s Streetcar Crowsnest theatre, about a German-born con man who passed himself off as a member of the Rockefeller family for 14 years.
This summer, his wife has starred in Shaw’s productions of Middletown and Dracula.
For the past decade, they have been a celebrity couple in Niagara-on-the-Lake while raising their eight-yearold daughter, Ellington. It’s a home they’ll have to part with soon, as O’Connell skips the Shaw Festival for a year to star in a production of
Macbeth with Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival next summer. They normally spend their winters in Vancouver and summers in Niagara-on-the-Lake, “and we’re hoping we’ll be back soon enough,” says Campbell.
“I was riding my bike past the museum a few weeks ago and there were a bunch of kids out on summer camp. A few of them waved and said, ‘Hi Torq!’ As I rode by I heard one of them say, ‘Who’s that?’ and the other kid said, ‘That’s Ellington’s dad.’
“Small-town life is beautiful that way. You do business with the same people every day, and people look after each other. It’s a great little community.”