Subway gig will be a ‘dream come true’

The chat included Julius Pedersen and Erik Jude — cellist Erika Wharton-Shukster was running late — near the Bloor West home/studio space where he often hosts house shows under the Somewhere Else banner.

“We were laughing at the possibility (it was a joke). And then I thought, ‘They actually might bite on this.’

“I asked Dan and Dan was, like, ‘Playing in a subway station is just shy of playing in a hospital. It’ll never happen.’ And I said, ‘What if it’s in an abandoned subway station?’ And Dan was, like, ‘An abandoned subway station is a different story.’ ”

Turns out an abandoned sub- way station is a different story and they did bite.

With a sympathetic ear at city hall in the form of Councillor Josh Colle, who does double duty as chair of the TTC and the Toronto Music Advisory Council, as his entry point into the tangled municipal bureaucracy, Knapp somehow managed to finagle the right to do a one-off gig on the disused secondary subway platform at Bay and Bloor that, in the past, has typically only seen visitors if they’re shooting a movie or getting looped and wandering into an installation at Nuit Blanche.

Knapp initially thought the dream was dead when the TTC came back to him with a baseline rate of $700 an hour per train to rent two trains for the duration of the event — just to keep people from, y’know, falling onto the tracks — at a time when he had not a fraction of that in his personal bank account. But it worked out.

It has been a hassle and neither he nor the rest of Deliluh really knows how they’re going to make a subway station sound awesome on Friday.

But they’ll figure that out when they get in there on the morning of the show. And, hey, there’s also gonna be a cocktail bar on a train for the duration of the show. What more do you want?

“At no point setting this up did I think it would be as insane as it has been just trying to figure out the logistics of this f---ing show,” Knapp says.

“As soon as it got announced, the fire department came down hard on the TTC and I was getting calls left, right and centre saying, ‘You can’t have 300 people down in Lower Bay. It’s not up to code’ … There’s now, I think, 21 police and firefighting staff and TTC staff and security all roaming around for the show. But again: the fact that they agreed to it in the first place still boggles my mind.”

It’s a coup, to say the least. And not a bad one for Deliluh, which is known for performing in outof-the-way spots such as bakeries, the Parkdale library and the disused Dovercourt Rd. veterans’ hall known as the Owls Club and which can handle an unconventional setup situation. And, for the record, the band will also will be celebrating Friday’s re-release of last year’s excellent indie offering, Day Catcher, on esteemed local label Hand Drawn Dracula. “When you end up working on so many spaces that aren’t concert venues, you just get better and better at using it to your advantage and really dialing in and kind of tuning it to the room. You’re recording and playing, and I think that’s a great exercise,” Pedersen shrugs.

“That’s also a great exercise we’ve been working on for awhile and now we get a chance to do it in a f---ing subway station. I think that’s a dream come true,” Knapp adds. “We still didn’t get CMW wristbands, though.”