Serving the people to heal old wounds
Operators will perform songs from frontman’s former project — Handsome Furs — six years after its awkward dissolution
Handsome Furs’ brief, but brilliant career was cut short in 2012 after just three slammin’, primitivist synth-pop albums in six years when the couple behind the music, sometime Wolf Parade rabble-rouser Dan Boeckner and his then-wife Alexei Perry, suddenly split up.
A wounded Boeckner bounced back hard, swiftly forming the one-off snappy New Wave “supergroup” Divine Fits with friend and Spoon frontman Britt Daniel later that year and, in 2014, pursuing an even more accomplished and swaggering take on the sexy electro-rock vision he’d conjured in the Furs, this time with Macedonian technophile Devojka and New Bomb Turks/Divine Fits drummer Sam Brown in the formidable trio Operators . He even reformed the much-loved Wolf Parade in 2016 along the way.
Handsome Furs never got a proper send-off but now, with those romantic wounds somewhat healed by time, Boeckner has decided to resurrect some of the sharply observant agit
anthems that have been gathering dust in cherished copies of Plague Park, Face
Control and Sound Kapital for the past six years with a pair of “Operators perform Handsome Furs” shows, one at Brooklyn’s Baby’s All Right last Thursday and another in a very lucky Toronto at Lee’s Palace tonight.
Unsurprisingly, both sold out some time ago.
The Star caught up with Boeckner this week to talk about his reclamation of the Furs canon and the general state of things in Operators, who finally appear ready to follow up their smashing 2016 debut, Blue Wave, once this little sojourn through the past is behind them. “Operators perform Handsome Furs.” What prompted this little endeavour and why now? Was there a “catalytic moment” that got you plotting?
I’d say the catalytic moment for bringing these songs back to life unfolded in slow motion over the last two years. The best way I can explain it is simply: I miss playing these songs. Handsome Furs may not have had the same reach or mass appeal as Wolf Parade or Divine Fits but, in a lot of ways, those three LPs feel like the most personally representative expressions of my art and songwriting of my whole career. I don't want these songs to stay in the song graveyard. Other signs pointed Devojka and myself toward putting these shows together, as well. During the six years between the release of
Sound Kapital and 2018 there’s been a
slow, inexorable slide here in the West towards some of the corrupt, illiberal, authoritarian structures I saw when Handsome Furs were touring places like Myanmar and Kosovo. So 2018 seems like a good time to get on stage and sing “Serve the People.” We’re buds so I don’t wanna prod too much, but I know the end of the Furs was tough on you. Was it hard to come back to this material? Were there any songs that were totally off the table?
The end of the Furs was tough on everyone involved and I hope I never have to go through anything like it again. But, for me, there’s been enough time and distance between then and now that I can go into the rehearsal space and tear through “Radio Kaliningrad” or “What About Us” and reconnect with them purely as songs without the weight of any attached emotional baggage. The timeline of Handsome Furs is the timeline of me being able to figure out how to be an artist. The things I wanted to sing about. The way I wanted to telegraph my songs. What was important to me as a person politically and artistically. Running down the set feels like being a time-travelling ghost. But in the best possible way.
That said, there must have been some Furs tunes that you were just itching to rip into again. Care to name names? My Operators love is a matter of public record, so I have no qualms about saying (again, in public) that Ops picked up where Handsome Furs left off and extrapolated upon a lot of those ideas in bigger and more badass directions. Surely there were a couple of doovers in which to relish?
“Serve the People,” “Legal Tender,” “What About Us,” “Repatriated” … I’d say everything in the set we put together. Before we all got together for rehearsals, Devojka went in and reconstructed a lot of these songs from scratch. The original MIDI files are lost to the ages and we wanted to build and improve on the tracks. Some of the rebuilding felt like an archeological excavation. When I first wrote these songs — especially the ones on Plague
Park and Face Control — I really had very little idea what I was doing in terms of programming and synthesis so a big part of the pre-production involved trying to deliberately recreate mistakes and randomness. Soooooo, and more importantly … more new Operators music on the horizon? I feel like Blue Wave kinda got shouldered aside by a swift-tofollow reunion album by another band you play in with Wolf in the name, but that's just me being a critic. Will the balance be redressed down the line? And, actually, how do you balance these two gigs? Can’t be easy.
Yeah, the Blue Wave cycle got stopped a little prematurely. I think that’s a constant hazard of being in two or more projects and sticking to what are increasingly outdated promotional cycles for albums. Breaking out of that mid’00s idea of long, inactive lead times and a touring schedule that revolves around a marketing plan and big summer festivals is a kind of a do-or-die question for working-class musicians right now. We’re almost finished LP 2 and it should be out in spring of 2019. It’s fairly different from Blue Wave — more psychedelic, more melted. I like to think of it as a pastoral, radiophonic Goth album. We really pushed ourselves with it and I can’t wait to put it out.