The Sheepdogs
They come from an isolated pocket of Canada and weren’t even born in the 70s. But The Sheepdogs have made some of the most glorious classic rock of the last decade.
They weren’t even born in the 70s, but they’ve made some of the most glorious classic rock of the past decade.
There’s a tiger in the room. And zebras, a polar bear and myriad other species. Not quite what one expects to see at three o’clock on a Thursday afternoon in East London. The Kings Head members club won’t be hosting The Vegetarian Society anytime soon, but with its lavish furnishings, striking taxidermy displays (Victoriana-style relics of a bygone era) and ornate woodwork, it makes an appropriately regal setting for the band we’re here to meet. Not that they see themselves as kings – they’re a bunch of young, down-to-earth Canadians after all – but as a group The Sheepdogs command your attention.
Classic Rock arrives to find open suitcases and outfits draped over bar stools, as our photographer sets up lights. There are tasselled jackets, cowboy boots and technicolor shirts. It’s as if a HaightAshbury boutique just exploded all over the room.
The band assembles soon after, some of them bearing hangover food to soothe sore heads from last night’s aftershow. They’re all in their 20s and 30s but could have come from Laurel Canyon circa 1970.
It’s a far cry from their beginnings in Saskatoon, Canada, where winters plummet to minus-20 and there’s no real rock history to speak of. This did mean, though, that when they started the band in 2006, founders Ewan Currie (singer/guitarist), Ryan Gullen (bassist) and Sam Corbett (drummer) had a clean slate to work from. Back then they looked like any old clean-shaven 19-year-olds, but as they became more immersed in a wide cross-section of music – taking full advantage of the recent arrival of online streaming – they started growing their hair, trying to grow beards.
“I remember you guys came back [home] and you all had tassel jackets all of a sudden,” grins Currie’s little brother Shamus, who was poised to be a jazz trombone player before becoming the Sheepdogs’ resident multi-instrumentalist in 2012 (he moves between ’bone, keys, Mellotron, guitar, percussion and more).
“I was thinking about this recently,” Ewan muses in deep tones, through a generous layer of ’tache. “That was the era of baggy jeans, and I have big legs so I was like ‘how do I wear tight jeans?’, cos Ryan wears his lady jeans, cos he can fit into them… I remember wearing these thirty-dollar loafers, but
then you’d be loading in in Saskatoon and it’d be icy as fuck, and in heeled shoes you’d just slip like a motherfucker.”
The frontman is a curious mix of jock and nerd. He’s burly and handsome (a good couple of inches taller than his bandmates) – with a sarcastic edge and a voice that’s part-luxury crooner, part-70s hippie icon – but enthuses about records and studio experiments with geekoid gusto. He played football as a teen, but met bassist Ryan Gullen through a regional concert band, where they both played clarinet. It was an unlikely friendship, but they stayed in touch through school and met Corbett and original guitarist Leot Hanson. Hanson left in 2014, to be replaced by blues prodigy Jimmy Bowskill – a successful soloist in his own right, who jammed with Jeff Healey (when he was just 11) and opened for Deep Purple and ZZ Top prior to becoming a Sheepdog. Aside from that, the line-up hasn’t changed.
Gullen strides over for a handshake, smiling and earnestly checking I have everything I need. Slim, willowy and conscientious, he’s also the band’s manager. In their early days he worked with disabled adults to pay the bills. Today that comes through in his chatty, gentle but very ‘on it’ demeanour.
“You can’t imagine what you’re getting yourself into when you’re just a bunch of guys jamming in a basement,” he says, glancing up at the tiger looming over the bar. “Now we’re sitting in a bar with weird taxidermy doing an interview for Classic Rock magazine!”
Before 2011, virtually no one outside Saskatoon knew who the Sheepdogs were. At times it probably felt as though no one inside knew them either. After five years, three selfreleased albums and backbreaking amounts of touring, no serious headway had been made and they were running out of ideas.
“We weren’t really making money at all,” Ewan remembers, “We were running up a line of credit on tour and then we’d come back and do these shows where we’d rent a hall and sell our own tickets and booze, and pay down our debts. There’s a lot of work in that.”
The future looked uncertain, until an agent who’d met them in Toronto submitted a demo tape to Rolling Stone magazine’s ‘Choose The Cover’ competition. Fifteen bands were shortlisted. The Sheepdogs won, and on August 18, 2011 they were the magazine’s cover stars. A record contract with Atlantic followed, and they made their next album with Black Keys’ drummer Patrick Carney.
After that, everything changed. They won three Juno Awards – 2012’s single, rock album and new group of the year. They backed up Paul Rodgers. They met Larry David. The aforementioned single, Feeling Good, was used in a commercial for Modelo beer. All of which came with a maelstrom of interviews, photoshoots, travelling and partying. Overnight they became stars in Canada, and if this wasn’t quite true in the rest of the world they were now, at least, a going concern.
A lesser band might have become complacent about the music. The Sheepdogs haven’t. Their career to-date peaked last year with 17-track masterpiece Changing Colours. A sumptuous, immaculately assembled feast, it’s fresh-eyed classic rock nostalgia at its finest. There are flavours of the Allmans and Creedence Clearwater Revival in there, but also Little Feat, The Beatles, Sly & The Family Stone, the Beach Boys, early Steely Dan, jazz, soul and more. Their not-so-secret weapon, though, is their harmonies – sublime multi-part vocal and guitar lines that feel pristine and wonderfully loose at the same time.
We’re meeting them today at the end of a UK run, during which all the above has been honed and perfected. They’re tired but willing, running on the adrenalin of the last month as our photographer snaps away. We wonder whether their easy precision onstage comes from a strict rehearsal schedule, or simply from performing a great deal.
“At this point we’re a year and a half down the line since the record came out,” Ewan reasons. “We’ve played the shit out of these songs, they’re really well worn in.”
“We should really re-record the album now,” Shamus adds, toothy grin and poker-straight blond hair offset by a serious, dark brow that aligns him more closely with his big brother.
“And then tour it again!” chimes in Corbett.
“I was wearing these $30 loafers. Loading in in Saskatoon it’s icy as f**k. In heeled shoes you slip like a motherf**ker.”
Ewan Currie
The drummer underwent treatment for cancer last year, in addition to becoming a father. Today he’s a softly spoken but steadying presence in the group. “I think [it’s] the sheer repetition of playing it all for so many shows since the album came out.” There’s a pause. “And we’re all super talented…” Ewan deadpans with low chuckle.
Saskatoon is an isolated place to start a band. The biggest cities are between six and eight hours away. Its roots are in the late 1800s, when an eclectic mix of European immigrants (including Gullen’s Polish ancestors) arrived on the promise of free homestead land to build farms on.
Arguably that spirit of independence and hard work has prevailed. The Sheepdogs’ earliest days were fertilised by an open-minded local scene, where rock, ska, funk, punk, metal, Afro-beat and more were embraced. They’d jam in Corbett’s parents’ basement, teaching themselves harmonies with an acoustic guitar to keep the noise down, then perform in local joints.
“There was a venue called Lydia’s in Saskatoon and they had an open stage, and there was a really cool scene going on,” Gullen recalls. “We were really fortunate because, long before we started touring or recording, we could flop and there’d still be people who’d come and support you – people who went out to see music on a Tuesday.”
Tuesday shows turned into Saturday opening slots (“like, ‘Wow we made one hundred dollars!’”), which led to touring and shows beyond their hometown. For a long time they tried to play somewhere every day. It led to some, er, odd gigs.
“If you could get a show in the west of Canada you could probably get a couple of hundred bucks, or maybe a place to stay, and maybe a meal,” Ewan remembers, “So you’d play a city on a Monday night until 2am and it was like, ‘Who’s out drinking on a Monday at 2am?’ It’s really the dregs of society. We played a very early show in Edmonton, and there was a guy wearing the collar of a priest… it was like, ‘Man, is this what it’s gonna be like?’”
“He was from the same small town as Nickelback too,” Corbett adds. “Claimed he excommunicated them or something…”
Corbett and the Currie brothers were born into musical families, preparing them for the less glamorous side of musician life. The Curries’ father was a classical composer – which was both a blessing and a cause for rebellion.
“If we were playing cards and I put on John Lee Hooker or something he’d get angry because it was out of tune, or something like that,” Ewan rolls his eyes. “He approaches things more from an academic background, he’s very trained, and I’m much more of a play-by-ear, or feel, guy. I can read music but I don’t use it for our stuff. For me, the Beatles are the greatest and they weren’t trained, they were just all into intuition and feel.”
“That said, it is fun to have an old man who can just be like, ‘Oh yeah, this Khachaturian concerto is pretty cool, you should check it out,’” Shamus adds. “He’s kinda like a wealth of knowledge in the background that we can access if we need to.”
“He did send a hilarious comment,” Ewan laughs. “He was watching a performance that we did at the Bataclan [in Paris] last year and he was like, ‘Ewan I noticed that the ‘Who’, you’re singing is an eighth note shorter than you used to’.”
Perhaps a simpler secret to those seamless, harmonised tunes is the fact that they are all friends. Like, actual friends. They get together for BBQs. They go to baseball games. They go on holidays.
“A lot of people think that’s really weird,” Gullen nods, “Ewan, Sam and myself have been in a band for fifteen years and we still hang out.”
We wonder if there’s a key to this, besides the usual glib stereotypes about Canadians being really nice people…
“I always say that being in a band is like being in a weird sexless polygamous marriage,” Gullen laughs. “You have these moments when you’re not happy with each other but the music brings you back. Any fight you’ve had during the day doesn’t exist after the show.”
And what a show they have, hinged on a vault of songs that seem like old favourites, even if you’re only hearing them for the first time. Songs that lift the spirit, and have helped fans get through breakups and bereavements.
“We met somebody once who told us our album helped get them through prison,” Gullen says, genuinely stunned. “And you have no fucking idea about this stuff. You can have this unknown connection with people without even realising it, until you talk to them. It’s really amazing.”
“Somebody once told us our album helped get them through prison. You have no idea of this stuff.”
Ryan Gullen
Changing Colours is out now. Thanks to all at The King’s Head, thekingshead-london.com.