Ghost of a flea: So This is Goodbye

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August 25, 2006

So This is Goodbye

Junior Boys.jpg

K-Punk asks us to imagine "an alternative history of pop in which glam rock was played on synthesizers." The result is the second album release by The Junior Boys, "So This is Goodbye". I first heard the first album at a record store on Roncesvalles by High Park. After "More Than Real" I dropped whatever I was looking for and walked out with music I had never heard before.* Almost the perfect way to encounter new music; unforced, unfeigned and serendipitous.

Arguably the most important moment in the whole Star Wars saga finds Luke Skywalker on his own looking out over the desert at the setting of the twin suns of Tatooine. In another scene, he explains to Threepio that "if there is a bright center to the universe, you are on the world farthest from it." Lucas is singaling his audience that Dorothy is about to leave Kansas in search of adventure. More than that, he is reaching for the place in any of us who have ever wanted to escape Tatooine. Someplace, anyplace, has to be better than this.

Regular Flea-readers will know I miss England. Not just the catastrophically glam bits of post-imperial London that are my stomping grounds or the majestic and foreign northern wastes of south Manchester. I miss Englishness as much as England. I miss Boots and Tesco Metro and the odd fillings in corner sandwiches packed for journeys by train. I miss black cabs and Silk Cuts** and the Vivienne Westwood tie selection downstairs at Liberty of London. I miss the Norrington Room and Boddingtons*** and shopping for bargains at the Penhaligon's store at Bicester. All sorts of things. It took me years to get there and once there it never occurred to me to leave.

There were a number of things which brought me back to Canada, some too personal to write about on a Friday morning. But one was sufficiently innocuous for this morning's Flea and illustrative of my point (which I am getting to); this being an ad for women's deodorant. I had been living in Manchester for two years at that point. The place has a ruins of Melniboné feel to it. The natives are friendly but it is difficult to trace an organic link between the people and the cyclopean Victorian engineering of the Ship Canal or condos in the ruins at Castlefield. More than that is the constant low-grade spookiness of the place. People may joke about the rain but it is always, always there. As one Texan friend put it, "It is hard to live in a place for so long that is so dark."

By contrast was the deodorant ad. So far from England's grim and exhausted north was a towering American landscape of shining steel and glass and women on the go. Not Melniboné but Barsoom.**** Then I spotted the streetcar and Union Station and some familiar cabs. My first thought was "That's Toronto!" closely followed by "What the hell am I doing here?" Toronto has neighbourhoods and blazing summer sun and Lake Ontario and just maybe the possibility of becoming an interesting place to be.***** In Toronto the future has yet to become impossible. I do not think you can ask much more from life let alone a city.

It is with considerable pleasure, therefore, that I read K-Punk's FACT interview with The Junior Boys. Mark has already underlined his geographical obsession with their music. He describes it as "more middle of the tundra than middle of the road" and "a deeply Canadian record: crisp and white, like the Canadian winter." When I read his blog take last March I thought the metaphor was a bit forced; a result of an Englishman confronted with something Canadian and finding he has nothing whatsoever to say about it.****** But Mark returns to the same theme with the interview and with it an apparent interest in the space of Canadianity. Perhaps it is me that is selling the place short.

The Junior Boys' Jeremy Greenspan considers making music an hour outside Toronto.

... I do think environment is among the most important components of making a record. The place where you are, the conditions you set up for yourself, effect what you produce in countless and often inexplicable ways. I think of both of our albums as intrinsically linked to the countryside and cities of southern Ontario. It’s hard to qualify exactly, I don't know why I think of my records as ‘Canadian’, but I do. I think there is something about the vastness of Canada that influences me. Both ‘Last Exit’ (the song) and ‘FM’ which is kind of an extension out of ‘Last Exit’, deal explicitly with the northbound highways which lead from greater Toronto to the never-ending emptiness of northern Canada. There is a kind of agoraphobia that comes with driving in Canada, the feeling you get when you realize that your on a highway that leads seemingly with no end to absolutely nowhere. It’s a very familiar Canadian experience. In America, I've found, you feel that the highways always lead somewhere, if you drive long enough eventually you'll hit some city, some place you've heard of. In Canada it’s the total opposite, unless you're on a direct path to somewhere you'll get totally lost.

Exactly right. And something I have found difficult to explain to people from just about anywhere else (excepting Australians) (and sometimes South Africans). The great empty spaces of Tatooine are not such a bad place to be creative. After all, they had the Cantina Band. Still, I think setting their next project in Shanghai is an excellent idea. If I can come up with the cash I have been thinking of doing the same thing myself. The Junior Boys album is out in Canada and will be released elsewhere by mid-September. I have been listening to "In The Morning" over and over again on MySpace and suggest you do the same.

*I first heard The Streets in the same place.
**Foul as they are.
***People think Mentos ads are great but YouTube will have reached critical mass as soon as someone posts that Ferrero Rocher ad with the ambassador ("Excellente!"). I have been looking for it on-line for years now. Not this one. I am after the English-language version of this one.
****Given half a chance many English people will corner Americans and explain to them how lucky they are to be living in such a young country without stultifying European social conventions; this being the depressive phase of a bipolar condition familiar to Americans who have endured the condescension and cowboy remarks attending manic episodes of the same. This despite America being the oldest republic in the world and most of Europe an undergraduate social science experiment in comparison. Canadians don't get the same flak as they are generally considered to be too boring to be worth having a go at.
*****Plus, cities have a way of becoming cool approximately three months after I arrive.
******Remember, Canada is just possibly more boring than Belgium.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at August 25, 2006 10:47 AM

Comments

The merest quibble on this point from a dislocated Nova Scotian:

I think of both of our albums as intrinsically linked to the countryside and cities of southern Ontario. It’s hard to qualify exactly, I don't know why I think of my records as "Canadian", but I do.

That is wonderful and correct and rich but it is the making of an Ontarian record. The Skydiggers (differences of taste aside) were greatest band for describing Ontario as where they were from. It is a great rich and wonderful place. It does not need to be Canadian as it is Ontarian. There is only one place that needs to establish its right to identity for what it is more than Toronto and that is Ontario.

Off to eat a peach as I drive from Kingston to Stratford through Northumberland's rolling hills.

Posted by: Alan McLeod at August 25, 2006 11:41 AM

Crap. My bad blockquote tag has destoyed the greatest comment I have ever written making the middle bit unreadable. Can it be salvaged?

I will still eat that peach, though.

Posted by: Alan McLeod at August 25, 2006 11:43 AM

Hey - it still in the source code. I will repeat myself for posterity:

"The merest quibble on this point from a dislocated Nova Scotian:

"I think of both of our albums as intrinsically linked to the countryside and cities of southern Ontario. It’s hard to qualify exactly, I don't know why I think of my records as "Canadian", but I do.

"That is wonderful and correct and rich but it is the making of an Ontarian record. The Skydiggers (differences of taste aside) were greatest band for describing Ontario as where they were from. It is a great rich and wonderful place. It does not need to be Canadian as it is Ontarian. There is only one place that needs to establish its right to identity for what it is more than Toronto and that is Ontario.

"Off to eat a peach as I drive from Kingston to Stratford through Northumberland's rolling hills."

Posted by: Alan McLeod at August 25, 2006 11:45 AM

I did a little freelance editing on that first comment. Now preparing an update for you.

Posted by: Ghost of a flea at August 25, 2006 12:11 PM

Fabulous. I have now coined "clogging" for what I just did to this post's comments section.

Off for that peach now to the place where no internet reaches...the in-laws.

Posted by: Alan McLeod at August 25, 2006 12:16 PM

Ok, am going to comment here because I can't find an on-line version of "Hasn't Hit Me Yet" by Blue Rodeo. Now, that's Ontario. Though for future reference: When I say "Canada" I mean "Ontario".

Posted by: Ghost of a flea at August 25, 2006 12:17 PM

Non-Canadian Flea-readers can still visit Blue Rodeo's MySpace and listen to "5 Days in May". It will give something like the same idea.

Posted by: Ghost of a flea at August 25, 2006 12:20 PM

I'm sorry, I'm confused. Are you going somewhere?

I visited Manchester once. In January. I was there for a conference at UMIST.

I discovered that the dorm I was staying in did not provide washcloths, so I went to Boots to get some. A man in a suit followed me all over the (very tiny) store, and when I gave the cashier a pound coin, she bit into it. A strange set of rituals.

I also drank scrumpy for the first time, at a pub called The Lass o' Gowrie. Good stuff.

Posted by: Angie Schultz at August 25, 2006 06:28 PM

Oh Flea, bless your little cotton socks!

Posted by: agent bedhead at August 26, 2006 10:38 AM

Black cotton socks. With a bit of argyle.

Posted by: agent bedhead at August 26, 2006 10:41 AM