Torquil Campbell, the 'words guy' from Montreal band Stars, talks to Peter Crawley about frantic resistance and forlorn resignation
'None of us expected anyone to pay any attention," says Torquil Campbell, "because no one ever has paid any attention to Canada." Campbell, the eloquently engaging, soft-spoken and somehow dreamily fatalistic frontman of the exquisite Stars, is speaking from his tour bus as it winds through the Swiss Alps, en route to a very attentive Zurich. He is speaking not for his band, but for an entire scene.
It would be wrong to say that this year belongs to the Stars. Nor is it accurate to say that the Arcade Fire have been awarded custody of 2005. The same goes for The Dears, The Stills and Wolf Parade. But put them all together and you can't ignore that a sound, a scene and a city have come to dominate one corner of music. Nobody likes the term "the new Seattle", but where indie rock is concerned, these 12 months have been brought to you by Montreal.
Canada's most populous city may not seem like an ad for artistic seclusion, but in a French-speaking city Anglophone bands form a close-knit community. This collegial nature was one of the main attractions for Stars, who moved to Montreal shortly after forming in 2001. That, and the cheap rents.
"There was an enormous amount of freedom, a lack of self-consciousness, and support for each other," Campbell says of the city. "People were very good to one another there, because we didn't sense there was any competition. So, unlike England, where bands spend a lot of time competing with one another and slagging each other off, in Canada we actually like what we're doing.
"I'm a huge fan of Arcade Fire. I don't have a bad word to say about them. I think we felt that if we wanted to get anywhere we had to support one another and be kind to one another."
And so they are: from the indie nexus of Montreal to Vancouver bands The New Pornographers and The Organ, or Toronto's ironically named Broken Social Scene (who share members with Stars), Canadian bands mention each other in interviews, perform together in festivals, and express a solidarity that belies both their disparate origins and their stylistic divergences.
Campbell, for instance, was born in England, started his band with keyboardist Chris Seligman in New York, and relocated when they decided that NYC was "so intolerably expensive and so totally monochromatic". And though they share the orchestral pop and unabashed emotion of fellow Montreal blow-ins Arcade Fire, the latter group follow the soaring catharsis of bereavement (which you can still dance to), while the Stars pursue a bittersweet tangle of political resistance and doomed romance . . . which you can still dance to.
In January 2004, the five members of Stars - Campbell, Seligman, co-vocalist and guitarist Amy Millan, guitarist/ bassist Evan Cranley and drummer Pat McGee - decided to escape the bitterly cold winter of Montreal, to experience instead the excruciatingly cold winter of North Hatley, a village in Quebec that gets snowed in for six months of the year. There, in a cabin, among several efforts to stay warm, they recorded Set Yourself on Fire, their third album and one of the year's best.
"They're real musicians and I'm an indie-rock nerd who got into a band," reasons Campbell, who comes from a theatre background and considers himself 'the word guy'. "The whole thing is about trying to achieve some aesthetic effect for me. For the rest of them it's about making a song sound good, whatever that takes."
HAPPILY, THAT TAKES equal doses of grandeur and bounce, the album's swooning string and brass arrangements as lovingly deployed as sudden flourishes of brash synth-pop. But while musically the record belongs to the group (Stars trade heavily on the dual perspectives offered by Millan and Campbell's boy/girl vocals), thematically it's all Campbell's.
That's his wife, Moya O'Connell, who appears on the album cover wearing only a pink balaclava and clutching a Molotov cocktail. "That image was very important to us," says Campbell. "Some people really hate it, which I'm very happy about. But to me it kind of tells you the whole story of the record: the idea of using vulnerability and fragility as a weapon. It's really all we've got against the forces that are willing to use violence and hate to advance their agenda."
That's his father, at the start of the record, advising us with doomsday gravitas that "When there's nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire!" Campbell elaborates on this incendiary pose, saying that Stars sing about sex and death ("creation and destruction", he explains), but in the abrasive, George Bush-baiting song, He Lied About Death, or the quietly resigned Celebration Guns, they tap into the mood of a generation: politically cynical but still yearningly idealistic.
The record, Campbell explains, is about the relationship between love and politics, but "I don't have the political eloquence to make something topical seem timeless", so those global intentions are smuggled into personal experiences. He tells me a story about a friend of his, a bouncer, who once asked a troublemaker why he was so belligerent. "I'm having a lover's quarrel with the world," the man replied.
There is a recurring theme across the Stars' albums which is fast becoming a rallying cry: "The Soft Revolution".
"I see it as a personal thing really," Campbell begins. " 'The Soft Revolution' is something that happens inside you. I think it's just about recognising the incredible beauty and the drama of your own life . . ."
He then changes tack with a sweet despondency commensurate with his adopted city. "It's a revolution where you lose," he says. "I think we're the first generation to recognise that this battle is not going to be won by the good people. In accepting that, in realising that and embracing that weakness, there might just be some salvation. There might be some actual change."
For a pessimist, he can be quite the optimist. "Well, what else can I do, you know?" he says, and his tone lightens. "I have to find some way out of the darkness. And I'm too short to be a goth . . ."
THE PARADOX AT the heart of Stars' music - that acrid humanity is laced with dreamy escape; that frantic resistance goes in hand with forlorn resignation - goes someway to explaining how Montreal has captured the tenor of the times, how a city may be in tune with the world.
For Campbell, it also illuminates one of the highlights of his year: Stars' first Irish appearance, in Dublin's Sugar Club.
"We had no expectation that any single soul would be there or anybody would give a toss. And there seems to have been such a fantastic response to it in your country. It was so warm and it just seemed to make sense, somehow. I hadn't really thought about it before, but when I was playing the concert it occurred to me that that mixture of viciousness and sentimentality is perfectly Irish.
"Of course you guys like it!" he laughs. "Because it's vicious and sentimental, just like you."
Stars play The Village, Dublin, Tue, Dec 13. Set Yourself on Fire is on Arts & Crafts/ City Slang. www.arts-crafts.ca/stars/