ALEXISONFIRE
BY JOSHUA KLOKE
Time heals all wounds, or so they say. When vocalist George Pettit of Canadian hardcore outfit Alexisonfire announced in August of 2011 that the band was calling it quits, fans took the news harshly. Pettit soon offered a statement on the band’s website, revealing that breakup indeed wasn’t amicable. The biggest question that plagued the breakup was a simple one: why? Why would this band, who’d amassed loyal followers and favourable critical reception, decide to throw in the towel? Pettit didn’t provide further explanation afterwards and for months, there were more questions than answers. It took time for the band to gain perspective on the split, which Pettit is now able to offer. “I think when you spend ten years doing any sort of job, you need a break,” says the 30-year-old, reached on the phone from his Toronto-area home. “There are a lot of things that we did which were enjoyable at first, but they eventually became stresses in our lives. Not to mention the success Dallas (Green) was having with City And Colour, which was eclipsing anything we’d done. So when Dallas announced that he was going to focus solely on that, there was the initial twinge of resentment and anger. But once you let the dust settle on that, you can see why he’s doing what he’s doing. Simply put, it was done,” he continues. “It may have taken Dallas and Wade saying it out loud for us to understand it, but it was certainly necessary.” A year after the split, rumblings of one last tour began to surface. Fans were hesitant to buy into the rumours, until the band announced a string of farewell shows. Pettit admits feeling guarded about announcing the tour, wondering if the band’s once-devastated fans would be ready to accept the band for one last tour. Yet it turns out the response, including the first show
in London having sold out in a matter of minutes, has given Pettit a keen understanding of just how important Alexisonfire was to their fans. “It’s actually been amazing,” he says, sounding incredibly touched. “I didn’t know what to expect; it’d been a year and a half since we announced we were done. We wondered if no-one would give a shit. We’d played Brixton Academy in London once before. It didn’t sell out, but it was a great show. And now we’re able to sell out two nights, it’s a great feeling. There’s a lot of messages being passed around through various social media sites, and we’re getting a real sense of what this band meant to our fans. It’s very humbling. It makes me feel like we did something worthwhile. You stop thinking about the little mistakes you made here and there on records.” All mistakes aside, while the purpose of a farewell tour is to allow fans one last opportunity to say goodbye, the very nature of Alexisonfire’s breakup can’t come as a huge surprise to the more keen observers. Formed out of the ashes of other Southern Ontario bands
that split, including Helicon Blue and Condemning Salem, there has always been a volatile intensity to the aesthetic of Alexisonfire. At times, that intensity could be mistaken for vulnerability, especially when Dallas Green began finding success with City & Colour. So was the breakup of Alexisonfire an inevitability? Pettit takes a long pause, considering the question. “It’s tough to say,” he concedes. “There were some moments throughout the band that came out of left field, and it was entirely possible that we could’ve continued on with this band but have been very unhappy. Maybe it wasn’t an inevitability, but maybe it should be that way with every band,” he continues. “There’s only a certain amount of creative juice you can squeeze. We probably could have made another record, but I also think we did everything we needed to do.” With the farewell tour booked across four continents, culminating with a run of shows throughout their native Canada, the only thing left to do now is look back at the career of one of the most impassioned and fervent hardcore bands of the 21st Century. How the pundits frame Alexisonfire and their legacy remains to be seen. For Pettit, continuing to be collaborative was always important.
“I think when you’re in a band with five people making equal amount of creative decisions, you get used to coming to compromises. That’s important. Because the band was a collaborative effort, I feel good about what we achieved. “ten years from now, who knows what people will think of the band. Hopefully they think we did something worthwhile. In a lot of ways, we probably inspired a lot of bad music,” he laughs. That Pettit can finally find humour in the break-up is incredibly telling. Their best days may be behind them, yet there’s no reason for fans not to enjoy their last kick at the can. “Sometimes I think we did as much harm as we did good, but I don’t have a lot regrets. If people look back on us ten years from now and think we were a good live band and we made some records that stood the test of time, that’s all I can really hope for.”
Garage. Lavan’s residency at the club touched each tip of a decade, and he’s one of six DJs in the Dance Music Hall of Fame. “He was disco, and then post disco,” Sparro says contemplatively. “He kind of transitioned into house music. He was there in the really early stages of that, but he also played a lot of funk and soul and you know, basically everything that I’m into, he played.” For more info on the era including plenty of tidbits about Lavan’s colleaguesin-cuts Frankie Knuckles and David Mancuso, readers are encouraged to check out the online film Maestro, which you can stream for free. Meanwhile admirers
can look forward to the upcoming show at the Prince Bandroom, and speculate on the stylin’ threads Sparro might be sporting.
as just the three of us before we started to play in big clubs and venues. We had just the cello and the guitars so we didn’t even need electricity – playing in friends’ apartments and in gardens – that was the performance, we didn’t have to do much. “Then we discovered real concerts and bigger crowds and a louder sound, which was very new for us. We were very excited and when I see videos of the first tour, sometimes I’m very ashamed because I jump everywhere and I feel like I’m a child. There is a big gap between the quiet, acoustic, and almost religious atmosphere of our first concerts and now.” The quality of Revolver’s rich, harmony-driven music was always going to find a home and an appreciative audience but the journey to that point was a long one. With no real networks in Paris, the band found breaking into the live music scene of their city of love a huge hurdle. They’re not quite folk, not quite pop and a far cry from classical yet they are all three of those genres at the same time – theirs is truly a unique sound. Combing the collective influences of Revolver’s members – where classical
precision meets pop appeal – the band have found their every growing audience to be as diverse as their music. With years of solid touring behind them, it seems there is now no question about their place within the modern Parisian music scene. “You can find people from any age at our shows now,” he says. “There are people around 50 or 60 who love our music because it reminds them of the music of the ‘60s and ‘70s – Simon & Garfunkel – there are also now a lot of younger people who’ve been listening to us on the radio. Two of us come from a classical background so we also find there are people who mainly listen to classical music and not pop music who really enjoy what we do. It is hard for me to describe our audience but the best way is simply the more you get close to the stage, the younger the audience gets.”
ALEXISONFIRE say goodbye with one last show at Festival Hall on Wednesday December 12.
SAM SPARRO
BY ZOË RADAS
Please do make way, ladies and gentlemen, for 2012’s Man of Style. And that’s not some cute nickname – Sam Sparro’s got the GQ award to prove it. “Yeah, they had a gala thing at The Ivy [Ballroom, in Sydney],” the prodigious singer says smoothly over the phone from LA. “I wore a white [Maison Martin] Margiela suit, like a kind of white tuxedo from their next summer collection.” The unflappable Sparro is releasing ReReturn To Paradise – a special digital-only repackage of his second album – on Friday of this week, and will be bringing his groove to Melbourne the week following. By his own admission Sparro has been travelling his heart out over the last few months. The GQ awards were held last week but he jammed several more commitments into that short trip. “I did an event for Samsung with Ricki-Lee, we did a collaboration, and then I did a photoshoot with Kimbra and Daniel Merriweather in Melbourne. [I’ll be back in] a few weeks. I’m going to New York, doing some US shows, and then I’m coming to Australia,” he explains. “I live on a plane a lot, I live out of a suitcase a lot.” Sparro is a coveted performer in Europe as well, and one of the bonus tracks on Re-Return To Paradise recently sat in the number one position on the Belgian charts for six weeks straight. There’s a great video up of the man performing the track Happiness (The Magician Remix) at a big outdoor party in Brussels, and you can practically hear the waffles being crushed underfoot as the crowd pinball around
to its beats. A portion of the material on the release isn’t completely new. “They’re the B-sides that basically came out on different versions of the album, but they’re going to be together,” Sparro says. “You know, you had to buy something to get them, or they were only at a certain store. They’re already out there, but now you can get them in a collection.” However, fans will be getting some fresh fruit, as there are a couple of mixes that are not yet out. “I just got those mastered a couple of weeks ago, and they’re some of my favourite ones on the record,” the singer says. “There’s like a nine minute Tiger and Woods remix of Let The Love In which I really love. And Mike Simonetti, and Plastic Plates. Really different from the originals.” The original album was inspired by Sparro’s fascination with New York nightlife in the early ‘80s, and particularly DJ Larry Lavan from Paradise
SAM SPARRO plays the Prince Bandroom on Sunday December 9 as part of the Moon And The Stars tour. Re-Return To Paradise will be released digitally on Friday November 30.
REVOLVER
BY KRISSI WEISS
Vocalist and guitarist, Ambroise Willaume, and cellist and vocalist, Jeremie Arcache united over their love of classical music during their training at France’s prestigious Maitrise Notre Dame de Paris music school. Vocalist and guitarist Christophe Musset grew up immersed in English pop music with a healthy love of artists ranging from The Beatles to Elliott Smith. In the early days they played their concerto-style, French pop for birthday parties and at friend’s houses, but in a short time Revolver quickly grew out of their humble, acoustic beginnings and into a bona fide pop band, albeit with strong classical sensibilities. Their sound has morphed into a new creature with the trio embracing some electronic elements in the studio setting and adding of two more live players. “On the first album, there was a big difference between the live versions and the studio versions of the songs,” Ambroise Willaume says. “When we recorded the first album we didn’t know anything about playing live – we hadn’t done any concerts – so we discovered all of that on the first tour. At the end of two years after the first tour, the songs had changed so much that people could have come to our concerts and not even recognised the songs. We didn’t want such a gap for the second album so we thought a lot about playing the songs live when we recorded them. It’s a little closer now but still, after spending weeks and weeks playing the songs, you want to change them up so we keep evolving all the time. We’re rehearsing a lot right now with a drum machine and a lot more keyboards, we didn’t expect to be doing that, so Beat Magazine Page 56
that’s a different sound. We’ve been touring for pretty much the last three years but we wanted to change a lot of our live show so we’ve spent a few weeks in the studio rehearsing again.” The first tour saw Arcache tackling bass lines on his cello and although that seems like a unique approach, Willaume concedes that it was simply too much for Arcache to take on and that the addition of a live drummer and bass player has brought their latest album to life in a much more accurate way. As well as the sound of Revolver changing shape over the past few years, the three-piece needed to find their feet as performers too. “In the beginning, we didn’t have to force ourselves to be very dramatic or anything like that, we had a very weird formula,” he says. “We were playing in very unusual places
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REVOLVER are playing So Frenchy So Chic in The Park at Werribee Park on Sunday January 20, 2013, with Melanie Pain, Nadeah and many more. Let Go is out now via EMI