by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

“I’m not going to jump out of a heart, and to be honest, I have a slight problem with that sort of social fascism, where you can only have one day on which to declare your love.”

So declares Murray Head, the English actor and singer, of the fact that his Montreal concert happens to fall on Feb. 14. It’s a typically incisive and contrarian remark from the man best known for a pair of hit songs, roughly a decade apart—“Say It Ain’t So, Joe” and “One Night in Bangkok,” both too frequently misunderstood.

To set the record straight, the former was a reflection on the cognitive dissonance of dead-ender Nixon fans, the latter extracted from a musical about chess, scored by the dudes from Abba, in which Head played a role.

An effusive, articulate and considerate talker in person, Head nonetheless quickly betrays a low tolerance for bullshit, a chafing at the blank-eyed hypocrisy and counter-productivity present in the music industry. In the clash of art and artifice these days, the latter generally wins, and while his loyalty to the losing team may have cost Head a few rungs on the ladder of success, it’s also kept his soul fully intact.

Getting in deep

From his breakout roles in early productions of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar, to the unexpected profile-raising of Chess, to his recent turn in Luc Plamondon’s Cindy – Cendrillon 2002, musicals have served as milestones on Head’s journey—and further windmills to tilt at.

“I realized that musicals catered to a different audience from the mainstream rock ’n’ roll market, mums and dads, people who wanted to recognize a song they knew. Everything I’d levelled as an insult against musicals, which is that they seem to be besieged by plagiarism, was in fact the very reason they worked—because they were reminiscent of something you’d already heard.”

Again, honesty is the core issue for Head. “The whole thing that I could contribute as a performer was the capacity to move from speech to song without any particular jolt. Hopefully, it was a seamless exercise, because I don’t profess to be a musical singer with virtuoso performances. I didn’t see it as a platform for showing off. It’s not a virtue that anybody particularly seized on or understood, so I’ve not really been made use of in the way I could have been. I can sing, and I can sing from the heart. There’s enough anger in me to sing very passionately.

“I got a sort of inverted pleasure in making people squirm when I sang a song in Chess called ‘Pity the Child,’ which is quite a formidable song, all about parental neglect, playing on my own and the arguments between my parents that I heard. We ended up doing it on stage where I was curled up in a fetal position on the bed, and there was this extraordinarily uncomfortable silence at the end of the song, which let me know that I’d got in deep, in a place they didn’t want to be touched. They don’t come to musicals for that, but that’s all I can bring that’s of any import.”

It takes a village

Of course, Head isn’t at Club Soda to recap the Rice/Webber catalogue. He’s there to share his own songs, old and new (including a duet with his daughter Sophie), many of which are gathered on his new anthology Emotions. And if honest connection is prime directive, the fairly intimate live show is the most effective platform for providing it.

“The whole point about live theatre, musicals and bands is that it’s one of the last bastions of tactility, where you can actually touch and feel and sense. We’ve gone through a hideous period where bands felt they had to have supplementary DATs or discs to make the songs sound closer to what they’d recorded. In fact, that is completely anti-live—as soon as you’ve anything on disc coming through, there are no codas, no flexibility at all. And I depend on that.

“I’ve never lost sight of the fact that essentially, I go from one village to another with a cap, I play, somebody might give me a bed for the night, I put my cap out and they might throw a few coins in it. At the end of the day, we’re all fucking buskers, and we should never get too caught up in the vagaries of rock ’n’ roll and publishing and ‘downloading is a menace to society.’”

At Club Soda on Tuesday, Feb. 14, 9 p.m., $36

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