Never mind
the reassign

>> For Toronto’s the Cliks, queer and
transgender politics take a backseat to rock

CROSSOVER POTENTIAL: The Cliks

by ANDREA ZANIN

Toronto-based rockers the Cliks have attracted quite a lot of attention this year. Their music has been compared to the White Stripes and David Bowie, and their major-label debut album, Snakehouse, was released in April by Warner in Canada and Tommy Boy in the U.S. This summer, the Cliks played several cities with Cyndi Lauper’s True Colors tour, and now they’re making a few stops in Canada before heading off to open on the Cult’s U.S. tour.

It should come as no surprise that an all-queer band with a female-to-male transgender frontman, the charismatic Lucas Silveira, would have a distinctly queer fan base. But the labels are betting that the foursome (with bassist Jen Benton, drummer Morgan Doctor and guitarist Nina Martinez) has crossover potential, and Silveira has high hopes as well.

“All I know is that we’re creating music,” he says. “To be good, it should be universal. The kind of stuff I write about is particular to the human spirit as opposed to a community or a politic of people.”

Silveira is happy to embrace his pop roots. “I’m not underground. I grew up listening to pop rock and mainstream rock music, so of course the music I create would be of that genre.”

Much has been made of Silveira’s transgender status—the Toronto Star described him as “on the verge of becoming the first transgendered pop heartthrob ever to register on mainstream radar,” and he’s been told he’s the first trans male to be signed to a major label.

“Everyone has a story,” he says. “This just happens to be my story and I happen to be a songwriter. I’m visible because it’s important to talk about these things. But I walk around thinking about music, not gender.”

Musically speaking, however, a gender change is more than an interesting factoid. A typical female-to-male transition involves using testosterone to help develop masculine physical traits—including a deeper voice, which can take several years to mature. For a singer, that’s no small consideration, especially since Silveira’s transition began just as the band was embarking on the upward spiral of success.

As with everything else, though, Silveira has made some unusual choices—he’s opted out of taking hormones. “I decided right at the beginning about the effects it would have on my voice, and I just couldn’t take the risk,” he explains. “Having a moustache would have been nice but it’s not worth losing my voice. It’s carried me throughout my life. I felt sorry for myself at first but because of this, I was sort of forced to start thinking about gender a little differently.”

He did have a double mastectomy—top surgery—“so that’s made me feel a lot more comfortable with my body. But I don’t necessarily need to have a beard or a deep voice to consider myself a transgender male.”

Silveira wrote the album while going through an intense period in his life, and that certainly comes through in the music. “It’s a strong album not just musically but because it’s about going to the deepest, darkest places inside yourself and coming out and finding hope and strength that you never thought you had,” he says. “But if people just want to dance around and say, ‘Yeah, it’s hot, that’s a great song’—well, that’s fine too.”

With guests at le Gymnase on
Saturday, Nov. 3, 9 p.m., $12