Fey has its day

>> Unabashed popsters Stars let the love shine through

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Stars singer Torquil Campbell said something in a radio interview recently that I really liked. "Pop has become a dirty word," he noted, "like Liberal."

Campbell and his bandmates aren't afraid of a dirty word like pop--or fey or pretentious, either. He and co-founder/keyboardist Chris Seligman grew up together in Toronto, best friends who shared a love of fey, pretentious pop from across the pond. They moved to NYC to study (acting for Campbell and music for Seligman), and it was there that Stars began to shine.

Once a few tracks were recorded, demos were circulated. "One of the first labels that wrote back was Le Grand Magistery," says Campbell, "who put out Momus--and I love Momus. It turns out that Matthew Jacobson, who runs the label, is a really fascinating guy. His grandfather owned a string of vaudeville houses in Detroit, his father was a magician and he himself was a famous child magician, so he comes from an impressario background. He has a great risk-taking vision, and you don't really find people like that running labels anymore."

New York gets old

That looked good, but the Big Apple less and less so, which prompted their relocation to our town. "That whole Williamsburg, Brooklyn scene is not something we wanted to do anymore," says Seligman. "It's hard to even characterize it--it's just this negative attitude. People seem to hate each other there."

"A lot of cynical young white people," says Campbell. "That is something that Montreal seems blessedly free of. Every time anything happens in art, or a movement begins, the corporations have learned how to subsume and co-opt it so quickly now. These things have no time to gestate at all. And New York is the centre of that."

On that note, he adds that we shouldn't expect to hear any Stars songs in advertisements. "Not that I think anyone's going to ask, but I'm going to try to put more swear words in the songs, so that it's impossible to use them anyway. I think if you're going to make music this fey, it's important to be really foulmouthed and filthy, just to cut it a little."

What's wrong with heartbreak?

Fey--they said it, I didn't. I'd use "gentle" and "precious," though, reflections of their taste for New Order, the Smiths and so on. I could throw in pretentious, and they wouldn't blink.

"I feel absolutely violent about being castigated for pretentiousness," says Campbell. "It's such garbage, and it's the reason why nobody's writing Crime and Punishment today, why nobody's writing The Wasteland or 'The Firebird Suite.' They're terrified of being called pretentious. This guy who wrote a book called A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, kicking himself in the ass before you even open the book. Why?! Stand up and express the love," he says, almost without cracking up.

The love is expressed quite clearly on Nightsongs, their first full-length. "There's two kinds of songs that we write. There's the ones where we're trying very hard to get some pure emotion going on, and then there's the ones where we're trying to subvert something, to unnerve people somehow."

"Maybe this is because I'm an actor, but I've always been fascinated by stuff that lets you in on the point of view of someone who is doing something terribly wrong, or because of some very noble purpose, has done something incredibly evil. I like those stories because they unnerve me, they make me question my own morality and be a little more honest with myself about what I might be capable of in certain circumstances. There's a romance to them, something incredibly beautiful about people who do terrible things in the name of love."

Transcendentally facile

Already Stars have shared both stage and headspace with a similar batch of hopeless romantics, the Dears. With the addition of Amy Millan on guitar and Evan Cranley on bass, Stars have become a "real" band, ready to spread the word. "There is something that we want to say to people," Campbell continues, "and that's that the possibility of art is that it can take you out of your mundane, painful, empty life and elevate you to a place where you're a star. That's why we called ourselves Stars--when you say 'stars,' now, you think of Winona Ryder, instead of the stars in the sky. I think it's weird that the most profound and transcendental visual thing in our entire life is the night sky, the universe, and yet we choose to name the most trivial, temporary thing on the planet after them. That's pop music--simultaneously incredibly meaningful and deep and totally facile, simple and empty. That's what's fun about it."

At Quartier Latin on Friday, Dec. 8, 10pm, $5