by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

By now it's a running joke - if third wave ska is dead, why didn't anyone tell the Planet Smashers, or the tons of kids that pile into their shows across Canada? The gag can be expanded, though, if the Smashers' jaunt through the U.K. and Switzerland (the latter still their best Euro draw) is any indication.

"You gotta understand," says Smashers frontman Matt Collyer, "everyone there is into the subculture looks. Everyone's a punk or a skin or a rude boy. You don't really see the snowboarding, fat-pants, backwards-baseball-cap types."

You'd think the band would be daunted by the prospect of trotting out their version of pop-punk ska in the land that birthed ska's second wave. You'd think the crowds would be either so over ska or conversely utterly dogmatic about it. But the Smashers and their recent CD Mighty have certainly made a mark there. The problem is of course that in the rapid-turnover world of British pop, maintaining that mark will be the real challenge.

"We played this one place, to a pretty small crowd, but in that crowd were the 20 or so kids, the scenemakers, who sort of decide what's going to be cool in that scene for the next little while. We played for the right people, and they totally dug us. The promoter, though, told us we had to get back there within four months or the kids would forget about us and move on to the next thing."

Fake folk and confounding sounds

The next big thing, for former Smashers sax-man Leon Kingstone, is his Synthetic Folk Hero creation. He's already toured Canada alone in a Honda Civic and has just released his self-titled debut disc. While there are shades of the Smashers' catchy pop and quirky humour in there, this is very definitely a whole new bag for Kingstone.

"I have general terms for it - confounded rock, bizarre rock, that kind of thing - but really I'm trying to do stuff that I feel hasn't been done before a gazillion times," says Kingstone. "I try to do songs that aren't three-chord songs, the standard extended choruses that you hear in a lot of pop songs. I like that stuff and use it as a contrast against the non-poppy stuff I do. So if it sounds really different from what you're used to hearing, that perks my ears up and I say, ‘Ah, that's a SFH song.'"

So what is it, exactly, that Kingstone does? In his mind, as synthetic as it is, it's still folk. "A lot of people would dispute that because I don't play guitar and sing, but I think a lot of my songs have messages - or even the silly ones, they have stories, and to me that's the basis of folk. The whole synthetic side is because I don't play guitar and sing into the mic. I play synthesizer and saxophone and sing through a processed mic. I have to use this synthetic way of telling stories, basically."

Here he comes to save the day

Right. But what about the heroic bit? "I had a huge list of 40 names, I couldn't choose, I fell asleep and woke up with the name Synthetic Folk Hero in my head and it just felt good. Then I did a show and people said, ‘Leon, you gotta dress up or something.' I'm just going by recommendations here. So I wore a cape and now everybody thinks I'm a superhero. But I'm going to be changing things around, I'm not always going to go with that."

Like any halfway decent hero, Kingstone's looking out for the little guy - sort of. "I like to give voices to things that normally don't have voices, like the GMOs. I like to sing about things that people notice but don't really talk about much, like my song ‘Nobody Does the Dishes Anymore (Except Me)' - silly problems with roommates. Or ‘Morning Wood,' which was actually written on a dare from Matt from the Planet Smashers. I don't know anybody who's written a song about that."

After breaking the bad news to Kingstone that ZZ Top beat him to it in '85 with "Woke Up With Wood," I cheer him up by noting that he's now part of a growing movement. Montreal's particularly strong on this front - the new-jack, pseudo-naïve one-person bands that straddle comedy and pop music, rife with idiosyncrasies and unafraid to mix up the emotions.

"I never actually thought I could do a solo act until I saw Lederhosen Lucil and heard Atom & His Package. Then I thought, know what? Maybe I can do this too. So Lucil and Atom are an inspiration, and - who's that guy from Texas with the motorcycle helmet? Bob Log III. It's really cool that there's a whole group of people doing this solo thing."

The Planet Smashers, with Flashlight Brown and Jesse James, are at Rainbow tonight, Thursday, Nov. 20, 8pm, $15, all ages. Synthetic Folk Hero CD launch with Mr. Matt & the Birth of Something New at Casa del Popolo on Thursday, Nov. 27, 9pm, $5

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