by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

This Saturday, the Montreal Museum of Fine Art sees its 1960s exhibit collide with the Montreal High Lights Festival for a free all-nighter of poetry, DJs, screenings of The Graduate and 2001: A Space Odyssey and some wicked surfabilly action care of Toronto trio the Sin-Tones. The Mirror got a hold of these confessed tiki freaks (dig their kung-fu luau video for "(Theme From) Chick Boat") and asked bassist/singer Jo Bradley how she, guitarist Mike Hussey and drummer Jim Clark compare with the real-deal Hawaiians of yore.

Mirror: Hawaiian history was passed along orally through mele, or chants, by the kahunas, or high priests. Which musical kahunas do the Sin-Tones grovel before?

Jo Bradley: The usual suspects. Link Wray, Dick Dale, Luther Perkins, Eldon Shamblin, Hank Marvin, Ennio Morricone, Roy Lanham, Joe Meek, Duane Eddy, Davie Allan and Akira Ifukube - maybe some not so usual.

M: Until the reign of the iconoclastic Kamehameha II, Hawaiian culture was dominated by a rigid set of kapu, or taboos, sacred laws forbidding things like men and women eating together. What taboos do the Sin-Tones refuse to break?

JB: We refuse to play without reverb tanks, Echoplexes, Danelectro Longhorns and Teles. Other than that, it's pretty much open season around here. Oh, absolutely no drummers are allowed at the dinner table.

M: Conversely, Hawaiians were traditionally the biggest gamblers of Polynesia - going so far as to wager their own lives in surfing competitions - and they made fermented drinks of kava roots. Prior to the arrival of the missionaries, they were also unburdened by sexual inhibition. How do the Sin-Tones compare in terms of, well, sin?

JB: Well, our favourite song topics are Jesus and Elvis, Jesus and Mary, Jesus, Elvis and Mary, Satan and Mary, and Jesus, Mary, Elvis, Satan and the Pope in the shower.

M: Hawaiians have held surfing as almost sacred for thousands of years. In the 1820s, Lord Byron, cousin of the poet and captain of the British ship Blonde, was heard to remark, "To have a neat floatboard, well-kept, and dried, is to a Sandwich Islander [a Hawaiian] what a tilbury or cabriolet, or whatever light carriage may be in fashion, is to a young English man." What would the Sin-Tones regard as their equivalent of a tilbury or a cabriolet?

JB: I could go either way on this one - either a 1958 toploader maple-board Telecaster, a vintage Shure 55 microphone or a 1978 Ford Econoline van. No, I'd definitely take the Tele.

M: Bonus question - if some foppish dandy were seen gallivanting about the Sin-Tones' neighbourhood in a tilbury, what large, heavy object would you drop on him from an overpass?

JB: A Fender reissue outboard reverb tank.

M: The hang-loose gesture of surf culture - a raised fist with the pinky and thumb out - is in fact the Hawaiian shaka gesture, communicating the spirit of aloha, or love and civility. Are there any hand gestures the Sin-Tones find themselves using from time to time?

JB: I once met the Grim Reaper in the washroom of a bar in Montreal when I was 18, on Stanely. He gave me the thumbs-up sign, just like Fonzie. No idea what this means, but I took it as a positive sign!

At the MMFA on Saturday, Feb. 28, at 7, 8:15 and 9:30pm, free

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