Emperor Penguins
The Constantines on curling, the Canadian arctic and their recent smuggling arrest.
by Ryan Kennedy
January 11, 2006
On the strength of their second full-length album for Sub Pop (and the recently deceased Three Gut label in Canada), Toronto-based rockers The Constantines embarked on a gigantic nine-week tour which began in North America and culminated in Europe.
Best known for their ass-shaking, foot-stomping rock anthems and lead singer Bry Webb's gravelly, passionate voice, the Cons have been wowing audiences all over with their Bruce Springsteen-fronting-Fugazi jam sessions that inevitably turn into indie-rock versions of a Southern revival church sermon. Tournament of Hearts, the band's latest testimonial, is an ode to all things earnest. Summed up best on the country-twanged track "Soon Enough," Webb coos "soon enough, work and love will make a man out of you." And while his opinions on whether the sentiment is a positive one are ambiguous, there's no mistaking the small-town humility of the band, who all grew up outside of the big city.
After some flawed time-zone gymnastics and the barrier that was their European tour manager's German cell phone answering service, Nerve caught up with guitarist/vocalist Steve Lambke in a much simpler place: home sweet home, Toronto. And if you've never explored the steamy
Canadian sport of curling, well, you just haven't explored. — Ryan Kennedy
You have a fair amount of songs about life in the city, even though you all came from smaller towns. Do you feel there's a romantic quality to big cities?
We're from small towns but the city does seem to be romantic to us still. As for the songwriting process, you sort of document your own life and your own imagination. I think it's a result of trying to write something that's true. I still love Toronto. When I was away I looked forward to getting home. It's the people and the community. There's just a lot going on and everyone's really supportive. Downtown Toronto is pretty much a small town when it comes to the artists, musicians and writers. You get to know everyone sooner or later. It's cool.
Another theme on the album is work. Do you think there is a romantic ideal in work, or is it more of a soul-crushing kind of thing?
It can be both, I think. Obviously you try and have it be as least soul-crushing as possible. I think those lyrics are just questioning the idea of what it means to work and what it means to be productive, and trying to find your own way through that and trying to be happy. I don't think that song ["Working Full-Time"] is particularly romanticized, but it's not saying we shouldn't work. We're all from working class backgrounds and it's sort of weird considering what I do for a job right now.
Ever had any workplace love affairs? You used to work in a record store, there must have been some customers that were interested.
No, unfortunately not. I was too grumpy all the time at work. It wasn't too appealing.
The new album is called Tournament of Hearts, which has a romantic connotation to it, but is also a reference to Canada's biggest annual curling tournament [curling is the distinctly Canadian sport that looks like that shuffleboard game you can play in bars, but on huge sheets of ice]. Can you explain the phenomenon that is curling in Canada?
I have no explanation for it. Trying to explain it; everybody here knows what curling is, and everyone knows someone who curls. Even small towns have curling rinks, it's everywhere. When we were watching the Tournament of Hearts, all the girls on the Ontario team work as secretaries on Parliament Hill and that's really cool. Everybody does it, but no one makes a living off it. There are no curling celebrities, and middle-aged people can play. It's a street sport anybody can do.
Is there an inherent sexiness to curlers?
I would say that's true. There's some good-looking healthy young Canadian girls. I remember one of the girls on the Ontario team being interviewed before the final. They asked her what her strategy was to win the next game, and she said "to go balls out." That's pretty hot.
Did you hear about the nude curling calendar that came out?
No.
It was put out by some woman who curled for the Andorran Olympic team. It's pretty crazy.
See, curling gets a bad rap.
You have a split coming out where you do Neil Young covers and The Unintended to Gordon Lightfoot songs. Are there any other Canadian icons you would like to shed light on?
The Neil Young thing, it wasn't the Canadian aspect, we just like his music. If you're asking if we're going to do any Bryan Adams covers, no. The Guess Who needs some proper dues, but I don't know if we're the ones to do it.
You've also gone way up to the Northwest Territories [basically the arctic] to play shows. What was that like?
We were in Dawson City. We went up for a festival, which happens every summer. They sell like, 900 tickets. Only 2,000 people live in Dawson, but a lot of kids go up in the summer to work, and they come from a huge surrounding area. It was kind of a folk festival atmosphere, playing to a huge range of people. You're thrown together with everyone. After the festival, we stayed three or four more days. We played the local dive bar and that was incredible, because of all the interesting characters. There are a lot of people that end up moving up there for a year and end up staying. It's the first time any of us had been really north.
I hear when you get up that far, the dating scene gets real crazy, because everyone's isolated and sometimes there's like, eight guys for every woman.
There was a good mix of sexes in Dawson, but I can imagine sooner or later you've kind of dated everybody. That happens in Toronto, where you can't date anyone that your friends haven't dated or who doesn't have weird baggage.
Any final tales of woe or fun from Europe?
I got charged with a half a million euro fine in Italy for smuggling my own CDs. They found our merch. There was such a huge language barrier, and they ended up confiscating everything. And they kept changing the reasons they weren't happy with us. They have real strict rules to combat bootlegging there, and you have to have a certain sticker on your CDs. We didn't have that sticker. Apparently no band has ever been stopped before but we did. They tried to get us to sign documents in Italian, and they wanted to fine us 105 euros for each CD, and we had 400 CDs. It's in the courts now, but hopefully it'll get thrown out.
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©2006, Ryan Kennedy and Nerve.com.