Bands sometimes spend all their lives craving a hit. Broken Social Scene wish for anything but.
For their latest record – the one that has seen them tagged ‘this year’s Arcade Fire’ – the Toronto group have meticulously exorcised any whiff of populism. Art, not chart action, is their goal. Given the choice, they’d much rather daytime radio remained unaware of their existence.
“We recorded a bunch of pop songs for the album. In the end, we decided that we didn’t want to go to that place as a band. So we left them out,” explains multi-instrumentalist Charles Spearin. “Broken Social Scene aren’t afraid of a certain level of success. However, nobody in the group wants to be put in a position where we have to compromise.”
More than 20 musicians play on the new LP (titled, phlegmatically as it turns out, Broken Social Scene); as a touring entity the group rarely appears on stage with less than 12 members. Even with two clear leaders – BSS is largely the creation of vocalist Kevin Drew and guitarist Brendan Canning – band meetings must be a pain.
“Are we a democracy? Well we’re some kind of ‘ocracy’ for sure,” chuckles Spearin. “Kevin and Brendan aren’t dictators. That said, they are our elder statesmen of sorts. Their opinions have a lot of weight. But everyone gets to have their say.”
Technically, Broken Social Scene isn’t even Spearin’s day-job. He fronts the indie-thrash trio Do Make Say Think. Like most of BSS (Canning and Drew are the exceptions), he joined the band as an extracurricular lark. Recently, the situation has started to reverse.
“At first, it was just this side project thing we contributed to on and off,” says Spearin. “Now, it’s starting to become something else and those of us who were originally part-time members are getting more serious about it.”
The credits for Broken Social Scene read like Canadian hipsterdom’s Wikipedia entry; the record features members of Stars, The Weakerthans, Metric and Montreal’s The Dears. In fact, the only local act that appears not to have been roped in is Arcade Fire.
This hasn’t prevented critics muddling the two outfits; The New York Times recently was forced into an embarrassing retraction after running a review which castigated Broken Social Scene as the latest Montreal outfit trying to clamber on board the Arcade Fire bandwagon.
“Their album is absolutely everywhere in Canada,” says Spearin. “It’s beyond huge. That isn’t a threat to us. People in Europe probably aren’t aware of it, but our previous record [2002’s You Forgot It In People] was pretty big in Canada and the US."
Last year, Broken Social Scene had an unpleasant foretaste of life in the limelight. The band’s producer, Dave Newfeld, was viciously beaten while in police custody in Manhattan. He’d been picked up in Central Park, trying to score a $20 pot deal. The incident made the news pages of the New York tabloids.
“Dave is a quite paranoid individual at the best of times,” says Spearin. “He’s one of those guys who believes in conspiracies and think people are out to get him. What happened didn’t help his state of mind, that’s for sure.”