Constantines’ sophisticatedly shambolic brand of punk-tinged art-rock is inspired and urgent, intelligent and tempestuous. Over the course of their first three full-lengths, the band garnered well-deserved praise for playing their music like they meant it. After their most recent release, Paste favoriteKensington Heights, members Steve Lambke, Doug MacGregor, Dallas Wehrle, Will Kidman and Bry Webb are striving to settle into the startling sonic lives they’ve achieved for themselves.
In the brief calm before his upcoming marriage and a tour that will culminate at the Sub Pop Records 20th Anniversary Festival, lead singer and guitarist Webb took a few free moments to catch up with Paste. He gave the low-down on collaborating with Feist on a Bee Gees cover, his newest musical project, the Harbour Coats, and how to control the destiny of your work.
Paste: How does Kensington Heights feel to you compared to other Constantines records?
Webb: It’s hard for me to see it as anything different than the record that we made at this point in our lives, in our careers. I think it’s very much a record made by a bunch of thirty-year-olds. We started out as kind of a punk rock band and figured out gradually that we just wanted to be a really good rock and roll band, and I think this record is just us completely coming to terms with that. I don’t know how it compared to the other records. Tournament of Hearts and all the other records were done very quickly. This one was the first one where we had a lot of time to make, which was an amazing luxury and kind of allowed us to enjoy the studio, which I don’t usually. That was the biggest difference.
Paste: So this one’s a little more refined, maybe?
Webb: Yeah, I think so. At least, we’re…well, I don’t know if I’d ever describe our band as refined. But I think we’re comfortable with our abilities…
Paste: You guys have gotten a lot of comparisons to Fugazi and The Clash. What are your feelings on the ‘punk tradition’ that you’ve come from, or perhaps already moved out of?
Webb: I feel pretty disconnected from it, in all honesty. I loved the network that was happening in the mid- to late-‘90s, or through the ‘90s in North America. You know, the Book Your Own Fucking Life stuff. We all played in hardcore and punk rock bands that traveled a lot in that network and knew a lot of amazing people, and we used to put on a lot of shows based on that idea. It was a really vital time, and a really inspiring time, for me. I feel like—I’m not sure if it was just getting a bit older, or just traveling within this kind of close, small unit for nine years, but we kind of just moved away from playing the rental hall shows and that kind of thing, which is a bit regrettable for me. I miss it, you know? I miss the kind of really hyper-intelligent, youthful spirit of that time in my life. And the people that I was most excited by, I was surrounded by.
But I love what we do now and the people that we’re surrounded by now. It’s just a very different thing, I think. It’s just older people, and I think trying to survive as a band, and make a living as a band, changes where you aim to play, maybe. Or it did for us, anyway. We wanted to be able to play for more people, and to be able to live a bit more comfortably on the road, so that’s the way it goes. But I still feel like we are in control of how our band is marketed and how our music is used, and the stuff that I really believed was important of everything in the ideology of hardcore, or punk rock—the stuff I’ve retained was the stuff that I thought was really important at the time, anyway.
Paste: What kind of stuff was that?
Webb: Just the control of your own destiny, and your own music, and your own productivity.
Paste: You just recorded “Islands In The Stream” with [fellow Arts & Crafts artist] Feist. Was it your idea more than Feist’s to do the [Bee Gees] cover?
Webb: Yeah, I guess we kind of thought it would be a fun idea. We had heard the song on a mix CD at the right time in Europe when we were are just kind of burnt out and tired and worn down. And this über-sentimental song comes on and all of us just kind of got right into it. It just kind of hit us in the right way at the right time, so we just decided we wanted to do a duet version of it, like some kind of weird duet of it. That was two years ago, and then we just figured we would try and do it when Feist was in town and it worked out.
Paste: Looking through the lyrics, it seems that Kensington Heights has this image of despair and hope in pairing, as if of someone who’s very frustrated but who also sees a reason to keep thinking and moving on to try to deal with things.
Webb: That’s pretty much exactly where I was at, in terms of a mental state for most of the making of this record. It’s probably not that different for anybody who’s been in a band for nine years, just trying to figure out what’s valuable about it and what’s doing you no good. There’s obvious things about the lifestyle of traveling and playing music that can be unhealthy, so there was a long period between touring heavily for Tournament of Hearts and making this record where that was the state I was in—trying to figure out what was vital about it and what was unhealthy about it and what I valued most about it. All of the records are totally self-referential and self-conscious, with all of the lyrics and everything, but that one—this record—is about band identity and trying to figure out where we are at this point in our lives.
Paste: Is any of the sentiment, especially on “Brother, Run Them Down” where you sing “you are not your generation/ days of doubt can ruin men,” of a political nature?
Webb: That song was just for a friend of mine, who was having some doubts about his vocation in life and what he was doing with his life, and some dark times. I wanted to express to him how much I value what he does and how much I revere what he does. He’s just a really inspiring person. I was just trying to say “you’re not judged” or ” I don’t judge you by your position, by who you are in relation to your generation or what everyone else around you is doing or what specifically you were doing and how you were interacting with the world that’s inspiring and exciting.”
Paste: Why is the album dedicated to Gar Gillies?
Webb: He passed away towards the end of making the record. He worked at Garnet; he designed and made all the Garnet amplifiers, which are sort of iconic Canadian amplifiers from The Guess Who and BTO and Neil Young and stuff, based out of Winnipeg. He’s just kind of a great example of a person who has retained complete control over all of his productivity and his relationship to the products of his work. A pretty inspiring thing for someone to live—I think he was between 85 and 90, and I think he was working until he died, and happy with it, with the work he was doing, and connected to it mentally and physically, so that’s something to be inspired by. And we just had that little connection with the amps. I worked for a week trying to get a guitar sound out of an amp, out of the amp that I was using live, and it was not working, and we brought in a Garnet and it kind of saved the day. That was an important technological feature of making the record.
Paste: What about your Diane Bish reference in “Do What You Can Do”?
Webb: I suffer from insomnia quite often, and when I was probably 22, I was living in Guelph and we had one or two channels on this shitty TV. When I had insomnia, I would just flip between these channel at night and her organ tour—she does organ tours through the world playing on the world’s finest pipe organs, just doing these epic Bach organ pieces with a beehive hairdo in these garish, loud ball-gowns. Just this amazing individual, just an incredible figure, character. And so I just fell in love with her as a character, as a person. It was in that state of insomnia—just ultimately lonely, just completely alone in the middle of the night. Tired and dreamy and groggy and confused, and just seeing something that specific, that unique, in that state was perfect. And I started taping her show all the time and just had these tapes and tapes. I don’t have the tapes anymore, but I still enjoy it whenever she’s on the Christian Television Network or whatever she’s on in the middle of the night, you know. I’m not particularly specifically religious, but I just like her as a character.
Paste: I’ve had some similar insomnia-ridden experiences myself… But I wanted to ask you about the band’s relation with The Weakerthans. I know John Sampson has expressed great interest in Constantines. Are you guys friends?
Webb: Yeah, we’ve come to be really good friends with all of the Weakerthans guys. We toured a bunch with them. We will, I think, be touring with them again, though it’s not official. Probably at some point next year or so we’ll tour with them again. But our band’s relationship with their band has become one of the best things we’ve found through touring so much. They’re just such sweet, wonderful, smart people, and their sound guy is also our sound guy, Cam. When he’s not working with them, he’s traveling with us. We’re always in contact with them.
Paste: [Sampson’s] path from punk into something that uses similar ideals with a little more rock n’ roll kind of reminds me of the path that you and your band has seemed to take.
Webb: Yeah, for sure. I think definitely we identify with them and vice versa for that reason. We came from a similar place and have moved into kind of rock n’ roll, more—I don’t know how to talk about it musically. But moving into a more open phase of making music.
Paste: What kind of band is your new project, the Harbour Coats?
Webb: Just a fair bit mellower than the Constantines. We’re still figuring it out. It’s kind of a bunch of the mellower songs I’d written over the last four years that didn’t have homes. Mike [Feuerstack], from Snailhouse and Wooden Stars, he plays guitar in this band. Patrick Conan, who’s in Tricky Woo, is playing drums. Sherry Pine is from Newfoundland and is a great singer in her own right is playing some accordion and saxophone. And Stephen Evens, who plays in a band called The Just Barelys in Halifax is playing bass. It’s just coming together now. We’ve played a couple of shows, but we’re just trying to figure out how to make a record now. I don’t know when that’s going to come out. It’s pretty gradual. I’m enjoying taking my time with that.