The shuffler: Torquil
Campbell, best known as the male voice of Canadian romantic-pop outfit Stars,
though he's also spent time playing with Broken Social Scene, he has a terrific
side project called Memphis, and viewers who didn't blink might have seen him
acting in episodes of Law & Order and Sex And The City. Stars are
currently touring the world in support of last year's In Our Bedroom After
The War, and they're planning to hit shelves again this summer with an EP
of B-sides and live tracks. Campbell did his Random Rules with an iPod Shuffle,
so he had to do some intelligent guessing with some of the songs.
The Good, The Bad & The Queen, "History
Song"
Torquil Campbell: This is something I stole
off the Internet—it's a concert of The Good, The Bad & The Queen. I
was trying to steal their record, but all I could seem to find was a concert. I
like it a lot. The idea of the band is so fucking awesome that I'm not even
sure I could tell whether it was bad. You have Paul Simonon and Tony Allen and
Simon Tong in your band? That's just too happening. You don't even have to make
any music after that. You can just do the photo session, and it's already
really good. Sounds like a small room, and people are fucking losing it—I
think it must be London.
Prefab Sprout, "Walk On"
TC: This is a B-side from, I think, 1982 or '83—it
was made about the same time they put Swoon out. He's my single
favorite songwriter ever, and he's a huge, huge, huge hero of mine, and one of
the four or five bands that I seriously couldn't live without. I have listened
to them since I was like 12 or 13 years old, and stuck with them even through the
period of time when everyone else hated what they were doing. I'm just so
completely devoted to Paddy McAloon and think he's so brilliant. If we lived in
a different era, he would be George Gershwin and everybody would give him
Grammys and he'd live in a penthouse in New York. Instead, he's an alcoholic
who lives in Newcastle and nobody listens to his records.
He apparently has 20 albums or something written,
and about seven recorded that he's never put out, including a musical about
Michael Jackson's life that's supposed to be absolutely fucking incredible. And
he's not allowed to put it out, because the wacko will sue him if he does.
[Laughs.] He put out a record a couple years ago called I Trawl The
Megahertz—it's
the first record he put out under his own name, and it was mostly instrumental
string music. But it also had this 25-minute spoken-word piece that's just one
of the most beautiful things I've ever heard in my life. Anybody who cares
about what's happening in music today should hear this record, because it's
unlike anything else out there. Stars was called Stars because that's Paddy
McAloon's favorite word—the whole idea of stars being a great metaphor
for life and for art, because it means "movie stars," and it also means the
deepest, most profound aspect of our universe, and that's sort of what pop
music should be, this mixture of totally idiotic and completely profound.
Slick Rick, "La Di Da Di"
TC: Well, what can you say about this? It's absolute
fucking genius. Fucking incredible. It's from 1984, '83, and it's literally
just like—Slick Rick went to jail before it was hip to go to jail. He's
truly underrated. He's sort of the only pansexual rapper I can think
of—he has the really drawling kind of delivery. It's almost sort of
queen-y. I think he was born in England, and then came to New York or something
like that. I know he was definitely in New York when he was making records, and
he did time in jail—maybe it was in England, I don't really know. But I
got put onto him in my teens as well. That's one of the great things about
marijuana: it helps you listen to hip-hop and Pink Floyd and understand that
both these things are wonderful. I listened to a lot of Slick Rick in high
school. I just think he's fucking hilarious. He's really funny and really
nasty. He's a nasty guy, which I think is hard to achieve and still be playful
and fun.
Mulatu Astatke, unknown song
TC: This is some fantastic Ethiopian jazz from the
1970s that a friend of mine gave me, and a lot of it, I think, was used in that
Jim Jarmusch film Broken Flowers. It's fucking sick, man—it's like this sort
of funk-jazz. It sounds awful in concept, but it's all on, I guess they're
Arabic scales or Ethiopian scales, so everything has this incredibly Eastern,
exotic, melodic sense, but really, really funky 1970s rhythm section.
Billie Holiday, "Sophisticated Lady"
TC: I feel like there's so much we lost in
songwriting that we don't go back and look at. The ways these people arranged
songs was so incredibly beautiful and succinct, but it was like a novel. The
verse was a chapter and the chorus was a chapter and the things in between, the
bridges and the end sections, were so considered, and every single note was so
heartfelt. You can hear in the music that it was—of course, it was a
brutal world, and people were doing horrible things to each other—but
there was a softness in masculinity and in young people. This is the shit that
people got drunk to, and that's beautiful to think of, that people were willing
to be that gentle and whimsical and fanciful with each other. It was probably
recorded in the late '30s, early '40s. It's got those very jazzy, almost bebop
chord structures, but super, super mellow.
Death Cab For Cutie, "Summer Skin"
TC: This song reminds me of being on tour with them,
and how quietly powerful they are as a live band, how fucking on it they are
every night. Ben [Gibbard] is the kind of guy who, you look at him, and it
seems odd that that much music comes out of someone who looks so normal. But
he's a fucking machine. He can play the shit out of everything, and in a very
confident, almost brash way. He's one of those people who just has music deep
in his nervous system, and he doesn't even really have to think about it. It's
a gorgeous track—it's the one that reminds me the most of Stars, in a
way. It's like where us and Death Cab intersect, because it's got that kind of
looping rhythm to it that we used on "Heart" and a couple of other songs. It's
built around the bassline, and a lot of our songs are built around the bassline,
because Evan [Cranley] is a great player and Nick Harmer is a great player, and
they sort of have a mutual-admiration society.
Orange Juice, "Felicity"
TC: This song is just so good, it puts everything to
shame. Orange Juice was a band that, when I was like 14 years old, I literally
would sit and look at their sweaters for three hours. I found more in these
guys' sweaters than most people find in religious texts. I was so obsessed with
Edwyn Collins and everything about what these guys did: mixing sort of '60s
guitar music with '70s soul music, and their haircuts and their shoes. The
whole thing just seemed to me to be absolute perfection. I've spent my whole
life trying to rip it off and be a part of it for even five seconds. A lot of
people don't know this, but Franz Ferdinand and all that shit is just an
unbelievable reproduction of the energy and style that these guys invented. And
The Smiths ripped off Orange Juice—Johnny Marr totally ripped off these
guys' guitar-playing. This is 1981 that this record comes out, and Johnny Marr
is like 15, 16, and I think he was listening to a lot of funk music and a lot
of early rock 'n' roll, and would probably have gotten to this place by
himself, but I think he was definitely influenced by the way these guys play
the Rickenbacker, the way they took the Rickenbacker and made it kind of punky.
Like hammering it a little bit more, and by using it as a rhythm guitar as well
as a lead guitar.
AVC: Have you kept up with Edwyn Collins'
career?
TC: Oh yeah. He's had a terrible medical thing
happening the last couple years—he had an aneurism and almost died, and
had to have brain surgery. He was really fucked-up for a while, but he's
apparently a lovely man and has produced a lot of great records, too. But thank
God he made some money because he had that hit, "A Girl Like You."
AVC: That song probably helped some people find
out about Orange Juice.
TC: And Domino did an Orange Juice greatest-hits kind
of thing, and Josef K, another band that was on Postcard Records, along with
Aztec Camera, and all that stuff. That stuff was so crucial to me. That's
what's so awesome, and still is awesome, about pop music: You can be living
anywhere, you can be living in some shitty Midwestern city like Toronto, like I
was, and you can invent your own world and have your own rules and your own
culture, and you can share it in this kind of invisible way with people all
over the world, just by loving a band.
All those guys were hanging out together and
making records together—it was very much a scene. It was all northern
Britain—Newcastle, Manchester, Glasgow—so I think they all knew
each other. There's an incredible book about it called Rip It Up And Start
Again.
It's not completely about that, but that scene up there after punk was such a
genius place to go with music—to make it softer and to make it more
feminine and more playful was such an awesome idea. Keep punk's energy, but
bring melody back. Those guys realized that the most badass punks in the
history of music were the people who were making soul music in the '60s and
'70s in America. The whole way they made records, everything about it was just
the essence of punk music. If you don't know those records, then you really
don't know anything about pop music. That stuff is, to me, the most important
stuff there is.