The Canadian government has financed many things in its time, most notably healthcare and education. It also finances rock and roll tours. That’s how Toronto band the Flashing Lights wound up playing a Warped Tour show in Florida this summer.
“We received a grant to promote Canadian music abroad,” organist and tambourine player Gaven Dianda recalled, “and so we ended up going to the States playing a couple of interesting shows like the Warped Tour in Florida and the Viper Room.”
“We saw firsthand how hard bands have to work in America,” said singer and guitarist Matt Murphy. “They were up at 8 or 9 [on the Warped Tour] to set up their tents to sell merch to the kids all day and then they’d play and then they’d get into their bus and drive to the next stop and do the whole thing over again. We were like, ‘Okay, so this is how bands work in the United States,’ because we had a bit of a cushion, a Canadian luxury, because of the grant, and we couldn’t believe how hard these bands had to work just to make ends meet.”
This doesn’t mean the Flashing Lights are swimming in money now. After two critically acclaimed records, they’re still at the same commercial position as when they started.
Murphy said, “When we first started up, we had a lot of exposure and there’s this expectation that we would take that and move on to a high level, and instead we plateaued in some ways…You are competing with a lot of people with a lot of ducats who can afford to really push a band.”
Of course, there are other ways for independent bands to gain exposure these days. Would the Flashing Lights ever let one of their songs be used in a beer commercial?
“It’s really one of those things,” Murphy said, “like would you turn down a hundred thousand dollars? What would it do for the band? What’s important in life? All of these questions come up, like is your integrity more important than your comfort, and all of these sorts of things. I’d like to think that we’d say no, but on the other hand, you get every band that you would think of as credible in history doing Coke jingles and stuff like that, so it’s not really that big of a deal—like the Who doing milkshake commercials or the Yardbirds doing Coca-Cola.
“It also depends on how the song is treated, and again it all might depend on the song, because there are some songs that we play that we are, like, ‘It’s just a fucking song, it isn’t our souls being sold, it’s just a fucking pop song,’ but there are other songs where we’d be, ‘Jeez, I don’t know, that means something.’ It’s also the way that the system works for bands. It’s like they need every ounce of sponsorship that they can get. I suppose you can argue that Mozart had some benefactor, and how ethical was that benefactor in their dealings with people? It’s just that those people don’t exist and the government is our sponsor for now. It’s a hard question.”
The issue of commerce becomes even more pressing as the Flashing Lights play music that generally isn’t pushed on radio or MuchMusic. Unlike most of the bands being pushed as the saviors of rock, the Flashing Lights play joyful sixties British Invasion-era rock as opposed to the seventies punk rock of the Strokes and the Hives.
“What really bugs me about the whole rock renaissance is that no one can actually rock out without it being part of some sort of post-ironic joke,” says Murphy. “Any overt rock maneuvers, right now, for them to be palatable to most people, have to be done with a nudge and a wink and tongue in cheek. We hate that, because it’s reactionary. It’s cool only because of its context.”
