With all those smelly smokestacks and noisy industrial steel refineries, it’s easy to see where loud and chaotic Hamilton bands like Cities in Dust, Wax Mannequin and Sailboats Are White get their inspiration from. And then there’s Junior Boys, a laid-back anomaly. The duo of Jeremy Greenspan and Matt Didemus, who started off in the Hammer, have garnered international acclaim, including a 9.0 review from Pitchfork for their most recent album, So this is Goodbye. Last week, Greenspan spoke with The Varsity by telephone from a tour stop in Florida about the group’s dark, electronic music, and their dislike for a certain Toronto airport (hint: it’s not the one that most people hate).
The Varsity: Where are you right now?
Jeremy Greenspan: Tallahassee Florida-which is a lot nicer than Hamilton, that’s for sure. It’s like 25 degrees, sunny, warm, the gators are out.
TV: Is it true you two started out as DJs in Hamilton?
JG: Yeah, Matt and I used to have a Wednesday night down at the Hudson (now Club Absinthe). We had terrible DJ names. I used to go by DJ Coma and one night someone got it wrong and printed “DJ Chemo.” People still get Junior Boys wrong too, we’ve been called The Junior Dogs, Virginia Boys, Junior Bros. It’s hilarious.
TV: What’s your writing process like?
JG: It’s definitely a collaboration. We’ve been working together for a very long time because we met each other when we were teenagers, so we have our own little systems of doing things that are kind of unpredictable. When you’re working with electronic instruments, the traditional writing roles melt away pretty quickly. You can’t really say, “Well, I wrote that hi-hat pattern,” it doesn’t really make any sense. The whole idea of ownership over a song becomes very blurry very quickly.
TV: What’s a Junior Boys live show like?
JG: It’s changed a lot over the last couple years. We used to do this big video thing and focus less on the actual performance. But now we’ve stripped down the whole visual thing and are concentrating more on the music. We like to keep the music faithful to the album, we’re not the type of band that sounds totally different live, and we don’t try to turn it into a rock and roll version, but it is different. When you play with a live drummer, and you’re not dealing with just a drum machine and samples, it’s a different sound. The arrangements vary a little and the sounds we use vary a little-we practiced for a really long time before we played as a three-piece, so it’s definitely something that we’re proud of.
TV: Will you be head-banging to Rage Against the Machine, who are playing after your set at Coachella?
JG: No. I don’t think I’ll be doing that, to be honest.
TV: How do The Junior Boys get around?
JG: A combination of vans, buses and planes. It’s quite a bit of flying.
TV: What’s the worst thing about being in a successful touring band?
JG: I would like to take this opportunity, actually, to vent a beef of mine. My beef is with my least favourite airport on the entire planet. And I’ve been to a lot of airports in developing countries and whatever. There is not a single airport where the immigration people are as rude, as suspicious, and as incompetent and horrible as they are at Pearson International. I’ve never gone through there without them giving me a hassle. Ever. Every single time we go through one of us is pulled over by a customs agent, and then last time we went through, which was like a week ago, they kept our drummer there for over an hour and a half just, like, swearing at him and being total assholes. And they always are at that airport. They’re assholes. They’re complete assholes there. And the thing that I find really weird about it is that we never have any other problems in any other airports except for our own. There is something seriously wrong with the Toronto airport. It just sets a really bad tone for people coming into the country.
TV: What’s coming up for the Junior Boys?
JG: We’re doing this American/Canadian tour and when we finish that in the summer we’re going to get to work on album number three. I’m very hopeful that we’re going to play a bunch of shows in Ontario in the spring and summer. The dates haven’t been announced yet, but stay tuned!
Catch up with the Junior Boys at their show this Friday at The Mod Club.
-JORDAN BIMM
