A few weeks ago, Armando Ianucci's disappointing satirical TV programme, 'Gash', commented on the official SARS all-clear given to Toronto with this alleged gag. "It's now okay to go to Toronto, the authorities say. They forgot to add 'But why would you want to?'"
Mr Ianucci clearly needs to be made aware of The Hidden Cameras.
To explain my love of this band, I should point out that I officially decided to stop liking new pop and rock music last year. Or rather, stopped trying to like any of it. I would like to say I'd become one of those stereotypical past-it adults of yore, watching 'Top Of The Pops' and bleating "You can't tell if it's a boy or a girl!" But it's the overwhelming dearth of anything unusual in the current music climate that's responsible for my lack of concern with it all. I'm a homogeneity-phobe. Call me strange, but I just don't find the uninteresting interesting. Surely it's people that are meant to get more conservative and conformist with age, not music? Yet when watching the archive programme, 'TOTP2', I frequently wonder if the likes of 'CD:UK' and the current 'TOTP' would allow many British chart acts of the 80s to even get within a square mile of their studios.
Would today's pop kids accept The Belle Stars - a small army of stylist-free tomboyish women, or Dexys - another army with its own unique aesthetic, or The Smiths - a group no one had seen the likes of before, or the Associates or Sparks or Soft Cell, or, or, or.... But instead of gaudy androgynes and parent-baiting innovations of image, I see clone after clone all looking and dressing alike, all terrified of resisting the fashions of the day. Any vaguely interesting qualities have been bevelled down to reach some kind of mythical unit-shifting common ground. The boys tend to have those objectionable Patrick Kielty haircuts, the girls tend to have blonde GQ-cover hair and fake-looking, if not actually fake, tans. Even the "alternative" acts like Coldplay do their utmost to avoid having a discernibly unique image. Trainers? Check. Unshaven? Check. Dressing down? Check. Millions in the bank spent on anything but razors? Check. Lack of anything vaguely interesting to say in lyrics or interviews? Check. Tatu, bless their white cotton socks, are the exception to the rule. But I can't help thinking that they could never be allowed to happen if they were British rather than Russian. Those crazy foreigners with their daring-to-be-interesting ways! In the country of the bland, the two-headed Russian lesbian is king.
My criteria for liking new music is quite simple. I want to be taken somewhere I haven't been before. Somewhere different with something new to say. Something worth looking at as well as listening to. And a few decent melodies. Is that really too much to ask? So when I discovered The Hidden Cameras via their debut single, 'Ban Marriage', my first instinct was to jump on the next plane to Toronto and... marry them. Finally, some English-speaking new music I could actually enjoy.
Like Dexys and The Belle Stars, they are a small army with their own aesthetic: in this case, joyous, poetic, intense, erotic, simple but memorable songs played by a church band who have dared to be different. The fact they hail from Canada is searingly apposite. As anyone who's seen Michael Moore's 'Bowling For Columbine' will recall, the one element that most distinguishes Canucks from the rest of the English-speaking world is that they all leave their doors unlocked. Canadians, Mr Moore posits, live with far less fear than their counterparts in the UK or US. So it makes perfect sense that The Hidden Cameras happily sing about subjects that still generate fear in many quarters, even in 2003: gay sex, wet sex, suicide, disease and death, bodies and bodily fluids, religious and spiritual imagery, all as parts of the same picture of being human, being creatures of love and desire, being alive, being free, being happy. And with The Hidden Cameras it all sounds like the most natural, obvious thing in the world. They are not out to attack or offend. They exist to provide what's not being provided elsewhere. To unlock a few doors. It equally makes sense for them to have an "open-door" policy on their band members, with concerts in their home town often featuring fifteen players, including go-go dancers wearing white balaclavas and little else. Anything goes musically, as long as it doesn't sound like anyone else. Keeping those doors firmly unlocked.
So at the Scala tonight, the band take to the stage by first snaking through the audience in single file like a miniature Salvation Army, strumming acoustic guitars, striking hand-held glockenspiels, banging tambourines, whistling 'The International Mild-Mannered Army' from their lo-fi home-distributed debut album, 'Ecce Homo'. Then they climb onto the stage, which is littered with a myriad of instruments - anything but the cliched row of Marshall amps - and tune up. Tonight the Hidden Cameras number a secret seven: singer-songwriter and core member Joel Gibb on lead vocals and acoustic guitar, backed by a flock of believers comprising a cellist, a violin player, a viola player, a glockenspiel player and two keyboard players. There is also a drum kit, a bass guitar and an electric guitar, all of which various members take turns on from time to time, as if they're the least important instruments and the easiest to play. Which is something I've always suspected. When the drums are played, it's always in a simple church-band beating-out-a-rhythm style, and never, ever, in a rock band pattern-with-fills style. God bless them for that.
Many of the band wear congregational chic: shirts and ties, woollen tank tops. One tall viola player has a shock of bleached white hair and resembles a skinnier version of Tim Curry's creation in 'The Rocky Horry Picture Show'. I later learn that he is Patrick Wolf, a teenage recording sensation in his own right. The glockenspielist spends the duration of the set grinning widely and encouraging the audience to dance along and follow her hand gestures to the more uptempo numbers like 'Breathe On It' and The Animals Of Prey'. Sadly, this is a reserved crowd of morose English people - worse, morose London people who have mainly come to see the headline band, The Sleepy Jackson, so her efforts are mostly in vain. But her belief never fades, her enthusiasm is impossibly infectious, some audience members happily bang away at the tambourines she hands out, and I find myself cutting a modest rug as the set progresses. Joel Gibb himself wears his raven hair slicked and side-parted in true schoolboy fashion, which along with his glasses and quietly-muscular frame solicits comparisons with Clark Kent. His spellbinding, rarely-blinking eyes appear to be possessed with his own message, utterly radiant as he is in self-belief. Mr Gibb - truly a musical superhero.
They cast off into 'Golden Streams', which also opens their current, much-acclaimed Rough Trade album, 'The Smell Of Our Own', from which most of tonight's set is taken. Somehow, this mere seven-piece manages to replicate the recording's choir of a thousand angels in a Phil Spector echo-drenched heaven, while Mr Gibb sings "My golden bone meets the golden bun / Buns held high in our dreams of men". Songs of praise indeed. What would the late Dame Thora make of it all?
More Christian imagery pervades the new single 'A Miracle', a tender and stark torch song where Joel imagines himself as a latter-day Virgin Mary (how's that for a double entendre?), receiving a new kind of Annunciation from a visitor in the night: "He tells me that I'm the only one / That can carry his disease / I'm made to be an animal by his love / And to bear his baby". This, along with another gorgeous romantic paen, 'We Oh We', represents the more gentle, reflective flipside of the band. No go-go dancers here.
The full band reconvenes for 'Boys Of Melody', a song which really should win an Ivor Novello if I had my way (I suspect Mr Novello himself would approve). It's arguably the Hidden Camera's most accomplished work in terms of melding lyrical depth to a meticulously-arranged melodic backdrop, building with such seamless grace that it's difficult to believe the song isn't playing the band, rather than the other way round. Depicting the existential beauty of a coastal suicide pact, the song recalls that early Hockney painting, 'We Two Boys Together Clinging', which in turn took its title from Walt Whitman. Both of whom are appropriate bedfellows for The Hidden Cameras. "As we reach the edge / I sing a new lament / the boys are here with me".
Another live highlight is one of their most engaging songs, 'Fear Of Zine Failure (Ode To Self-Publishing)', a witty toe-tapper from the 'Ban Marriage EP'. Like all the best people, Mr Gibb once edited his own pop fanzine, 'Glamour Guide for Trash'. If you're very clever at hunting down things on the Web, you'll be able to find an interview he made in 1995 with Johnny from Radiohead. Joel asks, "Who do you think is funnier, Dawn French or Jennifer Saunders?". Johnny's reply: "That's an odd question..."
'Smells Like Happiness', meanwhile, features Joel's most frantic performance, with coyote-howling and wordless whooping flanking delicious lyrics such as "I feed my own face when I soon crave a taste of the neck of a boy who wears eau de toilette and shaves every day and behaves well in department stores".
And so to a barnstorming performance of the brash, fast 'Ban Marriage', a tale which takes place during the protagonist's own titular ceremony. Our hero is there to marry his boyfriend, but his female best friend rails against coupling of any kind. So he has to decide - at the altar, too - whether to listen to her or not: "I was forced to take a stand on one side / It was him or my fag hag, oh well, I guess she was never that good of a friend." But then he changes his mind and ends up raging with new vows of his own against all varieties of marriage, specifically that: "There is splendour in the harshness of bum". In the concert, this last line is bellowed by all seven band members at once, regardless of whether they're near a microphone or not. That's pretty interesting. Call me strange, but I just find the interesting interesting.
After a hypnotic rendering of 'High Upon The Church Grounds', the band bid us goodnight, and I go home convinced that The Hidden Cameras must surely have made a few new recruits tonight. All it takes is to hear them, or better still, go see them. They are that rare thing in 2003: a genuinely original pop group that will take you somewhere you've not been before. Somewhere you'll rather like. Don't be afraid to leave your doors unlocked, now.
