Interview – Infamous Vancouver punk instigators Slow are back

For a brief moment in the eighties, Slow were Canada’s most infamous band. Equal parts punk and rock, the wild teenage band certainly lived up to that famous Neil Young line -– they exploded onto Vancouver’s stages in 1985, pissed off everyone, delivered one single, one album and disappeared all within a year or two. They soon became the stuff of legend, but no one ever thought they’d have a chance to see them play. And now, they’re back! Their legendary Against the Glass album was finally reissued by Artoffact Records, and the band is hitting the stages once again. Spoiler interviewed frontman Thomas Anselmi about the band’s history and return, just in time for their Montreal appearance on May 12th at La Sala Rossa with Dearly Beloved and Public Display. Tickets are $22 in advance, and we also have a pair up for grabs! For your chance to win, send your full name to contests@badfeelingmag.com with the subject line “Slow Contest.” For more information and all upcoming tour dates visit the band’s Bandcamp page.

Bad Feeling Mag: My first question is: you guys didn’t play for thirty years, never did any reunions, never even considered them. Why now? What changed your mind?

Thomas Anselmi: You know, it was kind of a death by a thousand cuts in a way. I just reached a point where I didn’t feel any attachment. I hadn’t really been working on music in any kind of organized sense. I’ve been writing for a while, I’ve been mostly concentrating on doing performances and that’s been my focus in the last few years. The people at Artoffact Records had released a different record that I made, which had to do with a show I did called Mirror. They did such a great job of it with packaging and everything, it was just a really nice LP. So the motivation [to repress the Slow album and play shows again] was kind of, this could be a fun thing to do, we could make some money and we can do this new version of our old show. Obviously me behaving the way I was on stage at the age of seventeen, you know… now we can just do our songs. The minute we all got into a room and started playing, it took on an entirely different kind of energy because the band just sounded great immediately, it was just a chemical thing that was there.

In many ways it’s really lucky that the band just ended quickly back then. It started and ended quickly, and that supported the opportunity now, that would never have been there if we had put out three records and went through the grind of having the life sucked out of us by some major label. All that happened to me anyway, just not with Slow, so this band kind of died in a pure state, and has now been reborn in a pure state.

I wanted to talk a bit about how the band ended. I’m sure everyone reading this will know about the Expo 86 thing, where you got in a lot of trouble for exposing yourselves and hurling two-by-fours at the audience, effectively ending the entire music event. Slow went on tour afterwards, and the band kind of fell apart on that tour. I think it actually may have ended in Quebec?

(Laughs) The band was basically marooned. The tour really started going wrong after we played quite a big show at RPM in Toronto with Soul Asylum, back when Soul Asylum were huge in a kind of alternative way, before their major success. We had the co-headlining bill, and that show was really successful. Then our American shows fell through, we didn’t get across the border, and the van was getting more and more problematic. We ended up in a farming field in Quebec. The van was broken down, so we started a campfire in the middle of the field, and right next to it was a corn field with a sign that said “Not for human consumption. Cow feed only.” So we went over there and cut down a few of those. My mother had put together a care package with various soups, ramen noodles, baked beans and different things for emergencies. It all got combined into one pot with the corn from the farmer’s field, the animal corn. We’re sitting there and the van is broken, someone hitchhikes into the nearest town. It was one of those moments when you realize this is just not going as well as last week when we were playing a sold-out show (laughs). We kind of drifted around for a while, we didn’t play, we didn’t have any money.

It was a time when the internet didn’t reach everyone, you needed physical records in physical places. We had a video on Much Music so that helped, but… it’s really hard to describe what touring Canada was like in those days. For us it was pretty bleak. A lot of gas money, really very few good shows. Quebec City was amazing, but there were a lot of bad shows on that tour. Anyway, it fell apart also because the band was more and more infamous and was under a lot of pressure. There was a lot of media when we left Vancouver. It was an old-fashioned media circus, with news vans parked outside our jam space, reporters hounding us saying “You must talk, what are you chicken? Come on!” Just crazy. So we left that, went on this fairly grueling tour, came back and just felt like… where the fuck can this go? It really felt hopeless. There were no opportunities being offered to us. We were just this band that was notorious. There was hype, but people also direct a lot of negative energy towards you when you’re doing those sorts of performances. Obviously the thing is provocative, and it’s meant to provoke. But when you’re a teenager, feeling that kind of negativity directed at you for that… a lot of bands didn’t get to play Expo 86 because of us, so there was a lot of resentment. It had become this thing that brought us all this hype, but for the other bands it was their chance to play to a big audience and they got fucked. You get sick of being in the public eye as [the band that fucked everyone over]. Especially for me as the singer.

Do you want to talk about how the band originally came together? I know some of you started playing in 1980 with punk bands like Chuck and the Fucks, and Sifu.

Those were different bands, grade eight punk bands. We were all in different bands. It was really Christian and I who were looking for a rhythm section. He knew Terry and Hamm from elementary school, it was like that. Then we added Ziggy after the first single. We were all into punk, but Ziggy looked like a punk, with the hair and a lock around his neck, you know what I mean? We were into punk, but we were more just teenage dirtbags.

So you guys came from being in teenage punk bands and whatnot, but you also incorporated a lot of different elements into your sound like rock, soul and jazz music. Where did that come from?

The main thing was hard rock. That was the big thing.

Did you consciously meld these things together, or was it a natural thing?

Wow, that’s a really great question. I’ve never been asked that before. It’s an important thing,  it’s part of what made the band stand out at that time. We were really one of the first bands to do that. There was a certain amount of rebellion against the orthodoxy that had set into punk rock. It had become very conservative. [It had been] about a movement, a provocative artistic movement that was very public. By the time Slow was happening, it had turned into something that was more about a community. That’s a very different thing. The Sex Pistols were using the media, they were using companies, they were riding in limos and were on TV as opposed to Minor Threat or something, who were in a van staying at people’s houses. That was a totally different thing. Punk rock became sort of an independent touring economy, people in vans driving around playing local hall shows booked by people involved in the same scene, where the bands know the audiences. That’s a totally different concept than what we were interested in.

We wanted to be on TV. We wanted to be in the newspaper. We wanted to shock people. We wanted to fuck with people. I didn’t want to do that small hall thing where a bunch of people patted me on the back telling me I did a good job. Every night when I got on stage was like a miniature war for me. I was not there to please anyone. But that being said, the band always was, so there was that balance. The band was a fun, great band with some dangerous and dark elements, but the singer was a bit of a prick. Now it’s a lot different because it’s all channeling in a different direction. For some reason some things changed in me, right? I want to direct the energy of the band and the energy of the audience in the same direction. It’s really powerful. I’ve actually never experienced it and it’s new for me. I’m just really having a good time playing, I’m having a good time seeing the audience having a good time.

Do you think the audience is now more so coming to see Slow as a band, and less as a band that’s known for shocking performances and whatnot? It seems to be more about the music now.

I think that’s a great observation. I want to go back to what you originally asked about bringing hard rock into punk. I think there was a certain amount of realizing that it was a provocative thing to do. It was kind of like mixing the music that got you beat up with the music of the people doing the beating. We knew that it was unfashionable to like some of that stuff. It was also part of a moment where younger people that were into punk started to realize that there were not these hard lines, and that music was music. If you listen to the Stooges you can hear things that came out of it, you can see punk on one hand but you can also see heavy metal. So I think it was conscious, and I think it was also an organic expression of something that we were just into. But we were conscious that some other people were not going to be into it. In fact, that turned out to be true. In the first year people really reacted against that. When we made our first recording people didn’t want to play it because it sounded like Goddo. We already had the interest of one of the most important local labels (Zulu Records), but people thought it sounded like what was on commercial radio. Which of course it doesn’t, but it does sound like it embraces aspects of that.

As far as your influence on other bands goes, I know there’s the stories of you guys going down to Seattle to play with early grunge bands like Green River, who were still dressing like glam bands at the time. Slow showed up like dirtbags wearing flannels that your moms had bought for you, and those bands started to dress like that. But do you think your sound was an influence on some of those bands as well?

You know, I don’t. Like I was saying, I think there was a little bit of it in the air. The real big difference between a lot of the Seattle stuff and us was, Slow just does not have any Led Zeppelin thrown into the mix. It’s not riff oriented. It’s a rock and roll band. Seattle bands really have that other aspect to it, that strutting kind of cock rock thing. We just weren’t into that. Maybe in the sense that we were putting on a rock show, that could have had some influence, but on a musical level? I don’t know man, I don’t really hear it myself. I know that a lot of those people were at our shows. I met Chris Cornell at our show through Susan Silver (his manager and partner at the time) and it was like “This is Chris, he plays in this great band Soundgarden, next time you come down I’ll get them to open for you” (laughs). She had booked our show in Seattle. So did it have an influence? Well, they were good shows, people were into it. But a direct influence? I don’t know man, I don’t think so myself.

My last question is, you guys are going to be playing your stuff from the eighties, but I hear you guys are also working on some new music. Can we expect some new stuff in Montreal?

It’s more than half new songs now. The great thing about this is, you can play everyone’s favourite song and it’s over in eighteen minutes. We only put out eight songs, and they weren’t opuses, they were like three minutes each. So that’s what we had, and only six of them kind of stand the test of time in my opinion. There’s only six I feel like singing, let’s put it that way. We’ve been working on this new material since day one and the new songs are better than the old ones. We’re playing about half and half right now, but we still play every old song basically. And we also delve into a lot of old music that’s part of where we’re coming from. On an influence level we always did that, we played a lot of old songs. This thing has turned into a rock and roll revue! You’ve got back up singers, saxophones, it’s a full-blown show. You haven’t seen this in a long time. Rock has become kind of this dour form. You got all these men singing about how sorry they are for their existence. We are a fun rock and roll show!

Slow play Sala Rossa (4848 St Laurent Blvd) on Saturday, May 12th. Tickets are $22 in advance, available here.