Interview with the United Steel Workers

Here's the full transcription...or almost full transcription of our interview with the United Steel Workers of Montreal.

The United Steelworkers of Montreal have come a long way since they started playing at Lucien-L’Allier metro station around six years ago. We met up with Gern f. (vocals/guitar) and Matt Watson (electric guitar) at the Silver Dollar in Toronto a couple of hours before their showcase at Canadian Music Week.


When did the Steelworkers form?

Matt: We were playing together a little bit with this guy Sean Moore and then we played in the metro a bit.

Gern: sort of a weekly metro jam session at Lucien-L’Allier metro…I did it for about four or five months, to greater or lesser degrees of success. It took us like two years to get to the lineup that we have, we went through a whole bunch of people at the beginning.

Matt: We went through an average of one every two weeks.

(The bands’ website has a list of 14 of these “dead members”).


How did you make the switch from playing in the metro to playing in bars?

Gern: That’s when we started losing members, as soon as we started saying ‘well let’s have rehearsals,’ with the end with the end to be playing live shows. So as soon as we started planning stuff we lost a lot of guys right there, they were like, ‘oh sounds like that’s going to be work.’


When was that?

Gern: A little over five years, our first show was Halloween…I wasn’t even at the first show. A great deal of planning went into it and then I had to go to the hospital for two months or something like that.

Matt: Derek Skeie, who used to play mandolin with us, stole one of those gowns from the hospital.

Gern: that set off the tradition of our Grumpy’s Halloween extravaganza.


What is that?

Gern: well we’ve been doing it for about five years and it’s just a big old costume party and it’s a lot of fun and we all dress up…its literally been packed every year.

Matt: We tried to do it on a weekday night this year and it didn’t work out, but still people came out.

Gern: It was still packed, we were nose to nose with the crowd. Six people on the stage at Grumpy’s is a bit of tight squeeze, we’ve had more, but it’s still a tight squeeze.


What’s the songwriting process? Do you write individually or as a group?

Gern: We tried writing together and that ended up almost like a cage match. Everybody brings song to the band and says ‘hey let’s try this one’ and if it sticks on the wall, then it’s a song.

Matt: Somebody will bring a song to the table and we’ll practice it for a little while.

Gern: The band has a lot of take on the arrangements, some of my songs really became real songs, just from introducing them to the band. And it’s like ‘no the bridge should go here,’ or ‘let’s double up that chorus up’

Matt: and then you start working on the harmonies and then you start working on the solos.

Gern: it goes from being lyrics and chords to being a whole song with the band.


What inspires the songs?

Gern: (he pauses for a moment) the biggest one would probably be alcoholism (Matt laughs) ... Certainly the blue-collar aspect of it, living in Montreal. Most of us live in the South-West; the Point, Verdun, St. Henri, Little Burgundy. My stuff comes out of the history of those neighbourhoods, a lot of it has a blue collar theme to it, we all come out of blue collar neightbourhoods, blue collar families. There’s certainly a very long line of crappy jobs, you start breaking down every member of the band and every crappy job they’ve had, it leads into it a lot. And your standard horrible relationships are real good, you know, fruit to pick from the tree.


A lot of the songs seem like they’re set in the past … (before I finish asking Matt answers)

Matt: We have a healthy respect for history, that’s for sure.


Where do those ideas come from?

Matt: Everybody in the band likes old-style music and from that you can start looking around you and start appreciating the history around you.

Gern: If you’re from Montreal a lot of people don’t notice it, but the city is dripping with history. It’s still a city that maintains the history of its architecture, it’s cityscape from a hundred years ago. Most of my songs with a historical bent on them, it’s just literally walk around the point on a sunny afternoon in the middle of summer and the stuff hits you.


In the new video (Émile Bertrand) there’s a lot of shots of the old Griffintown what do you think about the re-development?

Gern: (disgusted) oh god…one of the things that makes montreal a really great city to live in is that it’s a livable city and it’s livable because it was planned to be medium density housing, and condos are maximum density. All those towers are maximum density especially in the northern part of Griffintown. You’re throwing the whole thing out of whack. It’s what has been cool about living in Montreal for the last hundred years, was the fact that it had neighbourhoods. Everybody shopped in their neighbourhood, if you lived in St. Henri you shopped on Notre Dame, if you lived in the Point you shopped on Center street, if you lived in the Plateau you shopped on St. Laurent; that’s how it works. The condos come in as maximum density and there’s no shopping. Everybody owns a car and they just start shopping at Price Club and Wal-mart.

Matt: We like our bicycles in Montreal.

Gern: and the reason we do is because the neighbourhoods are connected. Bicycles don’t work as well in Toronto, because Toronto is a low-density city, most of the architecture here is low density, you hop on your bike and it’s an hour ride to where you want to go. In Montreal it’s an eight-minute ride. And consistently throughout the entire city, wherever you live there’s shopping, there’s theaters, there’s bars, there’s life going on. So what’s happening in Griffintown is just appalling, what they’ve already done there, the amount of condos they’ve already put in, and what they’re planning on doing. The reason they can do it is because it’s a vacant part of town because they got rid of residential building permits back in the fifties, supposedly to clean up the blight, the ‘urban blight’ of it, there was too much drugs and too much drinking and prostitution. They wouldn’t come right out and say it, but there was too many immigrants, so they decided what they would do is just put a freeze on it. So that’s why that part of town has been empty and it’s right in the heart of Montreal proper, and they just emptied the whole god damn city out for thirty years and now they’re ball parting it up. It’s Drapeau he’s a fucking maniac, if you need any more examples just look around the city: Ville Marie expressway, Decarie, the Turcott Yards, the toilet bowl on the edge of town, got rid of the streetcars. All the stuff that we’re all learned by now, or should have learned by now, was all stupid. And this new project is the same thing again, it’s like ‘well we’ve learned and now we’re going to do it again.’ There’s some decent properties down there, there are actually some cool buildings. I know the part they’re hoping to develop is probably not of the nicest stuff, it’s the really industrial stuff. It’s just crazy, doing something at this density and they’re not putting in pools and they’re not putting in CLSCs and they’re not putting in schools, so there’s no community that’s going to be created, it’s just going to be 5,000 people plunked down in the middle of it, 15 stories in the air. They’re saying it’s going to be over-top of commercial stores and stuff like that but it’s not going to work, it’s gonna suck.

Matt: we’re not for it

Gern: thanks for summing that up. (turning back to me) You’re gonna get me started on it, I’m gonna wear out your tape machine


You sing a lot about Montreal, how do people outside of Montreal receive the songs?

Gern: I think there’s a lot of romance behind them; everybody likes romance.

Matt: Shawn writes a lot of songs about Ontario as well.

Gern: I think they’re more songs about Montreal if you’re from Montreal. I think when we play “Place St. Henri” in Saskatchewan, that could be ethereally anywhere in Quebec as far as they’re concerned. So I don’t think we shoot ourselves in the foot about it, and that said, there’s a bunch of stuff in there, I draw a lot from growing up in southern Ontario and stuff like that. Gus’s are a lot of the time, more worldly tunes.

Matt (laughing): About three feet away from him.

Gern: we certainly like to write about montreal and we don’t apologize for it but I don’t think that excludes anybody, although maybe we’ve cause a whole pile of more people to move to montreal and that’s why your rent is doubled in price now, you can blame us for that.

Matt: I blame Arcade Fire for that.

Gern: Yes, it’s Arcade Fire’s fault that we all now pay $900 a month for an apartment that used to go for 250.


Do you tour a lot? Have you been touring a lot?

Gern: A lot this year.

Matt: A lot for us.

Gern: Yeah a lot for us. Nobody’s putting us in a tour bus and working everything out for us. Everything we do we do on our own, with a fair amount of help from Weewerk records, our label down here in Toronto, but for us doing it a lot is probably one-tenth of what people consider to be a ‘touring band’ sort of thing. But we made it to the west coast this year, we made it out to the east coast three times this year; numerous, numerous trips down to southern ontartio, to do three or four shows at a time and we leave Sunday for Austin Texas for South by Southwest.


Is that a big step?

Gern: Yeah, South by Southwest is one of those you’re supposed to do. It’s a lot of work, it’s a lot of monetary commitment for us to all get down there; but you get the invite, you go. We all said that when it first came up a few months ago, ‘we have to go, it’s South by Southwest, it’s the big granddaddy of all these festivals.

Matt: and it’s warm

Gern: Yeah, had it been in Salmon Arm, maybe not so much. I don’t know how big of a step, we’ll all see how big of a step. We know tons of bands who’ve done it before and they all said, ‘go it’s totally worth it.’ If nothing happens, you know, professionally it’s still completely worth it on eight different levels and pretty much everybody we’ve talked to said professionally it always helped, it’s certainly a good thing to have on your calendar, like up on the website and people take you that three per cent more seriously than they did before they saw that.


Do you like playing festivals like this?

Gern: yeah.

Matt: I guess so.

Gern: They’re a rush.

Matt: It’s really fast, you only get a 40 minute set, then you got to be up and off and you’ve got to move around other people’s equipment and stuff like that. I kinda like playing Peterborough, you know when you’re playing in a bar to the locals, that’s fun for me. But these festival things, they’re good, I suppose.

Gern: This year CMW was scaled back for us, because we’re heading for South by Southwest, like last year for CMW, we did four shows in four days. It was just nuts! Like literally you were just carrying gear for four days, I think we got drunk maybe once. It was a complete run.

Matt: first Canada music week was big for us, we played at the Rivoli and after that people started taking us a bit more seriously.

Gern: We got really lucky, we got on the big sort of alt. county show on the Friday night and we were the opener, and we were like ‘oh I don’t know, we’re playing the opener.’ But we were on the same show with Justin Rutlige, Luc Ducet, Great Lake Swimmers. It was really a nice introduction to Toronto and that’s where our label came out of. He was actually the one who booked us in to it. Now he didn’t even actually see us play if I remember correctly, he just came down and walked around the room and everybody was talking about our opening set. But he’s a pretty intuitive guy. He’s got a really neat eclectic taste, a lot of bands ask me, “should we be pitching at the label you guys are on?”
And I’m like, I don’t know what his criteria is when he signs bands but as soon as he signs one I go, yup of course that’s a Weewerk band. I can never really tell what he’s going to put his hooks into, but after they’re signed you’re always like, of course. He’s got really good taste. He builds a show like nobody I’ve ever seen…anytime Phil Kleego has set us up in Toronto it’s always been stellar. And he built us a pretty decent following here, we do almost as good in Toronto as we’re doing in Montreal.


Is your following growing?

Yeah, in the last year or two. Even in Montreal, about a year ago it really started taking off. We went from 100, 150 people depending on what room we were playing, what day of the week it was, how much we yelled, screamed, waved flyers and stuff like that and made a really big jump in the past year or two. Where suddenly a lot of people come out to see us play and a lot of francophones. We’re finally starting to make that crossover to the east side of town and that’s cool. You don’t want there to be that line in the music scene but there is. Everybody should be trying to break that down and we’re doing what we can. It’s really neat when you start getting 20 per cent of your audience or 30 per cent of your audience are all francophones.


You’re still working day jobs, is that something you’re trying to get out of?

Matt: it’d be nice…the more time we spend touring and the less time we spend working, it’ll come to a point where we’re going to have to jump…we’re all pretty old too, we’re not in our early twenties so quitting a day job is pretty difficult, we can’t live on tuna sandwiches on a coach for three months at a time.

Gern: Right now we could probably all quit and just book [shows], right now we’re playing as many shows as we possibly can without our lives falling apart, we did 53 shows last year and I was turning down two or three opportunities a week. I’m not saying anybody was paying us like a thousand bucks do a show, just offers, this band wants to hook up a show in this town sort of thing. We could double, we could triple what we’re as far as the interest goes but it also would mean we’d all have to decide we want to live in a 20 year old van, on the road. So that’s the rub, everybody has to make that jump at some point, and it’s just a matter of pushing it along until there’s a comfort level to be able to do that.

Matt: and monetary level as well

Gern: well that’s the comfort level, I wasn’t waiting for there to be comfortable beds to sleep in.


So what’s next after SXSW?

We’re hoping to shake some European hands down at South by Southwest because we’re looking at maybe going over to Europe in September, October. We’re hoping we can find a booking agent, or maybe some management guys or a record label who’s just interested in supporting us a little bit, just to make the European thing a little easier. Europe is interesting. Most of the guys we know who’ve gone over, who play similar stuff to us they’re saying Europe just eats that stuff up.


Where are you planning to record the third album?

There’s a possibility of house of miracles out of London, Ontario. The guy who runs it, Andy, and I’m not even going to try and pronounce his last name because I always get it wrong. He’s the front-man for Two Minute Miracles, he’s done all their albums; he’s done the last Bar-mitzvah [Brothers], the last Jenny Omnichord, he did Cuff the Duke, he did Constantines. He’s a pretty swift guy. And his band is on the same label as us, so it’ll be nice to keep it in the family. As well it’ll be the first album that we’re doing outside of our own studio and without doing our own self-production. We’re looking at this one to see what someone else can do with our stuff. We’ve hung on for the first two albums, trying to get it to sound specifically the way we want it to. Now we’re hoping with the next one to see if somebody can not change us at all but just texture us a little bit differently, that’d be cool. And it would also be cool to just go in, record and not have to do all the insanity that our first two albums required, which was taking six months evenings and weekends, doing this track and then that track and really standing on one leg. The studio back at my place, it’s project studio, it’s a little bit better than rudimentary. It would be nice to go in some place that they actually had good mics that you didn’t have to turn just such a way and the guy has to stand in just such a way, it would be nice if somebody else was worrying about that and we weren’t. So we’re going to see if that actually happens, if that doesn’t happen

Matt: (interrupting) we’ll do it ourselves again.

Gern: we’ll do it ourselves again, probably at Lucien L’allier metro.


The United Steelworkers of Montreal Play their next Montreal show at Cabaret March 22 with Cuff the Duke.