The Barfly, London – 2003 and 2005
Early 2003, and the Canadian collective Broken Social Scene become one of the first beneficiaries of what becomes known as “the Pitchfork effect”, when their album You Forgot It In People gets a rave review from the US website, which is just approaching its position of the Most Influential Thing in Indie (it will help break Arcade Fire and destroy Travis Morrison). Like a great many others, I’m excited enough about the review to go off and buy the album – you couldn’t try it first on streaming services, so distant and remote in history is this juncture. “You Forgot It In People explodes with song after song of endlessly replayable, perfect pop,” gushes Pitchfork’s Ryan Schreiber, though I’m not sure I’d go anywhere near that far; for a start, it’s not perfect pop, it’s art rock that manages to anchor itself to melodies long enough to intrigue. To me, it sounds like a whole lot of good ideas that don’t always swim into focus, but which explode into colour when all the elements align (and it still does, to be honest).
Still, I enjoy it enough to buy tickets to see them play at the Barfly, a few minutes’ walk from my house. They get an hour or so on stage; it’s swelteringly hot; and they pitch their set perfectly, singers wandering on and off to take the different songs. I’m pretty sure both Feist and Emily Haines of Metric are among them, though I can’t be sure (at this point, neither Feist nor Metric mean anything to UK audiences). Feist, if it is indeed she, takes the mic for You Forgot It In People’s standout, Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl, a song that perfectly captures the adolescent yearnings of either sex: “Bleaching your teeth, smiling flash, talking trash, under my window … Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me.” It’s spine-tingling, ecstatic in its stillness. Two years later, and BSS are back at the same room. A new singer called Lisa Lobsinger taking the female vocal parts. It’s again packed and sweltering, and BSS once more have only an hour or so to play with. They’ve got a new album out by now, but the highlight again comes from You Forgot It In People: a version of the ballad Lover’s Spit that is bruised and beautiful, the sound of dignified sadness; it sounds like the best song ever written, and for days afterwards I listen to the version on their odds-and-sods compilation Bee Hives on repeat.
The Astoria, London, 2006
It’s BSS’s first big-room show in London, and the place is full. Or, rather, it’s full at the start. It’s very far from full at the end. There’s no support act, and BSS occupy the whole evening, playing for close on three hours. We are standing against one of the railings upstairs, and around halfway through the show I realise we now seem to have most of the row to ourselves. Given free rein, BSS seem to have no idea how to edit themselves: it’s like watching the worst jam band you’ve ever dreamed of. Everything is elongated; each song seems to last an eternity – it’s as if they’ve taken the most indisciplined moments of their records and tried to model an epic set in their image. The band seem to be enjoying themselves; perhaps they’re enjoying their audience’s discomfort. I’m pretty sure we don’t make it to the end of the set. I’ve rarely been so disappointed with a gig, and Broken Social Scene disappear from my thoughts for several years.
End of the Road festival, 2016
Ten years since I last saw them, BSS are playing End of the Road at Sunday teatime. The kids must go back to school next morning, so we’re not staying to the festival’s bitter end. We negotiate a deal: I’ll go and watch Broken Social Scene, and they should come to find me at 6pm, halfway through the set. If it’s awful, we’ll go to the car there and then. The appointed time comes, but there’s no question of us leaving. Broken Social Scene are huge, in both numbers and sound. There are four guitarists, five horn players, three percussionists, a bassist, singers, and goodness knows who else, hidden from my view by the edges of the proscenium arch. The set draws heavily on You Forgot It In People, and the band do utter justice to it. They seem less like a collective – a group of people broadly agreeing, but each prone to going off on their own tangent – than an organisation, united in aim and spirit. The female singer is someone new again, and she’s terrific: Anthems For a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl is as blissfully nostalgic as it was more than a decade earlier. The brass turns the songs into huge serotonin rushes; for all the musicians on stage they play with precision, allowing the songs to flourish, even as they are lifted higher and higher, pushed further and further, by the contributions of the scores of musicians on stage. They finish with Ibi Dreams of Pavement, and keep returning to it for one more refrain, as if they never want to stop. This time, though, I don’t want them to stop either. It seems strange to talk of a band fulfilling their promise, 15 years after releasing their first album, countless raves and awards later. But End of the Road felt like a flower suddenly and unexpectedly blooming: you’ve seen the picture on the packet of seeds, but they could never do justice to the vivid colours of the real thing.
