Stars - Proceeding With Caution

Some musicians are friendly and down-to-earth, even modest or diffident. The Stars’ Torquil Campbell is not one of those musicians.

Long has there been an antagonistic relationship between the music press and musicians, a feud which seemed to manifest itself in our conversation. The first five minutes of the interview consisted of Campbell’s unenthused, monosyllable replies, delivered in sharp, breathless bursts. Clearly, he was not impressed with the line of questioning.

“Have you done any research? Do you know anything about my band?” he quipped demandingly, after I briefly attempted to establish some sort of rapport with him by making small talk about the band’s current tour.

But if you disregard his personality, the music behind the man is quite interesting. Having been together for seven years, Stars have just released their fourth album In Our Bedroom After the War. It’s somewhat of a concept album, focusing on purveying a unique take on the relationship between love and war, says Campbell.

“It’s the idea of just combining sort of horror stories, stories about people in very terrible situations in their life and acknowledging the reality of the presence of love in those moments,” he says.

“Even in the worst environments in the world or in the worst circumstances in the world, people still see love, people still feel love and it motivates them. And that I think is an interesting thing to examine, how people are motivated by love, even to do really terrible things.”

While Stars is proud of the album and glad that they attempted to make such a complicated task, it was a trying and difficult process. However, that’s the sort of challenges that Campbell lusts after and thrives on.

“I guess the sense is that if you do something a certain amount of times it’s then like anything else, it’s a pattern. It’s like sex in a relationship or something. You can get in a place where you do things you know work,” says Campbell.
“I’d love to try and actually write lazy songs for pop stars and make lots of money. But at the end of it I always have to put in some sort of a second level to it. I think that aspect of songwriting, that’s what keeps me interested in it.”

The ‘songwriting’ line of discussion seems to have touched a sweet spot. It becomes clear that once you hit one of Campbell’s buttons, it’s actually quite hard to shut him up. For the songwriter, his art is a tender subject and he possesses a rather romantic idea of music that becomes increasingly evident when Campbell speaks about the band’s popularity, or lack of.

“We’re pretty uncool. The trend came to us for a little while there, but we’ve been doing the same thing for a long, long time. We’ve been trying to write these songs in this way now for 4 albums, 2 EPs through 7 years of music.”

“We’ve been friends all our lives and we do what we do because it’s all we can do. If we had other options we might think about it. But when we get together and we make music, that’s what comes out.”

“I think we’re all people who ultimately are very in love with the idea of melody and the pop song. And that’s not a particularly fashionable or cool thing to be believe in but I think its something that lasts. “

While he may believe in the romantic notion of art, as is often the case there is a resulting cynicism towards many perceived evils in the industry, including record companies and journalists (you may have seen that one coming). This comes to air when the talk turns to downloading. Campbell reveals that Stars released their latest album two months ahead of its set in-store release date in order to avoid the album being leaked on the net.

“We felt like that for the fans of the band the people who wanted to hear the music it was unfair to ask them to either not listen to music or steal it. And we wanted to give them another option ‘cos there are people who do want to support the music and they have every right to hear the music when journalists hear it,” says Campbell.

“For years record companies [have] been exploiting the artist and they’ve been exploiting the buyer, because they’ve been overpricing massively for their shitty little pieces of plastic and not sending any of the money back to the artist. So their con game has come to an end. They’ll move on to a different con. I mean, capitalist scum are capitalist scum and they’ll always find ways to make money off people and that’s just the way it is.”

While there has been much talk among musicians over the last decade about possible ways the industry can combat illegal downloaders, Campbell’s view presents a stark contrast.

“The important thing to me is that people hear our music, I don’t care whether they steal it or not. Art should be stolen by people in my opinion, it should be owned by everyone because art is creative, it doesn’t really have any purpose til people respond to it.”

In Our Bedroom after the War is out now on Arts and Crafts

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