Tokyo Police Club

Stealing success a quick lesson

By Michael Yee

It's Canadian Music Week(end) and Toronto indie-scene Mecca, The Boat, is packed with scenesters anticipating one of the most talked about bands emerging from the scene in a long time. After a ferocious opening set by Sailboats Are White that ends with all the band members toppled over each other on the floor, Tokyo Police Club step up and pull out all the stops. Balloons are let loose, gigantic red flags are waved, sparklers set ablaze, and of course, rock and roll is brought. During their set, Jahmal Tonge of The Carps and Comic Book Fever prophetically exclaims "In a year, you guys won't need CMW!" Riding on the strength of a solitary 3-song demo, in just 6 short months Tokyo Police Club have miraculously created an envious buzz that innumerable other bands take years to achieve.

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Like countless other bands, the members of Tokyo Police Club met in high school and decided to jam. David Monks (lead vocals/bass), Gregory Alsop (drums) and Joshua Hook (guitar) started jamming together and eventually brought in Graham Wright (keyboards/vocals) to round out their sound. As Monks describes it, "[Tokyo Police Club are] four people who started a band without any ambition or plans." However, whether they like it or not, ambition and plans have suddenly thrust themselves into TPC's unsuspecting hands. This being their first interview, they're almost beside themselves and are decidedly extroverted throughout the whole interview; talking over each other and finishing each others' sentences. The band was first discovered by Andrew Rose [web content editor/podcaster for Pop Montreal] after applying to the Pop Montreal festival (where Monks was going to school at the time) in September of 2005.

Just after that, a second stroke of luck occurred when Lexi Valentine of Magneta Lane discovered them by chance. Wright is almost giddy with excitement as he recounts the story: "[We] were driving in this crammed semi-compact car [to Pop Montreal] and somehow we came in possession of a National Post and in the entertainment section was a list of artists playing Pop Montreal recommending other artists. And at the bottom was Lexi Valentine of Magneta Lane recommending Tokyo Police Club. After that, they asked us to play with them at the Social [bar/club in Toronto] in November and since then we've befriended them."

"Pure luck, pure chance. She just heard us on Myspace. She was just looking around and liked our name and clicked on it," chimes in Monk.
That luck and friendship has also landed them an opening slot on Magneta Lane's current Eastern Canadian tour and a recording contract with Paperbag Records (also home to Magneta Lane). Some may not think the band has paid their dues to the indie-scene yet, but they see it differently:
"We're not good in terms of being proactive and doing stuff ourselves. We've just been really lucky that people liked us. Not that we don't put in effort, but we'll put our effort into some dumb show with no payoff and then something else we do on a whim like applying to Pop Montreal does pay off," explains Wright.
"Before we started all this, all our experiences with bands were from afar. You think of them as a band and you're just a person. Since then, we've met a lot of other bands doing great things.
"People have been very warm and inviting. We didn't know there was much of a Toronto scene until we started playing here. When we were talking about getting big and stuff, we said to ourselves ' Man, we have to move to Montreal, 'cause nothing is happening in Toronto'. There's a lot we're discovering in the local scene that we didn't [know of] before".
Monks continues the thought: "We didn't know much past Metric, Broken Social Scene, Death From Above 1979. We didn't know there was such a bubbling undercurrent. You see a show like Born Ruffians and they're so great onstage, then you want to top them. Everyone inspires each other."

TPC will take that inspiration into the studio this month as they record their debut for Paperbag Records: "We're going to do a six-song EP and hopefully it'll be out in April." Undoubtedly, that EP will contain the infectious dance-punk that has proven their worth so far. And as Wright puts it, "It's all about challenging ourselves. We never want to write a song that's just the same as the last song. We really try consciously to make every song an improvement on the last song. We never rest on our laurels. We're bad at having influences. 'Cause every time we try to write a song, we try and rip off someone and it never ends up sounding like [who] we've ripped off."

"I think it pushes us to come up with more and more interesting things," adds Alsop. "Someone will go, 'Hold on, guys; we can do something better' and usually, we can."

There's no doubt Tokyo Police Club will take their A-game on the road with them and debut some new material. After the CMW show at The Boat, I asked Wright about info on the new material they were in the midst of recording: "It's all I've listened to on my iPod for the last couple days." If that is any indication, the future is looking up for TPC and bodes well for the swelling number of fans they're quickly acquiring, even those in Tokyo. "We don't know if they'd like our name. We heard that somebody in Japan heard our stuff and they were like, 'Great songs; terrible, terrible name.'"

This interview originally appeared in February 2006 on another website.

http://www.tokyopoliceclub.net
http://www.myspace.com/tokyopoliceclub