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The Harrowing Adventures of Tokyo Police Club
[gitpop]: What’s the average age of the band?
Greg: Um, Josh is 20 right now, turning 21 in May. Dave and Graham both just turned 21 and I’ve just turned 23.
[gitpop]: So how far back do you all go?
Greg: They’ve all known each other since grade four, and I was two grades above them, and so I kind of knew who they were within school, ’cause we all went to the same schools, basically from elementary school up to high school. I didn’t meet them really until I was in grade 12 and they were in grade 10. Josh, Graham and I were doing a school play together. We just had a bunch of scenes together and started talking. They let it be known that they needed a drummer and I really liked the music they were making. From there we just bonded over that.
[gitpop]: What play were you doing?
Greg: Anything Goes by Cole Porter … school musical.
[gitpop]: It happens like that. I know Trent Reznor’s first claim to fame was playing Professor Harold Hill in the Music Man at high school.
Greg: Really? Wow.
[gitpop]: It’s strange the way things like that start.
Greg: I guess everyone in the music industry has a dark past.
[gitpop]: I won’t publish that if you don’t want me to.
Greg: No, it’s fine.
[gitpop]: We all have our secrets. It’s been a pretty meteoric rise for you guys in the last few years. What do you personally see as the secret of Tokyo Police Club’s success.
Greg: I don’t know if there’s really a secret; we just toured relentlessly. It seems like a very meteoric rise from the outside, but we all remember when we were playing to five people in a room in Regina, Saskatchewan, and our van breaking down on the side of the road. We just kept going back out there hitting places again, and the next time you came out those five people told five friends and there’s, um, like 25 people at the show. It was kind of like a slow build in that way where people would hear about us mostly just through friends saying, “Hey, I saw this great band on the weekend; next time they come out you should see them.” So we like to think of it as a word-of-mouth thing.
[gitpop]: So, relentless hard work pays off?
Greg: Yeah, definitely. We’ve been touring the EP for the past two years, so we got as much mileage out of it as we could.
[gitpop]: It’s a zippy record, the first EP.
Greg: Sixteen minutes!
[gitpop]: It’s a lot of fun. To me, it kind of coalesces everything that the post-punk thing is all about; there’s not too much of an emphasis on any one performer and everything seems very balanced and equal; no dead weight whatsoever.
Greg: We’re all very careful about what parts we put on there. We approach songwriting as kind of like a minimalist viewpoint where anything that doesn’t need to be there is not going to be there. The songs are can be very very dense but there’s only four people playing them, and it just four people playing the parts that they could live, generally.
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