LEON THOMPSON
Arts Writer

Rocking two albums, two EPs and a buttload of performances, Tokyo Police Club has carved itself a comfortable spot in the Canadian music scene.

Add tour dates across North America and Europe and a willingness to take on fan challenges where the band competes against their fans in unique challenges before their shows and it’s clear that they’re doing something right. The Sheaf caught up with keyboardist Graham Wright to exchange words on various subjects.

The Sheaf: What’s been dominating your free time lately?
Graham Wright: Touring! What free time? Since the album came out we’ve been on the road nonstop which is of course how it goes now. You go out, do shows, you travel from city to city by van or bus or plane, and you do it again the next day.

Sheaf: Your music video “Wait Up (Boots of Danger)” involves dogs having a pool party, what was the inspiration for that?
Wright: Our friend Mike who directed the video had this idea that he’d been keeping in the back of his mind. No one really plays music videos on TV anymore really, that doesn’t happen, they just play them on the Internet. You don’t need some big budget, super fancy music video anymore. We made the video and lo and behold it’s gotten more attention and more people asking about it than any other music video we’ve ever made, so I think we’ve learned our lesson and in the future we’ll just do things our way.

Sheaf: Becoming a popular artist, has it changed your perception on pirating vs. paying for music?
Wright: In a perfect world everyone would pay for our records and we’d all get rich and buy fur coats but that’s not going to happen. At the same time, a lot of the reason our band got the success that it did is because of MySpace and the Internet. I’m sure that lots and lots of people who come out to the shows downloaded our records for free and then they come out and buy a T-shirt and spent their money there.

You can’t really get too particular about how stuff goes out there. I think music is valuable and hope that people agree with me about that. At the end of the day it’s not expensive, a record is like 10 bucks. And when I think about the records that I love that changed my life that I listened to hundreds and hundreds of times, 10 bucks is a pretty good bargain for that.

Sheaf: As an artist you have, to some extent, a captive audience. What are you trying to tell them with Champ?
Wright: All that we’re ever trying to do with the records is make something exciting and fun for people to listen to, and with Champ I think we definitely went a long way to doing that a lot better than we have in the past. We really spent a lot of time crafting it into exactly what we wanted it to be and hopefully it’s a rewarding experience for people because that’s what we want it to be.

Sheaf: I noticed that you guys are touring both North America and Europe. Who has the cooler shows?
Wright: It really depends. I mean the kids in Europe have been known to go crazy with less provocation than the kids in North America, but we’ve had some doozies over here too. I don’t want to sell anybody short.

Sheaf: You guys are taking challenges from people while touring. Have people been taking you up on that offer?
Wright: Yeah we’ve done a few over the last couple of months. It’s been a blast, man. We’ve done some really fun ones. It’s a different way to meet and interact with people. Obviously it’s cool to meet people before or after a show, and we’re happy to do that, but at the same time it’s always: you meet them, shake their hand, maybe take a picture or sign something, talk for a minute and then either you have somewhere to be or they have somewhere to be, and you go your separate ways. This is a different way to hang out with people.

We’ve made friends doing it. Now, next time we go back to Baltimore we’re going to go hang out with these people that we ended up doing this challenge with. It’s got lots of ups.

Tokyo Police Club are performing at Louis’ on Sept. 27 with The Arkells and Meligrove Band.

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image: Flickr