Canadian band Star Collector rekindle Portsmouth friendships for city gig

The power-poppers, who are based in Vancouver, have been on a creative hot streak recently, releasing three critically acclaimed albums in quick succession, following a hiatus in the noughties.

With last year’s Everything Must Go! under their belts and now in the band’s 30th year, they decided the time was right to return to the UK – which naturally includes a date here in Portsmouth.

But as frontman Vic Wayne explains, it’s a friendship from their debut gig in Britain that laid the groundwork for it.

They had been due to launch their 2004 UK tour in Manchester, but thanks to flight delays missed their own show and were forced to start the tour a day late in London at The Windmill.

They were playing alongside a French band called Sweet Apple Pie. Portsmouth music hero Nish (in The Good Time Charlies at the time, now with The Glorias) was there and talking to the band, and the two were introduced.

“We just loved the guy right off the bat. He was in The Good Time Charlies, so we dug their band and he dug our band.

"And then we met Steve (Morris, Charlies’ guitarist), who now plays (drums) in Freestone. And we just kind of kept a relationship going, mostly over social media. Nish helped us out a lot in the next two years that we were touring.

"We stayed at his flat at the time for a couple of nights and he helped us set up some shows. We did a couple of shows with The Good Time Charlies as well. We just stayed buddies. When we were thinking of doing this, he was one of the people that I still maintained a relationship with across the pond.

"He was one of the people I started with and said, we're thinking of doing this. We've got a couple of gigs offered at the Cavern. We'd like to make it a bigger trip and more shows, do you think you could help?

"And of course, being Nish, he was like, of course I could…"

Between Nish, Steve, and the latter’s bandmate in Freestone, Tanya Durrant, Vic says those three were “instrumental” in making this tour happen.

During their initial run, Star Collector released four albums of mod-influenced pop-rock that gave them a cult following.

However, after their fourth album, 2006’s Hundred-Bullet-Proof, the members drifted apart.

"That was just a weird thing because we never actually broke up,” Vic recalls. “We just stopped rehearsing and stopped gigging. And I stopped booking tours and shows.

"It was that time where I had little kids. And so the other guys, Steve, the guitar player, and Ringo, our drummer, we always were between bass players – we've had 19 different people play bass – which is actually true. It was basically the three of us, and we were again between bass players in around 2008, 2009.

"It wasn’t intentional. They just stopped calling to ask, when's the next rehearsal? And I stopped booking them. I raised my kids – I was a bit of a footy dad for a bit. Steve became a marathon runner, and Ringo bought a restaurant. We just started doing other things, but we were all still good buddies.”

It was a mutual friend who managed to cajole the various members together for a Christmas show, where they enjoyed it enough to bring the band back to life. For a while “we just did music off our first four records, and a few choice covers and just had fun.”

But eventually Vic started to get the songwriting bug again. “Stuff happens in your life – good, bad and ugly – and that got me writing again in about 2017."

It eventually led to 2021’s Game Day.

"The Game Day record I wrote mostly myself, a couple of songs were with Steve, but that kind of started because of a really heavy time in my personal life to do with some family members. That really got the juices flowing about writing again.

“Since then, we've done three records – it's been kind of like a renaissance, if you will,” he laughs. “But it's been fantastic. We've had a couple people change over those six years, but Steve and I just keep the old train rolling.”

Vic has always taken great pride in his songwriting.

“That's always been my thing,” he explains. "I'm a bit of a hack guitar player. I can pose really well – it's the way the guitar looks, not the way it sounds,” he smiles, “and I can smash out a few chords.

"I used to be a drummer so my rhythm is pretty good, but if anyone ever says, ‘hey, man, let's jam’, you better look elsewhere, because I'm not your guy!

"But ever since I was a kid, I've always been about songwriting. Some of my biggest influences as a kid were pretty much all are British, even though I grew up here in Canada. Weller, Townshend, Lennon, Ian McCulloch, you know, Ray Davies. Those are some of the people that I grew up with and just really, really loved.”

While Star Collector are often pigeonholed as power-pop, Vic likes to think their sound and range is wider than that.

I like to run the gamut when it comes to lyrical content. And obviously, the music's got to follow that too. So if you're writing stuff that needs to be a little cheeky...

“A lot of people call it power-pop, which kind of is our main thrust, but we tend to veer away from it an awful lot. And that I think, keeps things fresh for us, because the other guys are all really fine players.

“So if I decide that maybe we're going to write something or work on something that's pushing way outside the boundaries – like it's a seven minute psychedelic freak out, or a six minute song with a drum solo at the ending – those are not power pop things, right?

“I don't shy away from writing about heavier stuff, the things that affect you, going through hard times in your personal life.

“I've known people with mental health challenges, and because they affect me as a person it's such a great outlet to be able to use them as songwriting fodder – not in any sort of exploitative way, and not in a way where I ever try to tell someone else's story from their standpoint, but it's how I observe it and how it affects me.”

So when they were looking at coming back over The Atlantic, the stars were aligning.

"Things have just been really clicking and going really well over these last five or six years since we put out the Game Day record. It just felt like we had a really good group of people that really wanted to do the tour, and we still had the connections with Nish.”

It could also be ascribed to Vic’s personal philosophy, which is very much in the “carpe diem/seize the day” mould.

Something he applies to asking prospective co-writers to work with him, as everything else in his life.

It has led to him working with a role-call of fellow cult performers, including members of The Soundtrack of Our Lives, The Fountains of Wayne and The Pursuit of Happiness.

"It's so easy in this life to go through it and think, well, I better not try that because I might fail.

“Like who cares? If you try something and it doesn't work out, what have you lost?

"And if you try something and it does work out, it might turn out to be this amazing thing.”

You can see this amazing thing in action when Star Collector headline the Freestone Annual Birthday Trainwreck at The Edge of The Wedge in Southsea, on Tuesday, May 26.

They’re joined by Portsmouth bands Freestone and The Targets.

Doors 7pm. Tickets £8. Go to wedgewood-rooms.co.uk.

Last Friday they released a new video for Everything Must Go! track Black Nostalgia​ – see the video here.