Jenny Charlesworth

Jenny Charlesworth is an arts and culture journalist and online editor at Today's Parent. She regularly contributes to The Straight, Concrete Skateboarding and The Grid. A music and pop culture enthusiast, Jenny has written for The Wire, The Globe and Mail, Spinner, Paste Magazine, Montecristo Magazine, The Block, HUCK Magazine and The Tyee. She lends her expertise to CTV National News. In 2010, Jenny was a member of the Polaris Music Prize Grand Jury.

The sound of silence

Toronto punks-about-town Fucked Up lend their sound to a 1928 classic at the Images film festival

The scene is strangely civilized: tacked to the wall is a pristine takeout menu advertising calzones, not one empty beer can litters the tiny room and the blue Rubbermaid containers packed with miscellaneous gear are safely stowed overhead. Add in the 1928 silent film West of Zanzibar playing on a laptop, and anyone would be shocked to discover that this is the practice space of Fucked Up. And, yes, the hardcore art-punks are indeed jamming in time to Lionel Barrymore’s silver screen portrayal of a loathsome ivory trader.  

The band never expected to spend a Friday afternoon working on a score for the black-and-white classic by Freaks director Tod Browning—a film starring Lon Chaney as a cuckolded (and paralyzed from the chest down) magician who seeks revenge for his wife’s death. But here they are, just after 5pm, scribbling down notes and retooling riffs in preparation for their live soundtrack performance during a screening of West of Zanzibar, on closing night of the Images Festival of Experimental Film and Video. 

“There’ve been instrumentals on [all of our] records. So a lot of people have said, ‘Wow, this sounds like a soundtrack, when are you going to do a score?’” says guitarist Ben Cook, giving a bit of context for why the Images organizers pitched them on the project. As for why they signed on, he says, “Band life can be extremely monotonous—the same clubs, the same jokes, the same people all the time. This is something we have never done before, and we always jump on things like that.”

From the mini-epics heard on Year of the Pig and Year of the Ox to their forthcoming rock opera David Comes to Life, Fucked Up’s CV details a decade of adventurous output and high-minded pursuits. To find them moonlighting as composers in the realm of silent films seems par for the course for the industrious group—even if in this instance it means that gregarious frontman Damian Abraham is voluntarily benched, given the instrumental nature of the project. 

Despite their eagerness to try their hand at an art form traditionally reserved for nimble pianists and jazz quartets, the first time they watched West of Zanzibar they were still jet-lagged from their recent tour of Australia—hardly an exhilarating experience. Only weeks later, the members of Fucked Up can now recite the film’s dramatic title cards from memory.

The band seems ready to join the ranks of No Age, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and Toronto’s own Do Make Say Think, acts who have similarly offered their own sonic spin on a tradition that dates back as far as 1895, when the Lumière brothers of Paris hired a pianist for the public projection of one of their films. And while Fucked Up is primed to flip the script on the historic silent movie experience, they still have their doubts.
“We have no idea how to write a score to a movie,” guitarist Josh Zucker confesses, with Cook and bassist Sandy Miranda nodding in agreement.

“We’ve never written, you know, 65 minutes of music and then had to play it all at once, in a row,” adds Miranda, while perched on the edge of one of a dozen amps packed into the jam space. “I’m a little anxious about that point: how we’re going to remember it at all. The difference with, for instance, Year of the Pig—which has long songs, but which we generally didn’t play from start to finish before we recorded them—is we don’t have the luxury of time in the studio. We’re going to be in front of an audience for this.”
So what will a silent-film score by Fucked Up sound like? 

“There are ambient parts, there are rock parts, and there are trippy parts … and some catchy licks,” says Cook. “It all sounds like a Fucked Up record to me. Also, it’s along the lines of what we’ve been doing with the new LP, which is a musical. So it was kind of strange and cool that we got this [opportunity] right after we finished putting all the final touches on the new record.”

Though they agree it was rather apropos, the trio fall silent, shifting their gaze to the well-worn carpeted floor, when asked to draw more parallels between the two projects.

“They both have kind of a twisted, love-focused story arc,” Zucker eventually offers up. 
Cook, predictably, dodges the question in his own way. “There’s a bald guy,” he says, smirking at the likeness between Fucked Up’s absentee leader and West of Zanzibar’s balding villain.

-Published April 8 in Eye Weekly

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