When most musicians talk about influences, they cite records, guitarists and poets. When Adrian Teacher talks about the influences behind the forthcoming Apollo Ghosts album Mount Benson, he talks about Vancouver Island, bathtub races and a particularly eccentric Nanaimo mayor.

“Frank Ney was the mayor of Nanaimo. He used to wear a pirate suit,” recalls Teacher with a laugh. “I remember when I was a kid, in like Grade 3, he came to our class in full regalia.”
Mount Benson is the follow-up LP to Apollo Ghosts’ much-lauded first album Hastings Sunrise. That album, with songs like “Little Yokohama,” was set mainly around East Van.

Teacher tried to place the new record as a prequel to Hastings. Much of the material for Mount Benson was drawn from Teacher’s coming of age in Nanaimo, a sleepy Vancouver Island town that nonetheless had its share of kooky characters. The various tales around “Pirate Frank” figure heavily into the imagery of the album.

“[Ney] was a real estate agent, and in order to bring some notoriety to the town, he started this bathtub race between Vancouver and Nanaimo. I remember as a kid going down to the ocean watching all these people getting into bathtubs and going across the ocean. It was just so absurd.

“He was just this really eccentric character.”

Mount Benson is the story of Teacher’s adolescence on the Island. Told over his jangly guitar, Jay Oliver’s thumpin’ bass and the swingin’ drums of Amanda Panda. Musically, this CD can be placed somewhere in the indie rock continuum, with heavy new wave punk influences. It is very danceable. The album burns brightly and quickly, with no song going over the three-minute mark.

“It’s a conscious effort to try and keep [the songs] under three minutes,” explains Teacher. “I was having trouble writing songs for a long time, and I thought a way to get out of that would be to kind of cut them down.

“There are so many beautiful songs that are under two and a half minutes. Brian Wilson’s “Wouldn’t it be Nice” is like two-twenty.”

As Teacher’s surname would suggest, when he’s not playing with Apollo Ghosts, he’s teaching Grade 4. There is something in his demeanour that seems to suggest this, and the moment he mentions this it seems immediately obvious.

But he’s the kind of Grade 4  teacher who drops punk rock references off the cuff. “Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi once said ‘We always had day jobs,’” says Teacher, when asked if he ever plans on making his living off the band. “As soon as you start making it your living you’re kind of fucked in a way. I wouldn’t want this to be my day job. I can do it for fun basically.”

For the time being it seems that Apollo Ghosts, born on the Island and raised in Vancouver, will remain a BC band. Bad news for the rest of the world, but good news for Grade 4.

The Mount Benson release show is set for April 10, at Little Mountain Studios in Vancouver.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...