Snap, crackle, pop

Churches. Elderly Jewish people’s homes. Porn theatres. Art galleries. Not the average settings for a gig, to be sure, but The Hidden Cameras are not your average band. Fifteen-strong yet based around the vision and music of one man, Joel Gibbs, they are poised to follow the Polyphonic Spree as the latest bunch of inspirational mavericks to reach us from the other side of the Atlantic. And they played all of the above places and more on their route to notoriety in their native Toronto. With Joel on the other end of a phone line, we can’t help wondering which was the toughest of these insane ventures.

“Rigging up the stage on this ledge beside a film screening at a porn theatre,” he replies. “It was pretty death defying actually”.

Did this less than accepted approach to live shows come out of necessity or design?

“A little bit of both. It made more sense not to play the bar scene in Toronto. It’s kind of dire, there’s not a lot of good places to play and a lot of the people who work in them are assholes. I never found the club culture conducive to what we do”.

The transit van-busting number of members too has been something of a happy accident.

“I’d ask someone to play on a couple of numbers for a show, then ask them again to play on a couple more,” says Joel. “After a year we got a string section. The arrangements of the songs have developed as people have joined”.

All of which makes a band like the Hidden Cameras less a commercial concern and more a labour of love, an attitude ???????? by Gibbs’ own description of their sound as ‘gay Church folk music’. It may have been a throwaway line that he came up with for a gig flier, but it seems to have stuck. Listening to the band’s debut The Smell Of Our Own, it is indeed possible to trace religious motifs through the songs, both musical and lyrical. It certainly suggests that Joel has something of a love-hate relationship with religion.

“Totally. I’m ambivalent about a lot of things. I have a love-hate relationship with secular culture too and some of the values that are placed on people. In a way, the church has a lot of really good socialist values if you look closely than you would never find in capitalism. There’s at least some sort of sense of a moral base”.

As for the gay part, the record is full of songs that intertwine religious imagery with something a little less obviously spiritual. Take ‘The Man That I Am With My Man’, for instance, with its chorus of “solid is the rock of my man”, or ‘A Miracle’s retelling of the visitation from a gay viewpoint.

“Often a line like solid as a rock is trying to describe two things at the same time, evoking something religious and something homoerotic,” Joel explains. “I’m drawn to making those parallels because they seem not to go together”. Au contraire, on the strength of The Smell Of Our Own, the two not only go together but are capable of producing some of the most life-affirming, uplifting and joyous music you’re likely to hear this year.