Stars: On psychopaths, narcissists and classic albums

I thought Matt Berninger had the Hot Press Political Rant of the Year Award nailed with his withering Trump put-down but, no Torquil Campbell has just blown him out of the water with his “Why I really, really don’t like Justin Trudeau” tirade.

“Oh, he’s fucking dreadful, man,” the Stars singer shoots back when I ask how Canada’s poster boy Liberal PM is doing. “He’s as useless as a fucking chocolate teapot. He’s just a corporate hack; a failed actor with no moral centre and no idea how the fuck to run the country. He has no qualifications and very little intellect. Ho only got the job because people remember his father, Pierre Trudeau, as PM in the ‘70s. He’s basically Ivanka Trump. That said, he’s infinitely preferable to her godawful father.”

Which I think you’ll agree is some Grade ‘A’ telling it like it fucking is. Having previously split his time between New York and Toronto – the respective attractions being their thriving acting and music scenes – the 47-year-old has now gone all West Coast hipster on us and moved to Vancouver.

“Yeah, I’m standing on the balcony of my apartment looking at the ocean,” he enthuses. “It’s absolutely sublime and I’m never leaving. What’s crazy is that it’s populated almost entirely by 22-year-olds from Ireland. It’s fucking unbelievable how many of them are over here. So the exodus continues, I guess.”

It does. Back together following a ‘concentrating on other projects’ sabbatical – more of which anon – Stars are heading to Dublin in September to play 2004’s Set Yourself On Fire in its entirety. While considered by most fans to be their masterpiece, it ended up a lowly no. 7 last year when Vice asked Torq to rank all of Stars’ albums.

“The Set Yourself On Fire songs are great, but we didn’t have the technical know-how or the music chops to fully do them justice in the studio,” he explains. “Listening back to it now, I think, ‘Fuck man, I was so optimistic back then.’ I had so much hope we were going to save the world with this shitty little pop band. In that sense it’s beautiful, but there’s also darkness in the record, which I relate to a lot more now and want to explore musically. I always hear the 7% of things we did wrong rather than the 93% we got right. These shows are our chance to fix the 7%!”

In addition to Stars’ tearing up the charts, 2004/’05 also saw fellow Canadians Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene and Feist making their international breakthroughs.

“There were just special people everywhere,” Torquil recalls. “I remember seeing Leslie Feist in a shitty little café in Toronto and thinking: ‘That girl’s going to be fucking huge, there’s no other outcome.’ None of us were spring chickens. We’d been working on that stuff for a long time. This wasn’t bullshit, it was real musicians. Some of the Broken guys were in their forties when they had their first hit. They could have thrown the towel in, but they persevered.”

If Torquil looks a little more wild-eyed than usual when Stars come over in September, it’s probably down to his recent playing of convicted murderer and imposter Christian Gerhartsreiter in a one-man show, True Crime, which he also wrote.

“After three hundred shows, I wasn’t so much playing as occupying the character,” he reflects. “In his late teens, this German guy moves to Boston and successfully passes himself off as Clark Rockafeller, a WASP-ish relative of the man considered to be the wealthiest American of all-time.”

It has to be said, that Torquil and Christian/Clark look eerily similar.

“That’s how my fascination began. The thought was: ‘This guy who looks like me is trying to be somebody like me; what if I try to be somebody like him?’ He ended up in jail but with his malignant narcissism, relentless lying and total self-invention of reality could just as easily have become President of the United States. Right now there’s Stars business to be taken care of but I’d love to bring True Crime over to Ireland.”

One of Torq’s first acting gigs was appearing alongside Philip Seymour Hoffman in a 1998 NYC production of Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping And Fucking.

“His death shook me very deeply,” he concludes. “I just couldn’t believe that Phil had done that to himself. When I was hanging out with him, he was straight edge but still a man of enormous appetite – y’know, two packs of cigarettes a day, three double cheeseburgers. He was such a kind, responsible, everyday guy. Phil said to me once, ‘I know you like drugs, but don’t do heroin because it’s the best fucking thing in the world.’ I ended up being more careful; Phil ended up dead. You’ve got to cherish the shit you have and not take life for granted.”

Stars play The Workman’s Club, Dublin on September 27