Torquil of the town

20 minutes into our conversation, it strikes me that Torquil Campbell is, in the sweetest possible way, out to lunch. Eyes bulging, mouth working frantically, the Stars singer is holding forth on why he wanted to put an image of his wife, naked and in a crucifixion pose, on the cover of the group’s new album.
“She would have been nude,” he says, grinning maniacally. “With roses in each hand and ‘fuck’ daubed across her tits in blood.” He pauses to drain his glass – we’ve convened to a pub next to Dublin’s Sugar Club, where Stars are about to play their Irish debut – before plunging deeper into what is becoming a rather sinister monologue.
“The idea was that we’d show people that we, the quiet ones, the shy ones –  can be mad too, that we can change the world with our love,” he proclaims.
In the end, the rest of Stars, who come from Montreal but trade in a suburban ennui hitherto particular to the north of England, talked Campbell out of his crucifixion fantasies. Instead, the sleeve of Set Yourself On Fire features a treated photograph of Campbell’s wife (from Spiddal, Galway), topless and wearing a pink balaclava, holding a lit fuse. I suggest that the album is indie rock’s Smell The Glove – Spinal Tap’s censored masterpiece – and Campbell, suddenly normal again, cracks right up.
“Yeah man. The indie Smell The Glove. I like that.”
Like Campbell, the music of Stars divides between matey cheeriness (prior to the crucify-my-wife rant, the singer had chatted knowledgeably about football) and, beneath the skin, something creepier, darker .
Recently, Stars have suffered endless comparisons to another Montreal-based outfit, The Arcade Fire. In truth, aside from a shared fondness for string arrangements, the bands have little in common. The Arcade Fire ply euphoric neo-folk; Stars, in contrast, steer a more orthodox course. They were raised on The Smiths, New Order and The Cure; their song book explores familiar indie-rock territory: dour bedsits, love-struck introverts, English rain.
Later in the evening, performing to a capacity Sugar Club, Campbell will swerve between ingratiating niceness (“It’s so great to be here,” he says, sounding as if he means it), and outbursts of mild lunacy (“This song is about fucking someone because you want to kill them”).
One senses that, under the layers, Stars are not completely comfortable with their milieu. Peddlers of plaintive indie-pop tend, in sympathy with their music, to be mild and a sensitive breed. Stars wear a darker hue.
“On the new album, we had a budget and an audience for the first time and we wanted to do something different,” explains Campbell. “I’m not sure we set out to shock them, exactly. We did, though, want to shake things up slightly.”
When they joined Stars, Campbell and co-vocalist Amy Millan were both jobbing actors in New York. It was, I suggest, a strange trajectory: from performing on Broadway to touring the lower rungs of the indie circuit.
“I’ve always dreamt of being in a band,” he says. “I can remember acting on stage, wishing I was playing music.”
Campbell doesn’t play an instrument and claims not to be a musician (this is untrue: he has a distinctive and affecting voice). What he contributes, he says, is aesthetic direction. He has a specific vision of how Stars should look and sound and encourages the rest of the group along paths that make his ideas reality. “I’m a fan of Stars, essentially. A guy who loves music, who somehow found himself in a band.”
Hatched in bed-sits and coffee houses and recorded on cheap home studio equipment, Stars’ first two records were, he feels, the work of archetypical outsiders (“We had no money, we had no audience – we made this music for ourselves”).
With Set Yourself On Fire, their third album, Campbell believes Stars are graduating to another level. Many seem to believe it's their debut (it is the first to gain distribution outside of Canada). In a sense, says Campbell, it is.
“We’ve always had a vision of what we wanted to achieve musically,” he explains. “But this is the first time we’ve had an opportunity to really put that into practice. I have absolutely no problem with people coming to this record completely unaware of our past.”
Nor is he bothered that journalists are constantly comparing Stars to The Arcade Fire. For one thing, both bands matured in a metaphorical bell-jar. Until recently, a music industry didn’t really exist in Canada; isolated from commercial pressures, groups have tended to evolve idiosyncratically and at their own pace. Had The Arcade Fire remained in the US (songwriter Win Butler is Texan) over-exposure would, suggests Campbell, have prevented them becoming the absorbing misfits they are today.
“Canada is the perfect place for bands to develop,” he avers. “It’s isolated. Nobody pays you any attention. We’re left to our own devices and that, I think, makes for some really great music. I’m glad we aren’t American. The US can really mess you up.”
I wonder whether Set Yourself On Fire is the point where, like the Arcade Fire, Stars depart the indie firmament and plunge into the mainstream. The prospect does not fill Campbell with enthusiasm.
“We’re indie and proud,” he says. “If someone had said 20 years ago that the two most influential bands would be The Smiths and Orange Juice – whom Franz Ferdinand have basically copied – people would have laughed. Look around you today, man. We’re taking over the world!”