Few appreciate this dynamic more than Vic Wayne. To be clear, Wayne's’ band, Star Collector, is no creation of social media. The Vancouver-based band has been crankin’ out the jams since the internet was just a baby. Back then, nobody was thinking much about social media, but a couple decades on, it has helped Star Collector connect with a worldwide audience who are fans of real-deal, fun rock and roll.
The band reached new multitudes with its 2021 album, GameDay. The collection of swirling power pop, mod-flavored rock and an occasional moody turn garnered ears and airplay for Star Collector worldwide. Just about every song on the album became a radio hit on some independent radio show somewhere, and was still getting regular airplay on said shows more than two years after its release.
“There was this whole online community that has come together around power pop that we discovered just as they discovered us,” explained Wayne, who talked to Garagerocktopia twice on our radio show, plus at an actual face-to-face sitdown over beers in Palm Springs earlier this year. “It has been a whirlwind. We put out the single, “Rip It Off” in January of 2021 and 16 months later it was still getting played, which is just layer upon layer of awesome sauce.”
Stylistically, the band – named after a Monkees song – isn’t exactly an airtight fit into any particular niche but sort of checks a lot of different boxes. The upbeat sound of most of the group’s work makes them a natural choice for power pop fans, though the band’s hooks just as frequently recall mod revival. As well, with the cohesiveness of the songs on each album, one could even be forgiven for regarding the band as classic rock.
Yet Game Day didn’t really represent any kind of radical departure musically for the band. Wayne acknowledges that, likely, some added diligence, some of it due to the pandemic, may have helped the band to make an album just a little more noticeable to some than did previous works.
“We took a lot longer to do Game Day than any of the previous records,” recalled Wayne, “so I think that maybe that little bit of extra dedication to time and care and having the ability to spend you know a good chunk of COVID working on one record probably allowed us to be a little more picky about what we tracked, what we kept, what we needed to re-do.”
Up through 2006, The band’s albums were generally well-received and earned them enough cache to play at prestigious venues on both sides of the Atlantic. But, as is often the case, after the release of Hundred-Bullet-Proof, that giant bear called real life, as well as some burnout, reared their unattractive little heads and forced band members to rethink, at least for a time, just exactly where Star Collector fit into their lives.
“We’d gone pretty hard between 1996-2008,” explained Wayne, “doing
four albums, three European tours, swings here in Canada and down the West
Coast of the U.S. We worked with amazing producers like GGGarth Richardson,
Kevin Kane, Dean Maher, played some top venues like The Cavern and The
Borderline, and met incredible folks along the way but, in 2009, we just very
organically, without ever saying we were breaking up, took a hiatus. For me, as
a writer, I’d written or co-written over 200 songs at this point in my life and
I felt like the proverbial pen was drying up a bit too, like I was repeating
stuff and needed a break. But we all stayed good friends.”
And, as is also often the
case, people who liked the band’s music decided they weren’t just going to sit
back let them fade away. People found clever new ways to get the band members
to play together, and Star Collector was pushed in baby steps towards playing
together again.
“In
2013, a mutual musician friend, Derek MacDonald,” said Wayne, “who, incidentally, plays organ on a few songs
on our two most recent albums, had this little group thrown together for a
Christmas show, which Steve was a part of. Derek diabolically rubbed his hands
together and contacted me saying he’d love it if Star Collector could just do a
few songs. We did a few songs, and the magic came back… instantly. It had been
over four years but we all immediately wanted to keep playing together again.”
The band played a small number of gigs each year, and Wayne found the songwriting mojo ebbing back to him.
“From 2013-2017, we’d play a handful of gigs a year,” Wayne recalled, “just doing stuff from the first four albums, the odd cover and having fun. Then some hard, deeply personal stuff happened in my world and BOOM, the writing started up again. And it was like floodgates opening. I wrote the majority of Game Day during this time, with Steve co-writing a few with me, et voila, we’re back, baby!”
No doubt, Game Day would still be getting steady airplay, but for the release earlier this year of Attack, Sustain, Decay … Repeat. Released in February, the band could not have forged a better follow-up. Attack does exactly what it should do, displaying the same power pop, mod and classic rock flourishes that had already caught fans’ ears, but taking those elements even further while adding some new ones. While the band was never lacking for good hooks, Attack … raises that boil a bit higher, with every song containing something hummable long after the song has ended. Thus far, response to the album has been very positive, including a five-star review from prestigious outlets like Shindig, no doubt due in no small part to its solid songwriting. When discussing songwriting, Wayne detailed a songwriting approach organic from the word ‘Go!”
“There’s no real set approach to writing songs,” said Wayne. “We approach each one as its own entity as opposed to saying ‘ok, we’ve got to do this and this and this.’ It’s more like ‘what does this song call for?’ or “does that song call for an electric or an acoustic rhythm?’ What’s the tone? Is it a sad song? Is it a angry song, or a tongue in cheek song? Each song just works for its individual self, at least that’s where we come from.” Then, you hope they all work together as some sort of cohesive album.”
But cohesive didn’t mean sounding all the same. While there are pronounced influences to the band’s sound, for the new album Wayne wanted the songs to reflect dimensions of the band’s music that may not have been quite so clear in the past.
“One thing we did realize as the songs were coming out and coming together in the rehearsal room was that we were expanding a bit in terms of what the assumed approach might be,” recounted Wayne, “both from ourselves and from people who listen to us. I love the whole power pop community and that is our bread and butter, but we all like a lot of different types of music, from people like Julian Cope to Echo and the Bunnymen, to more rock stuff you wouldn’t really associate us with like Alice Cooper. I think that all starts to infuse itself into the songs as you’re arranging them. And when all that comes together, that’s when you realize what the identity of the album is, and that’s when I realized “Attack …” was further reaching than anything we had done before.”
Creatively, the album has been a home run, though the music landscape of today has no shortage of potholes and drop-offs. Still, overall, Wayne feels the album has accomplished much.
“It’s been getting some incredibly kind reviews from some highly regarded publications,” confirmed Wayne, “so critically, thus far, we’re thrilled.”
“Financially, haha... this is not the era of big money-making indies, or at least not us! To be fair, we’ve made a few shekels, but streaming has put the kibosh on meaningful sales. Let’s not kid ourselves, if you’re not in it for the passion, you’re bangin’ yer noggin’ against an unforgiving brick wall. Do. It. Cause. You. Love. It. Full-stop.”
“However, this leads me to the artistic accomplishment yay-or-nays. When the album was finally finished, the five of us, including Ad, did a listening party at Adrian’s and I can definitely say we all felt extremely happy with the final versions and the different tangents we went down on this album. Wrap that in Monk’s (Monteith’s) always-bitchin’ artwork and yes, it’s a record that we feel accomplished the aforementioned musical barometers we expect of ourselves. We are proud of it… and now we get to have a whole lotta fun playing the album live and making videos! Music, man… can’t beat it!”
One result of the airplay for Game Day was that it piqued the interest of other artists, as well as other DJs and fans. A guest on the album was Ian Person, guitarist and singer for the well-regarded Swedish power pop band Soundtrack Of Our Lives. Person co-wrote two songs on the album, getting hooked up with the band through a quirky set of circumstances.
“In the “Rip It Off” video, I’m wearing a Soundtrack Of Our Lives T-Shirt,” said Wayne, “and a DJ who plays our music is in Sweden mentioned that he knew Ian quite well. We were writing songs for the new album and I thought, ‘don’t ask, don’t get in this life, so I talked to the DJ and asked how he would feel about hooking us up with Ian, and that maybe Ian and I could write a song or two. A couple days later he called back and said yeah Ian’s interested and a few days later we got some demos with bits of unfinished music. I played with them like Play-Doh, added some things, made some changes but tried to keep the key ideas in the stuff he sent.”
“He never heard them until they were finished, we thought we would surprise him, and luckily he really loved them. He even plays the guitar solos in “Feel It Comin’ On” and “Running Through The Rain,” which are the two we wrote together. And I even got him to sing backup on another song, “If We Can’t Take a Joke.”
“When you can work with people who are super talented,” Wayne commented, “hopefully it brings out the best in you. It was great!” Other guests on the album include Kevin Kane of the well-regarded Canadian band the Grapes of Wrath as well as Bad Beats’ keyboardist MacDonald.
As the band has become a force on independent radio all over the planet, oddly they seem to be overlooked in Canada, even in their Vancouver base. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, while presenting a lot of great programming, hasn’t exactly distinguished itself for its adventurousness with Canadian rock bands. That may be one reason, Wayne says, more of the band’s support appears to be south of the border.
“What’s funny is that I can say we have had far more airplay and interviews and reviews come from places outside of Canada than we have had in our own home country," Wayne revealed. “There are places in the states that, if we could get our behinds there, say to Chicago or Brooklyn, a lot of places there that really embrace the kind of stuff we do, we could hopefully get some big audiences there.”
While Star Collector has no problem keeping audiences and radio stations, bass players are a different story. While none has exploded in spontaneous combustion a la Spinal Tap, bassists have come and gone for just about every other reason imaginable.
“We’ve had 19 bass players,” said Wayne, who, pre-Star Collector, at one point played with a bassist named Kennedy Stewart, who would go on to became the mayor of Vancouver (“He sure didn’t look like a mayor then!”).
“That’s a weird thing, though to be clear, some of those that I’m counting may have only played on one song or gone on one tour,” elucidated Wayne. “But we have had times where we had one guy who may have been great for two years, then he’d move to another part of the country. And then we’d have someone else for two years, and then they decided to give up music. This would go on, and in in-between times we’d have all these fill-ins, including my brother Adam, who plays bass on Game Day and plays on some songs on “Attack …’ and we’d always seem to have to find somebody to fill the bass seat.”
“Luckily, we’ve had the good fortune to find good people to do it. Adam lives in Portland, Ore., and now we have Tony Kerr here in town and we have been splitting them. The bass player thing with us is kind of a weird animal.”
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Oi, Kreutz... Keep up the good work alright!
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