The Dears: A gloom of their own

The leader of The Dears could brood for Canada. Tim Cooper meets a man for whom success has not in itself brought any visible happiness, just the opportunity to carry on baring his soul

Murray Lightburn, the self-styled "writer and director" of the cultish Canadian darlings The Dears, does not look like a man upon whose shoulders the worries of the world rest lightly. On stage he's a dark, brooding presence who pours his intensity into songs with cheery titles like "Expect the Worst", "There Is No Such Thing As Love", "No Hope Before Destruction", "Death Of All The Romance" and "Postcard From Purgatory".

Offstage he's a dark, brooding presence who pours his intensity into long silences and loud sighs. Today he's also tired, after an overnight 10-hour trip by road and sea in a cramped tour-bus from Stockholm to Copenhagen. Instead of waking up as planned in a designer hotel with his wife and their 10-month-old daughter, Neptune, the family awoke to find themselves parked in a seedy backstreet outside their next venue.

Though this tension will work wonders for his stage performance later that night, it has done little to lighten Lightburn's demeanour. "To be honest," he announces ominously, "I would rather staple my balls to the table than be doing this."

A good start, then. But Lightburn, a real-life son of a preacher man, has not finished. "Talking about music is the worst," he elaborates wearily. "You can't win. I can sit here and explain to you everything about the album and why I think it is relevant, and why it's important for people to hear it, but there is always going to be some smartass who will review it and totally not get it, and subvert it into something meaningless."

The album he is promoting, the self-mockingly titled Gang Of Losers, is a musical departure from the baroque chamber pop which has hitherto defined the Montreal sextet's sound. Five years on from their debut album, End of a Hollywood Bedtime Story, The Dears have shed the extravagant flourishes that characterised them and helped make their second album, No Cities Left, a critical and cult success. Gone are the violins and flutes and cellos and rapidly shifting song-within-a-song structures. In their place is a raw and primal stripped-down style: an apocalyptic amalgam of guitars, bass and drums, through which Lightburn's anguished baritone is counterpointed by sweet girl-group harmonies from the band's two female keyboard players. Still in place, thankfully, are Lightburn's angry, anguished lyrics that rail against a cruel, unfair world.

His contempt for the promotion process, the endless cycle of answering the same questions to help sell his new record, is equally impassioned. "I don't feel like I need to pose or pretend to be some eccentric rock star with witty things to say," he explains, "because I am: a) not eccentric, and: b) not witty. I guess that is what some people want out of their rock stars but I didn't sign up to be a rock star."

If Lightburn is a reluctant interviewee, he is also, by his own admission, a reluctant rock star who sees his work - like his father's - as a vocation. "This is something that chose me, not me choosing it," he declares. "I never decided to do this and I am still an unwilling participant. I enjoy playing music - it's therapeutic and cathartic and all that - but the whole machine... just doing this..." He just trails off, glumly.

Formed in Montreal in 1995, The Dears had various line-ups before settling on the current sextet, of whom Lightburn and Mrs Lightburn, aka keyboard player Natalia Yanchak, are the only founder-members. They are joined by keyboard player and flautist Valerie Jodoin-Keaton and her husband of 10 days, bassist Martin Pelland; guitarist Patrick Krief and drummer George Donoso III. Donoso was born in Chile, Krief is a Moroccan Jew, Yanchak is of Ukrainian/Polish extraction, while Pelland and Jodoin-Keaton grew up steeped in French-Canadian culture. The new album's theme - the search for identity in a violent world - reflects their shared bond as outsiders.

In their early days The Dears were the archetypal struggling artists living on the breadline. "I have starved and lived not even hand to mouth, and we have all had tough times and we have struggled and toured in a mini-van," Lightburn recalls. "We recorded our first album for $1,000 - that's 500 of your Earth pounds." Today, the group are regarded as local heroes in their native city. "When we go back to Montreal people think we're rock stars," says Lightburn, "but there is a certain underdog element to The Dears which will probably always be there. I know that I am not in U2 and will probably never be U2. Which is fine. That's not a defeatist attitude. I am an outsider and we are a pretty motley bunch for a rock band, not the traditional four white skinny dudes."

Their distinctive sound has always been Lightburn's vision. He's wary, and weary, of the constant comparisons to Morrissey and Damon Albarn, to whom his vocals do bear distinct similarities. "I'm sick of all the comparisons," he sighs later, relaxing over a drink following an outstanding live show in Copenhagen. "But if you forced me to make my own, I'd say we sound like what would happen if you took The Smiths, Pink Floyd and Curtis Mayfield and shook them up in a blender." At the end of the show, which climaxes with a 15-minute psychedelic-reggae take on "Passport To Purgatory" that makes any comparison foolish, Lightburn apologises for his silent demeanour between songs throughout the course of the previous 75 minutes. "I know I don't talk much," he tells the crowd. "That's just the way I roll." As if to amplify his forbidding presence, when some local fans approach our table at the end of the night to offer their thanks for the show, they steer clear of the frontman as if he might bite, and approach the more friendly-looking Pelland instead.

"I have always felt like an outsider," Lightburn declares. "All my life. Wherever I have been. It is so easy to lose your way. I have been lost. On some levels I probably still am. But I try to keep my eyes peeled. As I travel I try to leave a trail of breadcrumbs so that if I do lose my way I can take a few steps back and get on course again. On this album I was conscious of what I wanted to say in each scene. It is not like there are any real epiphanies or anything. There are a shitload of questions. And I only have questions right now."

Lightburn's parents emigrated from British Honduras (now Belize) in the 1960s and, after spells in London and New York, they settled in Montreal to raise a family. The youngest of four brothers, Murray's dark skin set him apart in a mostly-white neighbourhood. There were other black kids at school, "but whenever there was trouble they were the first to be called in to see the head teacher." He believes that, "there is not a place on earth that is not discriminatory for a black man on one level or another."

His father made a decent living as a saxophone player in a touring band, The Inner Groove: "Kind of jazz, R&B... black-people-for-white-people music." He recalls being taken to clubs as a child, just as his own daughter now comes on tour, and he remembers being taken to his first gig when he was five: The Jackson Five. Then his life changed abruptly. Instead of being taken to nightclubs he was taken to church. "My mom became a born-again Christian and my father subsequently gave in and crumbled at the hands of a woman." Soon his father had renounced music and before long he had become The Rev William Lightburn with his own flock.

Murray persuaded him to dig his sax out of mothballs for a guest appearance on the new album, but he remains suspicious of his father's calling. "'Born-again Christian' means so many things these days," he muses. "George Bush calls himself a born-again Christian but what I don't understand is this: if you are a follower of Christ, and if you really follow the teachings of Christ close enough, how can you possibly, even for a split second, associate yourself in any way with war? That is the question. I guess that's what people meant by the Antichrist: someone who says he is Christ but he's not. So I guess that is the embodiment of the Antichrist." He shifts anxiously. "I'm not saying that those people are the Antichrist, I'm saying that maybe they're working for the Antichrist." Lightburn sighs. "That could get me in a lot of trouble!" he exclaims, with a cackle of laughter.

Despite his different calling, it's hard not to feel that Lightburn is following closely in his father's footsteps, spreading the word to a different congregation. In the language he uses ("This is something that chose me", "I have been lost"); in his lyrical preoccupations with big themes (life and death, love and hope, darkness and light, truth and the very nature of being); and in his almost messianic stage presence - a dark-skinned, black-clad counterpoint to The Flaming Lips' white-suited, grey-haired Wayne Coyne; Lightburn's persona seems a product of his upbringing.

"I just try in my every interaction - and I am not always successful, and I know it - to do the right thing and to be good," he shrugs. "And that might have to do with my upbringing. Who knows? But I don't believe that we have to be weighed down by a certain religion. It is the opposite of freedom. Because then you are not that free. I think there are certain aspects of religion that are pretty cool in setting some sorts of moral boundaries, but it is like a tightrope because you can easily go over the edge and create problems. It can lead to conflict. It is like putting yourself in a category that will put you at odds with someone who puts themselves in a different category, and eventually you end up fighting about it. And then you forget what you are fighting about at all." Which just about sums up every conflict of recent times, from the Balkans to Rwanda to Afghanistan, Iraq and the Lebanon.

Parenthood, he admits, has had a profound effect on the way he sees the world. "The second she first arrived I was bawling like a child. Everyone else was going about their business and Natalia was stoic as ever. And when you see that you are reduced to... how can you not be optimistic? It is like a fresh chance."

Having a child offers the chance to make a different kind of contribution, he reasons. "I like to feel that The Dears make a contribution but this is a little more direct because the way we will raise this child will mean that hopefully, when she is older and we are passing on, we will have instilled some sort of values that will enable her to bring some light into the world."

The other major change in his life is that he has spent most of the last two years touring. That means he's been far from Montreal at the very time that the city is being recognised as North America's new hotbed of talent, through bands like Arcade Fire, Stars and Wolf Parade. "Because of this so-called scene getting all the attention I worry that bands think they can get signed just by saying they are from Montreal," he says. "But it's not like everyone congregates at the same bars. I don't even really go out. Sometimes I just like to sit in my boxers and play video games at home. And I like going grocery shopping.

"Basically all we are doing is extending a hand," he says. "People might cut it off, or shake it, or spit on it, or kiss it." Does he believe that art - music - can change anything in this world? "I think art - the best stuff, the true stuff - in a weird way is our only hope," he replies. "I guess that's why we still do it. I believe it is the only contribution I can make. I know that I will never discover the cure for cancer or Aids. I will never be the leader of a revolution that will topple an oppressive government. But words and the ability to write them and express them can be pretty powerful," he says. "Sometimes. I think."

The Dears play the V Festival this weekend; 'Gang Of Losers' is out on Bella Union on 28 August