If time flies when you’re having fun, then it’s no surprise that it’s already been 20 years since The Trews unleashed their debut album House of Ill Fame on the world. Their first charting single, “Not Ready To Go” immediately put them on the map, and planted a flag at the summit of the chart, staking a claim for the Hamilton-by-way-of-Antigonish band as one to watch.
With a few dozen Top 20 hits and innumerable miles under their belts, the 20th anniversary of their debut was a perfect excuse for the band to celebrate that success by playing the full album, in sequence, for the first time at a handful of shows. Luckily for Ottawa fans, Meridian Theatres @ Centrepointe hosted one of those shows last Saturday night.
The band essentially opened for themselves by kicking off the show with a play-through of 2004’s House of Ill Fame. As a setlist, you’d be hard-pressed to beat that track listing, given that “Not Ready To Go” is the second song. After that rousing opening set, the band took a short intermission and came back to play a headliner set of the best of their remaining catalog, starting with an acoustic performance of fan-favourite “Ishmael & Maggie” walking down the aisle to the stage. With so many hits to choose from, they had no trouble filling the remaining time with familiar songs that had the crowd singing and clapping along.
After the two-and-a-half-hour performance and initial encore, the crowd demanded more, chanting “We’re not ready to go!” Singer Colin MacDonald noted this was, surprisingly, the first time in 20 years a crowd had pulled that line.
Prior to the show, we caught up with guitarist John Angus MacDonald for a chat.
The Trews at Meridian Theatres @ Centrepointe, February 2024. Photo: Stephane Dubord.
Apt613: How have these 20-year anniversary shows been so far?
It’s been really a lot of fun. We’ve never done anything like this, where we play one particular record, front to back, in its original order. I would have suspected that by now we’d be sort of bored with it, but it’s just such a unique thing that it continues to be fun for us. And some of those songs we haven’t played in almost 20 years, so it’s like having new songs in the set in a weird way. New old songs.
How challenging was it to dust those off and get back into it?
Muscle memory accounts for a lot. I think we did 200-ish shows for two straight years just to get that album off the ground. That was our first time getting any kind of success, so we just went, went, went, and we said no to nothing. So a certain amount of it just snaps back. I would say that lyrics were the most challenging thing. Those are the things that don’t come back quite as easy, so we had to relearn a lot of lyrics. The riffs and stuff though, it was like riding a bike.
The only thing that’s been a challenge is that there’s really no breathers on the record. It’s a very high-energy record. When you’re a new band, you have to turn heads without being familiar, so you’re writing a lot of songs with that energy in mind. So that’s where all our early songs come from.
Being 20 years older than we were when we recorded them, I won’t say it’s challenging, but it’s refreshing in a weird way. It keeps us on our toes. Maybe there’s a few spots where we’re feeling a little winded, and feeling our age a little bit, but it’s also a good reminder that energy goes a really long way.
John Angus MacDonald of the Trews at Meridian Theatres @ Centrepointe, February 2024. Photo: Stephane Dubord.
The connection with the fans and the energy you’re getting from the fans must be off the charts.
It’s really cool. The way album cycles tend to work is you put out a record, then you play the majority of that record on the next tour, and then everything except for the singles tends to fall away and leave the set. And for however long it’s been since we stopped touring that record, people have been saying “I want to hear ‘Confessions’,” “You guys never play ‘When You Leave’ anymore,” “I want to hear this,” “I want to hear that.” So it’s nice to be able to scratch that itch for people. And nostalgia is such a powerful drug. We’ve had a lot of people telling us that they remember exactly where they were the first time—leaving home and in a college dorm when they got that record … or they remember a particular part of their life. And that’s something that I do with music too. So in that way, it makes the night a little bit more special.
Hindsight being 20/20, what are some of the things you wish you knew back then?
Maybe we should have slowed down a little bit every now and then. I was 22, 23 when we were touring that record, so my body could handle a lot of the staying up late every night and travelling the world. I feel like we just rushed right from album to album and tour to tour and we didn’t really get to soak anything in.
Now that you’ve got a lot of experience with production, when you go back to that album, are you nitpicking?
It launched us, so obviously it wasn’t that bad. But I like it more now—more than I did when we were touring it. I’m really proud that it’s so raw and so live. Everything was recorded live off the floor, except for the vocals. There’s about three or four of the songs that didn’t even have a click track, which is completely unheard of in modern recording.
I love it for its raggedness now, whereas back then I wanted to change it all, but now I just love how bare bones and raw it is and you can hear two guitars. You can hear really live bass and drums. The vocals are overdubbed, but we didn’t spend weeks on it. We just did about two, three songs a day and then it was done.
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