This past September, the Bronson Centre hosted a star-studded Legends Weekend that kicked off with a quartet of 80s superstars headlined by Strange Advance. One of the highlights that night was a captivating set by Montreal’s The Box. Their limited eight song setlist clearly left fans wanting more, which they will get at the Brass Monkey this Saturday night.
A staple of Canadian radio and video channels for almost a decade, the group, led by Jean-Marc Pisapia had a whirlwind 80s that produced unforgettable hits including “Closer Together”, “Carry On” and “Ordinary People” to name a few. However, it also burnt the band out, and they split soon after their fourth studio album in 1990, The Pleasure and the Pain. Eventually, Pisapia revived the group in the mid 2000s, and have been releasing new material sporadically since then. And if their Bronson set last September is any indication, they’re in top form as a live band again.
We caught up with Pisapia this week to chat about the glory days, and the revival, of seminal Canadian band The Box.
Apt613: How different is it now touring with your contemporaries compared to back in the day?
Oh my god, where to start? Back in the day, we would be on tour frantically all over the place. And we would do it because we had to, and it was excruciating. We used to do something like 250 shows per year between 1984 and 1991. That was really, really hard.
As a matter of fact, one day we’re playing in Ontario, and we do two sets. Between the two sets, I go and have a beer at the bar, and there’s a woman standing next to me, and she says to me, “You know what,we can see your neckties more than we can see your guitars.” I didn’t get it. And then when I got back to the hotel, I realized what she meant. She means that we look like a bunch of people who are there to make money, because we have to, and we seem to have no fun.
What happens today is exactly the opposite. 40 years later we hit the stage because we want to, not because we have to. We don’t have a record to sell. We don’t have a single to push on the radio. We go and play because we want to. And even at the personal level, the relationship that we have on stage as a band, and off stage, is completely different. When you’re 65, you don’t act the same way as when you’re 25. There are a lot of things that are not important to you anymore and you do what you have to do, and you do it with respect for others a lot more.
I can imagine if you’re doing 250 shows a year, the level of tension and irritability at 25 would impact everyone.
That’s actually what killed the first version of The Box back in 1991-92. We were completely exhausted. We came back from England after recording the fourth album there for four months.
We were signed with Capitol EMI in Los Angeles. I lost half of the band coming back from Los Angeles. And then the other half stayed for another two years and then that evaporated too. So when I was asked by the industry around 2003 to reform the band, I went to see the original guys, and I asked “What do you think? Would you like to go back?” And they were clear “Are you kidding me? No way, buddy.” But I have a bunch of friends with whom I made music for fun, and I proposed it to them. All these guys were Box fans from the 80s, and they said, “absolutely, we’ll do it”, and it’s going to be 20 years next year.
Now that you’re back with a full set, what do you have in store, given that you have a whole lot more time to play with?
The fun part stays intact. That’s the same thing. I mean, we step on stage and we start having fun until the end. The difference might be that we’re going to be doing some more recent material, in the first half of the show at the Brass Monkey. So we’re going to do some songs from Black Dog There, which dates back to 2005, there are two great songs off that record that we do. We’re going to do a track from the EP that we released in 2018 called Take Me Home.
You’ve had new singles come out pretty regularly in the last five years or so. Is there any new stuff in the works?
The short answer is no, but if you’d asked me in 2018, before we started recording that EP, I would have told you the same thing. In other words, I don’t know – I have to have something to say. The band needs also to be in a writing binge type of situation. Then we all gather at the rehearsal space and we start goofing around with a bunch of ideas and eventually something comes out.
However, it’s technically, logistically and financially very difficult because it’s super expensive to do that. So we have to be pretty darn sure that we really have something new to say before we embark on that process because it’s a lot of work. We all have lives outside of the band, so we have to make sure that we can take the time to do it correctly.
At least three quarters of whatever we play during the show is stuff that dates back to the 80s. That’s what people come to see us for. Yes, they absolutely enjoy when we do those two songs I was talking about from Black Dog There, “So Beautiful” and “Hell on Earth”. They’re absolute killers on stage. But I’m perfectly content just playing shows and maybe not that much writing new stuff in the studio.
The Box is playing November 30th at The Brass Monkey, 250 Greenbank Rd at 8pm. The show is 19+. Tickets are available online for $37.88
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