Stars

As Montreal’s Stars skip onto The Corner Hotel's stage, merrily distributing freshly cut roses, the audience gathers in for the party at which they are all guests. The set commences aptly with The Night Starts Here, and once the familiar duet of Amy Milan and Torq Campbell’s vocals begins, the ear-to-ear stuff is hard to contain. The gang proceed through each of their best songs from their four albums with every bit of heart and soul that has come to identify them.

A friend of mine remarked a little while back that Stars are not a festival band, and his point was validated by their ill-fated set at Pyramid Rock festival this year, where a beer can used as a projectile prematurely ended the band’s show. The reason that Stars are not a ‘festival band’ is because their shows are unapologetically heart-on-sleeve and melodramatic. You don’t have to strain your imagination to conceive of this not being every punter’s cup of tea. However, where this lovable bunch thrives is in an intimate venue like The Corner, amongst their real fans who adore their idiosyncratic performances. And you can tell the band prefers this kind of environment.

Perhaps the biggest appeal of a Stars’ live show is the inclusiveness of the performance; the conventional non-physical distance between band and audience is avoided as the band gives a warm and inviting show, akin to a party as I mentioned before. For example, in Calendar Girl, when Torq comes away from his microphone and stands at the edge of the stage shouting the refrain ‘I’m alive!’, the crowd feels involved, singing along willingly with him. The two lead singers’ banter between songs is everything you’d expect: kind, gracious, unpretentious and just a little dorky, but endearingly so. They take the time to make specific Australia and Melbourne references in and between songs, which is always a crowd-pleaser.

To give another example of crowd awareness and inclusion, Torq, mid-song, spots a young man in the audience wearing a tiara with a feather protruding from it, causing the front man to work hard to concentrate on his singing, visibly combating a belly-laugh. After the song Torq thanks the crowd member for ‘taking the night to the next level.’

Further, apparently we witnessed the very first time the band has allowed crowd members up on stage when, in their encore, a young lady asked if she could dance on stage and the band obliged, inviting another two girls and one young man before commencing My Favourite Book. During the song Amy offers the mic to these fans to echo her in the verses, which produced hilariously cringe-worthy results.

As for the delivery of the songs, a fan couldn’t ask for much more. Precise, but never rigid; as I have said twice already and am about to state once again, Stars put on more of a party than a show. They take tiny liberties with their songs, adding extra life to the familiar tunes. For instance; Amy’s voice is a little breathier in Calendar Girl on this occasion than it is on Set Yourself on Fire, perhaps conveying the desperation of the song even better than the album version. The band perform each song with their whole bodies, there is an unadulterated sincerity to their show that surely accounts for the loyalty of their supporters.

As a Stars fan, to be present at a show of theirs such as at The Corner is to have a wonderfully romantic experience. To be enveloped by their music, to watch the band perform with twinkling eyes, feels just as I imagine a slow waltz with one’s lover at the end of a festive evening would feel. And I know very few people who wouldn’t take that every night of the week.

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