The Cansecos: Don't Panic At The Disco

Bill Halliday, Gareth Jones, Paul Prince and Dan McCormick — better known as The Cansecos — really know how to mess with our minds. After all, they released their Juiced! remix album before they released Juices! the proper album that those remixes came from. We got Halliday and Jones to explain that and whatever else they've been up to.

ChartAttack: What were you doing in Dublin, Bill?
Bill Halliday: I was working on the Tudors television series.

Doing what?
BH: Visual effects. I guess people here would know about it now, it's on the CBC.
Gareth Jones: I watched my first episode of it last week. Dirty!
BH: It's very dirty. Softcore.
GJ: Great casting. All the chicks are smokin'.
BH: It's something grandma has not gotten back to me about yet.

Is that your day job, then?
BH: It is. This was season two that we just finished up on.

So what's your day job, Gareth? Is it Upper Class Recordings?
GJ: Yeah. I run the label, manage the bands...

And right now it's Cadence Weapon, Russian Futurists, and you guys?
GJ: Yeah, right now. We've released other records before, but those are the active ones.

You don't seem to play in Toronto very much. Do you not play internationally or elsewhere in Canada?
GJ: No. We do now, but we didn't on the last record. Starting this summer we played a couple shows in July, a couple in September, and next week we tour the country. We do the west coast with Small Sins and this side of the country with The [Russian] Futurists. So we're starting. It wasn't a priority before, but now we've found our groove live.

Did you record the new album at Abbey Road or was it just mastered there?
GJ: No, just mastered.
BH: That would have been too much for our coffers.
GJ: That's too much England, too. We record at home with the exception of some live drums that get done at a practice space.
BH: A jam space down the street, around the corner.

When you're recording, do you ever think about holding back or changing something so that you can reproduce it live?
GJ: Not at all, never.
BH: It's not much of a consideration. We play with a back-up track, so it's like the fifth member of the band. And they're always exact. This band member is very, very precise.
GJ: In the end, most of the shit we put on the record is live. It's all live bass. It's a lot of live drums.
BH: The first record was just Gareth and I on it, and that was ages and ages ago.

That was 2003, right?
BH: 2003, no money, an old broken four-track as the mixer, $50 microphone...
GJ: Laptop speakers.
BH: Yeah, laptop speakers, the Altec Lansing speakers from a Dell computer as the monitors. High-quality stuff. We had Paul [Prince on bass] and Dan [McCormick on drums] join us for all the live stuff that we did. So they kinda got incorporated into the sound and they ended up on the record on most tracks, I would say.
GJ: And we got a lot of good gear in between record one and record two. We relied less on computer manipulation to make shit sound expensive and just got really good gear.

So how did you fund the gear purchases?
BH: Working.
GJ: And buying smart. It's not like we're buying anything new.
BH: It's still not state of the art, but it's a good home set-up.

Where do you go to get the good deals?
GJ: Ebay, Craigslist, friends; the black market of music instruments.

Weren't one of you or Paul or Dan in the Toronto metal band, Titfuck Me Jesus?
GJ: Both of them.
BH: They're both metal guys, so they play very fast, very hard, very precise. They're an incredible rhythm section.
GJ: They also both used to be in the band Sully. They were on Nettwerk [Records].
BH: They are two guys who can play absolutely anything.

One thing I've noticed in Toronto recently is that it seems like a lot of venues that used to feature bands most nights are starting to host more DJ dance parties. But at the same time there are a lot of bands that are starting to play live electronic music. Are bands taking back dance music?
GJ: It's all phases. It's going back to disco days. DJs are rock stars again. People want to party. What more can you say? People want to party right now. If that's the spirit of the bands, too, that's where it goes. It's not necessarily conscious, I don't think, but it's party times right now.
BH: In Dublin there's a station that plays dance rock music and I noticed that a lot of songs sound very similar. It's kind of a Bloc Party feel. A lot of bands sound like that for some reason in Ireland and the U.K. But the tempo of the music is so much faster than any of the phases of music that I've lived through. All of the sudden everyone's playing at like 170, 180 [beats per minute]. These kids they move a lot faster these days.
GJ: Short attention spans.
BH: They need it to be "jugjugjugjugjugjugjug." It's a lot of single guitar-note melodies on top of... speed.
GJ: We're the same live. Not so much on record. On record we're more like stoners I guess, it's like head music. But live we're really guilty, too. We play party live.

Is rock dead?
GJ: I think rock's super-alive. I think electronica's become rock. Like Justice and Digitalism and all that shit. They're rock stars, man. The same with a lot of rap, too.
BH: They borrow a lot. Justice for sure borrow from rock.
GJ: Yeah, rock might have a bit of an identity crisis right now, but it's all good.

I was thinking about how in the early days of rock it was dance music. Kids would go see Elvis or Chuck Berry and dance while they played. Then we got away from that, but it seems like we're getting back to it.
GJ: All this shit — I don't know, it feels like something between Manchester and Disco — it's all coming together. Like, live dance rock, big trip-out parties. That's where we are and that's super alive rock shit, so it's good. I think there are some explosions about to happen.

Have you toured much as The Cansecos before?
GJ: We've never toured. We've played New York, Montreal, Hamilton, Toronto. That's it, ever.
BH: And Barrie.
GJ: That was like 10 years ago.

Releasing your "pre-mix" Juiced! on your website seemed to get a lot of attention. It struck me as a shrewd business move.
GJ: There was nothing planned about it, you know? It just happened and we were like, "Well, this is fucking awesome and this is more fun to listen to than the actual record. Let's throw it up on the website." I don't even know how it happened. It just happened. A lot of disco listening this year.
BH: Disco was such a crazy era where they'd have a five-minute section in the song that's just a crazy, almost prog-like breakdown where these incredibly talented and skilled players were just going wacky with it. And it works with vocal tracking. Just throw it on top of that and you're done.
GJ: There was no master plan to release a remix record first. It was done and...

So, for kicks you decided to make a disco remix of one of your songs?
GJ: Honestly, I had a fucking dream that I needed to do a disco version of [one of our songs].

Literally a dream?
GJ: Literally. And I sat on it for months thinking, "That's fucking ridiculous." And then I started hearing disco tracks that perfectly fit with the vocal lines. It just kind of happened. It was a dream that came together really quick, and then it was done and it was good. So we threw it up on the website and people like it.