Hidden Cameras Frontman Joel Gibb Has A Three-Way With Skye Sweetnam And Music

Joel Gibb and The Hidden Cameras have returned to Toronto to play a World AIDS Day benefit concert on Thursday night at the University Of Toronto's Hart House Great Hall. Though the Cameras have been debuting some newer material in their sets, and Gibb claims to have started demoing and recording, don't necessarily expect a new album soon. First, Gibb has to go to Berlin and hibernate for a while.

"I'm here for touring, recording, seeing people and then back to Berlin to hibernate and make art and be dreary," says Gibb. "Nobody works [in Berlin] and everybody's poor, but it's fabulous.

"I just came from London, too, and it's like a polar opposite. People there are working all the time, worrying all the time. Berlin's just laid-back. Laid-back could mean anything though. Laid-back could mean liberal, laid-back could mean apathetic, so I guess what I mean is cool."

Unless it's New Year's Eve.

"At New Years, they throw firecrackers from the buildings — all the time, at you," says Gibb. "You have to plan out your evening. Just go to where you have to go and don't walk around a lot."

While dodging firecrackers, making art and revelling in dreariness seems ideal for a guy who just had his first art showing in New York earlier this year, what does it say about the gay church folk orchestra who've put on more unforgettable shows than any other Canadian band in recent memory?

"It's not something we can just stop and start," says Gibb. "The Hidden Cameras will be whatever it makes sense to be.

"It can accommodate anything. I would love to tour the world again on another record, but that doesn't have to be anytime soon. We're happy to be doing other things, too. It's nothing forced. We got together, we toured to Newfoundland and we were all excited for that, which is important. You don't want to force it."

On top of the art, which fans of the band will see as a continuation of Gibb's experimentation with banners and music-associated drawings, Gibb is also working on a film and has been approached to work on a book as well. In spite of these creative departures, the Cameras are never far from his mind, even if it seems to slowly be unravelling.

"I'm working on so many songs right now that my brain's going a little bit crazy," says Gibb. "I'm experimenting with guitars, like taking all the strings off, playing them through different things, touching them, making weird noises."

Perhaps some of the strain comes from the bizarre love triangle that recently came to light involving Gibb, Skye Sweetnam and their mutual lover: music. Both Gibb and Sweetnam hail from Bolton, Ont., and both have written songs called "Music Is My Boyfriend."

Then there's that iPhone commercial with the CSS version of "Music Is My Hot Hot Sex," which just makes things more convoluted. The chorus for the CSS track claims that "Music is my boyfriend/Music is my girlfriend." But then, Duke Ellington's 1973 autobiography was titled Music Is My Mistress, so we could give original credit to him. But we'd prefer to start up a rivalry between Sweetnam, CSS and Gibb instead.

When I try to rile Gibb up by talking about touring, new albums and the controversy over this hussy we call music, he quickly reminds me of one simple fact.

"I told you, I'm going to go hibernate in Berlin, read Dostoevsky, make art."

Give it a week, and Sweetnam will be thumbing her way through the works of Leo Tolstoy and CSS will be finishing a daring papier mache project.