Polaris Music Prize Gala Recap

09/22/09 12:11pm

by Kate Harper (CHARTattack)

Monday night's Polaris Music Prize gala was all kinds of wacky.

After pretty standard performances from Metric, Great Lake Swimmers and Malajube, Patrick Watson and company emerged with backpacks of megaphones with weird lights on them and proceeded to play a tune from Wooden Arms in the middle of the floor right next to Chad VanGaalen's table. VanGaalen was loving it, as was everyone else in the room.

K'Naan got all inspirational with two tracks from Troubadour, while Joel Plaskett, his father Bill Plaskett, Rose Cousins and Anna Egge got all folk-rock with two numbers from Three.

After it was announced that Monday was Leonard Cohen's 75th birthday, VanGaalen melted people's faces with blistering guitar work from two of Soft Airplane's tracks. Then he got all insane-o on people with his speech after his performance.

VanGaalen — it's unclear if he'd been drinking, but we saw him with a Steam Whistle in his hand the second he arrived in the media room at around 7:30 p.m. — proceeded to say he thought it was "crazy that Leonard's not here," and then kept saying happy birthday to him.

He then said he thought it was awesome to be one of the last performers, because if you screw up, no one notices because everyone's drunk and you're just like "sloppy Susan." There was also some comment about gelatin, but I have no idea what that was in reference to. It was pretty much the speech of the night and people were still talking about it on Tuesday morning.

The cookie sheets reappeared for Elliott Brood's set in what ended up being really loud and percussive two tracks from Mountain Meadows, Hey Rosetta!'s Tim Baker wowed the room with his vocals and then the performance of the night occurred.

Fucked Up, who were joined by 2006 Polaris Music Prize winner Final Fantasy (a.k.a. Owen Pallett) and Lullabye Arkestra, came on stage to perform The Chemistry Of Common Life's "Son The Father."

Damian "Pink Eyes" Abraham immediately removed his shirt. His pants followed pretty soon after that, and before you knew it he was pulling up his boxers so that he had made his own thong. He finished the track bent over so his entire behind — now completely visible because of the self-made thong — was in full view of the audience. The first mooning at Polaris was a completely cheeky and subversive moment that will go down in Canadian music history.

After Fucked Up had finished their performance, the members of Patrick Watson and Malajube started a food fight that sent garbage in the VIP area flying everywhere. It seemed like the intensity of Fucked Up's performance had created some kind of delayed reaction wherein everyone wanted really badly to mosh and start a circle pit.

As soon as Caribou (last year's winner) announced that Fucked Up had won, Abraham bounded on stage and kissed co-host Grant Lawrence on the mouth. A rather excited Abraham made a speech which referenced frisking and free iPods before everyone scattered to the media room for a press conference.

I didn't attend the afterparty, but according to Lawrence's Twitter it went until 6 a.m. Suitably hardcore, considering this year's winners.