JONNY play the Drake Underground, Friday and Saturday (June 3 and 4), 8 pm. $20.50-?$25. HS, RT, SS, TM. See listing
Jonny – the duo of Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake and Euros Childs (best known for his Welsh psych-pop band Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci) – were introduced to the world via their video for Candyfloss, the first single from their self-titled debut album (Merge).
In it, the pair engage in an eating contest. They start by using a knife and fork to take dainty bites, but by the song’s end they’re stuffing wads of pink spun sugar into their mouths.
“I’m afraid we ate it, yes,” Childs says over the phone from Blake’s house in Kitchener. “By the end, it was like having a virus – just poisoning our systems with an overload of sugar.”
Besides making themselves sick in the name of art, Childs and Blake have been busy touring since the record’s release. Scaled down to guitar, keyboards and drum machine, they just returned from Japan, start their North American tour on Friday and hit the UK by month’s end.
The record nicely combines beauty and humour, with genres varying from pastoral ballads to organ-driven garage rock. Most songs would fit neatly into the cheerier chapters of either songwriter’s catalogue.
“When we’re together, we have a bit of a laugh,” Childs says, “so it felt right not to have a dark, introspective record. That’s not how we interact. We’re not sitting around having a crisis.
“Both of us enjoy pop, and that was the kind of record we wanted to make.”
music@nowtoronto.com
