If you happened to be wandering the Carleton tunnels late Monday, March 30, you may have been surprised to see a group of musicians playing on acoustic guitar and ukulele in a passage near Residence Commons, gathering a small crowd. Then again, you might not – aspiring campus musicians occasionally come to the tunnels to play – but the band in question was Michou, a folk rock group from Windsor who had played a concert in Toronto to over 1,000 people just three nights before.
When asked what would compel the band to play a free concert in the Carleton tunnels – on their day off, no less – lead singer Mike Kargreaves replied "The reverb!" as the sound echoed up the various tunnel paths and back. This carefree ethic appeared frequently in his responses.
"I fly by the seat of my pants and so do these boys," he said, explaining why he chose music as a career.
"Why not? It’s the life I get to spend with my best friends . . . [and] making people happy. That’s a bonus."
When I joked that he sounds like Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie ("It’s a curse," he jokingly replie), he proceeded to cover that band’s "I Will Follow You Into the Dark," dedicated to me.
Interestingly, Karegreaves cited playing this concert here as one of the landmark moments of the tour. In addition to the tunnel performance, he talks about stealing pizza from the cafeteria ("We went out the back door and the alarm went off, so we booked it"), and sneaking into the athletics building showers.
That’s not to say that there’s no competition for memorable tour moments, however.
Consider their tour van: the band and their manager almost slid off a three-foot-tall ledge while trying to drive the band up a hill to The Bunkhouse (home of management company Bunk Rock Entertainment), which would have seriously damaged the van – all on the day after purchase. And then they played at the Sound Academy in Toronto last week.
"It was one of the largest crowds we’ve ever played for," said Karegreaves, adding he hopes to play more shows of that nature, when they "deserve to play crowds of that size."
"It was pretty incredible and it’s pretty stunning, sharing a stage that Death Cab for Cutie plays and stuff like that." They opened for Pat Robitaille and Rebel Emergency on March 27th at the exclusive event with radio station the Edge.
With such an off-the-cuff attitude, you might worry that the band’s growing notoriety would mean the end of randomly jamming in the Carleton tunnels and other such mischief.
Karegreaves said that couldn’t be further from the truth. "I’ll continue to do things like this, even moreso if we become popular musicians. I would like nothing better than to hop on a subway and play for people or come to the tunnels in Ottawa and play for people randomly. It’d be better if we were popular, but the people we played for had no idea."