Serene by day, wild by night—Black Squirrel Books became a screeching punk-rock haven Jan. 31.
Ottawa-based punk bands AUBE and H.de Heutz, and Peterborough’s Hello Babies played sets among the bookshelves.
Two members of Hello Babies, David Grenon, and Bennett Bedoukian finished off the night with a joyfully irreverent set. Bass player Wes Grist was not present for the performance.
Hello Babies said their name was a reference to Kurt Vonnegut’s famous message to newly-born infants in his novel God Bless You Mr. Rosewater.
Guitar player and vocalist David Grenon said Vonnegut’s “bleak, beautiful sense of the world,” has had a huge influence on the band.
“This is a weird, bad world, and the wrong people are in charge and it’s important to be good to each other because when power is so far out of most of our hands we have to try our damnedest to be good and to be kind,” Grenon said.
The bands literary connections don’t end with Vonnegut. he added. The band was formerly named Tender Buttons, an allusion to modernist writer Gertrude Stein’s 1914 book of the same name.
“We’re going to play a song called demons, which is based on a book called demons, also the Possessed, by Dostoyevsky,” Grenon said. “Sounds pretentious but it’s true.”
Hello Babies performance style involves story-telling, a good amount of banter and joking, and musical spontaneity.
Bedoukian, the band’s drummer, said the performances involve a careful balance of planned improvisation. He said it’s important for the band to make its time onstage “more than just music.”
“One of the things that we’re like, fairly aware of is that most people don’t understand what we’re doing so anything we can do to . . . show that we’re having fun ourselves, that’s what we care about,” he said.
Grenon said humour and absurdity is important to his band’s music and performance. This is apparent in everything from their song choice to their choice of clothing.
“It’s really important to be silly and I like wearing dresses,” Grenon said.
He said he has a hard time pinning down what genre or musical tradition they fit into.
“I would go with heavy whimsy. It’s whimsical, we’re silly but it’s also like, really loud and can be pretty serious.”
Bass player and vocalist for H. de Heutz Nathan Medema said this whimsy sound is what attracted him to Hello Babies the first time he heard them in Peterborough.
“They’re fucking weird,” he said. “Like, genuinely strange. By that I mean they have their own identity, they’re kind of working by their own rules. It was very idiosyncratic and very unique.”
Medema said this kind of singular identity is important to him in music.
Adam Strickland, an employee and creative director at Black Squirrel Books, said these kinds of shows are integral in making the bookstore a cultural hub.
He said Hello Babies’ Kurt Vonnegut-inspired name made their performance especially appropriate.
“I think that’s amazing . . . that fits in with the lit scene so much,” he said.
