Interview
Interview
Stage Times: PUP
Steve Sladkowski talks zombies, empty rooms, the tour that almost killed PUP, and the gig memories that last
Toronto punks PUP are notoriously hard tourers. They named their second album, 2016’s The Dream Is Over, after what vocalist Stefan Babcock’s doctor told him when he wrecked his vocal cords after too many gigs. On that album, there’s a track about becoming murderously irritated by his bandmates called ‘If This Tour Doesn’t Kill You, I Will’. In the nine years since then, PUP have gotten older and more mature, played to bigger crowds, and learned how to tour without wanting to throttle each other.
“Stefan and I were talking about this the other day – we met for the first time in 2010, so we’ve known each other 15 years,” says guitarist Steve Sladkowski, speaking from his home in Toronto. “I’ve known [drummer] Zack [Mykula] and [bassist] Nestor [Chumak] longer than that, we went to high school together. So there’s always gonna be that almost familial undercurrent. [But] Nestor has two kids, and I’m married now – life happens. I think this year we have over 60 show days, and yeah, that’s hard. But that’s not as crazy as it was when we were doing three times that in a year.”
PUP’s newest album, Who Will Look After The Dogs?, reflects this marginally more settled version of PUP. That’s not to say they’re relaxed now – the album is still packed full of the manic, hooky, raucous punk they’ve always done so well, while Babcock reflects on the end of his relationship with trademark self-loathing wit. Tracks such as ‘Paranoid’ and ‘Get Dumber’ are classic PUP, but on other songs such as ‘Concrete’, ’Hallways’ and ‘Cruel’, you hear them taking their foot off the gas and feeling out new shapes of their sound.
PUP - Get Dumber (feat. Jeff Rosenstock) (Official Video)
“I think a big part of it is realising the band works the best when the four of us are trying to do things that we like or that we feel are interesting,” says Sladkowski. “Any time we’ve ever tried to be like, ‘Maybe if we write a song like this, it’ll get played on some radio show’, or, ‘This’ll be the music video that people think is awesome and goes viral’ – that’s just such a useless way of thinking.”
“We’re already kind of unhappy people to begin with,” he adds with a laugh, “so any way we can try and just enjoy ourselves when we’re working on music, that is the most important thing. And if it connects with people, that’s even better.”
Their UK tour in May will be their first one post album release – and there’s a special relationship between PUP and their fans on this side of the Atlantic, having played here since their earliest days. As we look forward to that, Sladkowski talks us through some of the most memorable PUP moments over the years.
The gig that made you want to play music
There are probably two. One of the first concerts I ever saw was blink-182 on the Mark, Tom and Travis Show tour, so it’s way back, like 2001 or 2002. And Bad Religion opened. I was probably 13 – so I was kind of a perfect age for that – and I thought, “whoa, they have the cross and it’s slashed! Punk is so cool, dude!” And then, I really loved Oasis as a kid. And I got to see them I think four times before they broke up. It was sort of after Be Here Now, kind of in that Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants, Heathen Chemistry era – so I got to see them at slightly more intimate venues. I think that was the first time seeing a rock band. Like cool denim and sunglasses, that whole thing. Also, my mum was really good friends with a guy in a band locally; she played on a softball team that he was on. They were called the Rheostatics, they were a Toronto band. I got to see them, and just getting to know a guy who actually was in a band, that was kind of a cool thing.
The first
My first gig would have been at a community hall or a community centre. I would have been just starting high school, so right around the time I would have seen blink-182 – 2002, maybe 2003. I think someone’s parents booked the town hall so everyone’s little garage band, our ska-punk band who idolised The Aquabats, could play. And then PUP’s first gig… we played a little bit under an old name here and there from 2010 to 2012. But that was kind of a different thing – we had auditioned a piano player, there was acoustic guitar. Some of the songs were starting to take shape but it was a different thing. So that first gig [as PUP] would have been sometime in 2012. It would have been somewhere in Toronto. In all likelihood a venue that doesn’t exist anymore, because that’s kind of the nature of Toronto, it’s a hellscape of gentrification. I think it would have been some small 100-cap venue or something. It’s funny, you’d think I would remember that one. But it is wild, to think this is like, year 12 of PUP. And closer to year 15 of the four of us in some formation writing and playing songs together.
The biggest
PUP "Reservoir" + "Sabotage" (Beastie Boys Cover) LIVE @ FEST 14 (Gainesville, FL)
For headline shows, probably in Toronto, or New York maybe. That would have been recently. Like Terminal 5 in New York, or we did Echo Beach [in Toronto], which is an outdoor venue that’s no longer open. And then that most recent tour we did supporting Sum 41 in Canada, we did a couple of those venues that were somewhere between 16 and 18,000. Which was a lot. Festivals, I think is kind of a different thing. Festivals you can never tell. Sometimes it feels like there are 10,000 people there, sometimes, who knows. But we’ve had really great times at Riot Fest in Chicago, and some of those tents at Reading & Leeds or Download. Those feel pretty big. But with outdoor shows it’s a little hard to tell.
How does it feel to play to such a big space, when I feel like PUP plays the kind of music that works best in a really tiny in-your-face environment?
Yeah, it’s funny you say that. I actually think the way it goes over the best in those larger spaces is if we treat it like it’s a small club. Obviously there’s no way to replicate a tiny little box where you can taste the sweat of other human beings – that is a uniquely wonderful and disgusting experience – but you can bring that attitude and energy to a larger space. A lot of the time, especially when you’re opening for someone, the vast majority of the people there have never heard of you. I would say probably 20%, if we were lucky, every night had heard of us. So you just kinda have to be like, “what would this band be if we were headlining?” Whether that’s kind of being snarky, or being a little bit standoffish in like a fun and joking way… it’s just trying to bring energy and not really talk too much. We would come out and Stefan would say, “Hey, we’re PUP, we’re from Toronto, what’s up you freaks, we’re gonna play for as long as possible, we’re not gonna say very much, here we go.”
You can’t tailor what you do or who you are too much in an environment that’s unfamiliar to you. I think it’s the same as trying to change your songwriting process, in thinking any change will make something more likeable or connect in a different way – you’re chasing something that you’ll never be able to grab on to. It’s much easier and much smarter, in my opinion, to do the thing that the band does well, and just allow that to be the thing that makes an impression on people one way or another. Either they’ll think “this band’s really cool”, or “this sucks”. Either way we elicit a reaction, and that’s all that I can hope for. Obviously I want people to like the band, but just give me something visceral, you know?
The smallest
PUP: Tiny Desk (Home) Concert
We were on tour once in Canada – this was really early, maybe our first ever Canadian tour. And we played in Prince Edward Island, which is the smallest province in Canada. We got our set time on the day sheet and we’re like, oh, cool, it seems really early, but whatever, that’s fine. The city’s called Charlottetown, and we’re playing this little club – it was like a bar-restaurant with a stage basically. We went on stage and it was still bright outside. It’s a pub so there was light streaming in, and there were maybe 10 or 15 people there. And we were thinking, “what is happening?”. It was an outlier on that tour. We were the first band every night, so we weren’t expecting to play to a lot of people, but most of the rooms were a pretty good size. You could probably fit about 300 people in that bar. And we found out that the promoter had put the time for the doors on the posters that had been postered around town after our set time. So only a handful of people who maybe followed us on Twitter or something saw that we were playing at the right time.
And then once, on our first big US tour, we played in Phoenix, and we played to maybe eight or nine people. We just invited everyone up on the stage with us, and they just stood on the stage while we played. And the other band we were touring with was a band from Montréal called Solids who are a two-piece, and they did the opposite, they just pulled everything onto the floor and they played on the floor.
We’ve definitely played to some empty rooms. This is the kind of stuff that I think people need to realise. Most bands that get to the point where anyone buys tickets have eaten such a titanic amount of shit, so many times.
The best
Photo by Lorne Thomson/Redferns
Oh, man, that’s so hard. There’s so many. That first night with Sum 41 at the arena that I grew up seeing the Toronto Raptors and the Toronto Maple Leafs at, that was such a surreal experience. Selling out the Roundhouse is up there for sure. I remember just being like, holy shit. Like, I’m playing the Roundhouse. This is where the photo of London Calling was taken! You know, you think you’re not gonna be affected by the history of certain places. And then you go, “oh no, I’m actually glad that I am”. I don’t ever wanna get to a place of taking for granted that you get to play in all these really important and famous and beautiful places.
And then, I think any time we get to play in a new place, that’s always a favourite for me. There’s just something about it that you can’t replicate. So we got to play in Poland for the first time, or we played in Zagreb in Croatia for the first time. This year we get to play in New Zealand. Those to me are always really memorable. As much as I can’t remember the first time the band played in Toronto, I’ll always remember playing at The Miller, this little bar in London Bridge, for the NME Awards. Or we played the Soup Kitchen in Manchester. Little stuff like that, to me I find memorable. But I guess it’s hard to pick just one.
The worst
The Vans Warped Tour, I think that would be overall worst experience.
As PUP heads will know, you guys wrote ‘Familiar Patterns’ about your experience on the Warped Tour.
PUP - Familiar Patterns
Yeah. I think it was sold to us very creatively. Which was like, “oh, people buy tons of merch, whatever”. And we didn’t do ourselves any favours by electing to do it in a van. It was not a tour that was sensible to do in a van, but there were a handful of us who did it. So a lot of overnight drives, a lot of sleeping in Walmart parking lots. There was just rampant platforming of the worst elements of humanity. Misogyny, homophobia, that sort of entitlement, ugliness and shitty vibes. Like, not to be too reductive, but it was just sinister. And weird. And bad. And shortly thereafter it was gone. Sometimes we joke we were almost like the Grim Reaper. Like, if we were getting booked on a festival, you could tell that within a couple of years the festival might be in trouble! It’s like that meme of Death knocking on the next door. That’s what we felt like with festivals that were shitty.
But yeah, it was one of those experiences where if I had to think at all positively about it… A, I think we wrote a great song. But B, it did really teach us a lot about trusting each other and relying on each other in moments where things were really, really tough. And realising if the band was at all going to be something that was viable, it was important to prioritise the interpersonal dynamics and the interpersonal relationships ahead of virtually everything else. I think we came out of that experience on the Warped Tour certainly psychologically and physically damaged, but in a way that we understood if we were ever gonna do anything with this band in a grander sense, it would be because the four of us looked out for each other. And that was probably the only way we got through it, just an open acceptance of that.
The weirdest
The weirdest gig… a lot of them are just in weird places. But a weird venue is really just a weird venue. If it’s a show, that’s actually kind of fun. Like we played in a bunker in Dunkirk once, which was crazy. And Em from Nervus gave me a stick-and-poke in there. It was great, super fun.
In Montréal once… I hadn’t thought about this gig, and then I was going through some photos to try and find some stuff, and I came across this set of photos from when we played in Montréal. This would have been pre-pandemic for sure, so 2017 or 2018 maybe. In downtown Montréal, they have Quartier des Spectacles. It’s where the symphony hall is and where the film festival happens, and it’s all right downtown, near Old Montréal. And there’s this beautiful, giant outdoor stage, where during the summer and into the fall, they’ll do outdoor production. I think it can fit like, 50,000 – it’s enormous. And one of the last events they have every year is this thing, just before Halloween, called Montréal Zombie Walk. And it is basically as advertised. It’s a bunch of people in zombie cosplay, like The Walking Dead basically, and they walk around Montréal, and it ends in Quartier des Spectacles for a performance. And for some reason we were playing. We do this whole bit of speaking bad French when we’re in French-speaking places, where we say “Bonjour, nous sommes Le Petit Chien”… But we’re playing and we’re doing this whole bit, and it’s just like a bunch of random people who know that there’s a free show, and then we look out and like 80% of the crowd are dressed as zombie. And we just thought “Does anybody know our band? Anyone here?” You know, maybe it’s, again, 10 – 20% of this crowd. Yeah, so Montréal Zombie Walk is definitely up there. That’s gotta be the weirdest one.
Photo credit: David A. Smith / Contributor
