City and Colour: Of Space And Time

                                                                                Photography: Ken Leanfore

30 May 2012

by Poppy Reid

For twelve years, Dallas Green has been one of post-hardcore’s most unbidden sex symbols. First finding fame as the silvery-toned vocalist for Alexisonfire–until the band’s cessation in 2011–and now on his own, Green has swapped the basketball singlet for a tweed vest and button-front shirt with the more ubiquitous City and Colour.

Green is seated in a fusty, cardboard box-sized dressing room in Sydney’s Enmore Theatre; tonight will be the fourth time in just over a year that he’ll play to a sold out crowd at this venue, and the fourth time he’ll have to accept who he calls ‘the shouters.’

:: GREEN DISCUSSES HIS NEW SONG

“’Take your pants off, take your shirt off, I want your babies’,” Green lists with his eyes to the ceiling. “All those things are not so good to say.” Intriguing are the comments Green was forced to accept when he left the power chords and circle pits for analogue tape recordings and self- deprecating odes to his loved ones. But although ending his tenure with Alexisonfire was necessary to keep both his physical and mental health in tact - “the constant back and forth was driving me nuts,” Green admits – he says he expected the backlash from fans.

“I don’t think they looked at it like I was a different person, I think they saw us as two different entities,” Green says, completely nonplussed. “Last night one girl yelled ‘Bring back Alexisonfire!’ It’s like ‘What do you want me to say to that?’ ‘Okay?’ ‘Go fuck yourself?’ ‘What are you looking for from that?’”

While Green had known his time with the band was over for more than a year before the official announcement last August, Australia was barely given seven months before his second national tour with City and Colour was advertised. “I was doing all this press and when anyone would ask me questions I’d just be like ‘Oh well you know...’ Even though I had already left the band,” says Green. “It was nice having that come out and now being able to talk to the guys and have everything be cool.”

Despite his fans’ struggle to accept the basis of Alexisonfire’s demise, Australia remains, in many ways, Green’s favourite apologist. Before his third and most recent album, Little Hell, debuted at #2 on the ARIA chart and went on to reach Platinum status, we had already over-exhausted all his tour dates and committed to the idea that Green would be the artist to rekindle the art of musicianship and overslaugh fashionistic entertainers and phatic lyricism.

“I do feel like there’s a kinship between Australia and Canada and I don’t really know what it is,” he says calmly. “But I guess we both live in big countries with not that many people in it and we’re usually pretty kind to one another, we don’t have too much of a chip on our shoulder.”

A more detrimental similarity we share with Canada is our struggle to break artists in the US. While a lot of factors come in to play here, namely the sheer scope of the country, Canada seems to wear the brunt all the more, because of its close proximity. But Green could care less; he never broke through the US consciousness with Alexisonfire and his underground success there now is just the way he likes it.

“[Alexisonfire] didn’t really break in America, we were much more appreciated everywhere else but America. I think because we were so close there, some things just don’t cross over in certain territories you know?

“But the shows that I’m doing now are way bigger than I ever imagined that I could have been doing in America... I’ve done it with no media attention whatsoever. Me being on the cover of a magazine in America, it’s like, not even a feasible option,” he laughs. “No press write about me, but I’m okay with that. My thing is, the more they write about you, the more chance they have to stop writing about you.”

Green speaks with equal appetence and nonchalant composure, completely aware of his envied position; an ascent pushed solely by the votaries who convinced him to go solo in the first place.

“Certain things come and go, especially nowadays in the fickle world of the Internet where people’s attention spans change like that,” he says, clicking his fingers. “The City and Colour thing built here on its own and because I came over and toured, people were like ‘Whoa the show’s sold out, we should talk about it.’ That way I also kind of feel that it’s genuine rather that people latching on because they read or heard that it was the cool thing to like.”