Rock

White Lace and KISS for luck

PUBLISHED IN THE GLOBE & MAIL IN 1995 FANS / Some want to being a lifetime commitment at a rock convention   BY NICK KREWEN   Toronto   Like most impressionable music-starved teenagers growing up in the mid-seventies, Harold Gagnon spent his evenings after school in his suburban Montreal home huddled in his room. Cranking up his stereo as loud as his parents would permit, he’d spend countless hours daydreaming…


Matthew Sweet

  NICK KREWEN Hamilton Spectator Thursday, July 13, 1995     Somewhere deep inside Matthew Sweet, there’s a young filmmaker just waiting to escape. “It’s something I’m thinking more and more about,” concede the singing and songwriting native of Lincoln, Nebraska over the phone from Los Angeles digs. “I’m thinking of getting involved in making a movie, some way some day. I haven’t really figured out what my place is…


Roadside Hip

PUBLISHED IN THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR Thursday, July 13, 1995   NICK KREWEN   Gord Downie really likes Hamilton. In fact, when the 31-year-old singer of The Tragically Hip and his wife were looking for a new locale to live a few years back, they almost moved here. “I know a lot of good people there,” said Downie Monday during a rare phone interview from outside The Hip’s Kingston rehearsal space….


Much-Travelled Mike Watt Gets Help From Famous Friends

PUBLISHED IN THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR APRIL 27, 1995   BY NICK KREWEN Ball-hog or Tugboat? Mike Watt, the legendary the bass-playing linchpin who anchored San Pedro underground collage masters Minutemen for six years and followed it up with flannel rocking fIREHOSE for seven, has named his first solo album after one of his favorite armchair hobbies: wrestling. “It’s the only TV I watch, besides Soul Train,” said Watt, recently in…


Radiohead finding its honey with “Creep”

    NICK KREWEN The Hamilton Spectator April 6, 1995   Being ignored at home was the best thing that ever happened to England’s Radiohead. Unlike other Johnny-come-latelys of the British pop scene, the five members of Radiohead weren’t former plastic surgeons who got bored with their professions, nor are they the byproduct of some horrible laboratory accident. They’re simply a handful of normal school friends from Oxford who practiced…