The New Pornographers

If you've somehow failed to succumb to the charms of Canadian pop collective the New Pornographers thus far, this is the perfect time to do so. Their Together album from earlier this year is possibly their strongest yet, and the band are headed our way with as many NPs as possible. After missing the last tour because her solo album was running late, vocalist Neko Case has confirmed that she's on board for this tour. Well, probably.

"She says she's coming. That's as much as I can tell you," chuckles Carl "AC" Newman, the band's main singer/songwriter and default leader. "There are places in the world she doesn't like going but she really likes going to Australia."

However, any hopes that the mysterious Dan Bejar might make the trip have been once again thwarted. "I don't think that will ever happen," Newman. "Dan's just weird that way. I don't think that he will ever go to Australia; not with [his main band] Destroyer, not with New Pornographers, not with anybody. I was with Dan in North Carolina recently and he was talking to [Destroyer's label] Merge, basically telling them that he didn't want to tour his next record and to figure out some really creative marketing ideas that would overcome the fact that he's not touring." He laughs softly. "That's Bejar for you."

However, the most notable thing about Together is probably the contributions of the relative newcomer Kathryn Calder: originally recruited a couple of years back as the Female Voice for When Neko Couldn't Tour, the album proves she's now an integral part of the band.

"Yeah, she really had a big hand in this record. With this band this thing has always been that we just go into the studio and screw around: we don't know what we're doing," Newman enthuses. "Even this many years on we still have that we're ultimately a bunch of friends hanging out and playing music. With one of Dan's songs ‘Silver Jenny Dollar', on the day we were mixing it, Kathryn just started doing these big, ridiculous harmonies. So she and I overdubbed about ten tracks of them and Dan was cheering us on: ‘Yes! More Queen vocals!'"

That playfulness has clearly connected with certain Australian fans. "Murray from the Wiggles came to our show last time we were down. He was very cool."

Really?

"Yeah: I was talking about all the old Australian music that I loved and he was shocked that I knew it and I was shocked that he knew it. It was like: ‘but... but you're in the Wiggles'. I was shocked that he was in the Wiggles and he was shocked that I was from Canada. We seemed equally uncool there." Andrew P Street