Ivan Doroschuk of Men Without Hats still dances if he wants to
Montreal’s contributors to the ’80s pop canon return to their hometown for the Totally Tubular festival at Place Bell on July 23.
Some music far outlives its initial day in the sun, and that can definitely be said about Men Without Hats’ biggest tunes.
Though he’s called Vancouver Island home for many years now, frontman Ivan Doroschuk hails from Montreal, and will be returning to his hometown — Laval, actually, but close enough — with Men Without Hats to play the ‘80s nostalgia fest Totally Tubular at Place Bell. Totally Tubular is currently touring across North America, featuring Doroschuk & co. alongside fellow musical acts from the Reagan/Mulroney/Thatcher years, namely Thomas Dolby, Wang Chung, Modern English, Tommy Tutone, Bow Wow Wow, and Tom Bailey and Eddie Muñoz from the Thompson Twins and the Plimsouls, respectively.
Only one of those acts is someone Doroschuk had never previously met or toured with before, that being Thomas “She Blinded Me With Science” Dolby. (“I’ve toured with pretty much everybody else over the last 10 years,” he says.) So far, they’re getting along swimmingly.
“He’s awesome,” says Doroschuk. “He’s all by himself on stage, too. He’s a one-man show. He’s got great music, great visuals and it brings back a lot of memories.”
Bringing back memories of times long gone is exactly the purpose of this type of tour, especially in an age where nostalgia festivals have become big business. Talking to Cult MTL while in Phoenix, AZ earlier in the tour, Doroschuk says fans going to Totally Tubular can expect a night full of each band’s best and most iconic tunes.
“This whole tour is just about giving the fans the songs and the music that they want to hear,” he says. “Nobody’s out there promoting a new album or anything. It’s all a Greatest Hits package, and people are going to remember every song that every band plays.”
Diving too deep into nostalgia can be dangerous to an extent, as our memory is unreliable in the best of circumstances. But looking back on the new wave boom of the ‘80s with the benefit of hindsight, Doroschuk pinpoints that zeitgeist as one that still looms large over the music of today.
“If you listen to the music on the radio now, contemporary pop music borrows a lot from ‘80s music,” he continues. “There’s a lot of the same type of drum sounds and synthesizers and robot voices and all that.
“(The ‘80s were) kind of a fresh start for everybody. There were new clothes, new video, new technology. It was kind of the first era where the whole culture was focused around teenagers. The music was all focused on teens, and the movies and TV shows and the clothing — everything was focused around the younger generation.”
That has translated into fans from that era not only attending these shows, but bringing their kids along for the ride — a testament to the staying power of so many of the songs heard on the tour.
Being able to transcend generations in that way perhaps speaks to how youth-oriented the cultural landscape of that decade was, in ways the world hadn’t seen before. Doroschuk still considers it a good time for pop music, especially the strength of the melodies — at least, compared with the relative “downer” of the ‘90s, though he proclaims himself a fan of rap.
“I love Eminem, but I don’t know how many Eminem songs people are going to be singing around the campfire in 20 years,” he says. “The ’80s have got all these great songs and great melodies — it’s stuff you can sing along to. Every band [on this tour] has got everybody singing, from Tommy Teuton to the Thompson Twins to Modern English. It’s like a huge ‘80s singalong.”
For Men Without Hats specifically, two of those songs include “The Safety Dance” and “Pop Goes the World”, both tunes that feel thematically as relevant today — if not more so — than four decades ago.
“I think people still need to hear the fact that they can dance if they want to,” Doroschuk adds. “Especially in this era of social media where there’s peer pressure on people to conform, to not step out of line. Everybody’s got to sort of look in the same direction. [That song] tells them: ‘Hey, you know what? You can march to your own drummer, march to your own beat. You can dance if you want to, and just forget about what your friends have to say about it.”
Meanwhile, “Pop Goes the World” feels especially prescient given the worsening climate crisis of our current dystopian universe. “We did [it] as a message… that if we don’t stop screwing around with Mother Earth, she’s going to blow up,” says Doroschuk.
“The green movement was starting. These are themes that are still touching people’s sensibilities today. People are still focused on ecology and doing their own thing. I think we were lucky in that respect. We just happened to touch upon themes that were kind of universal, and just kept on going.”
A native of NDG (the Snowden area, more specifically) and the son of two university teachers, Doroschuk’s parents originally hailed from Winnipeg. But Doroschuk himself was born in Champaign, IL, where his father was getting his PhD before accepting a position teaching at UdeM back while they still had English classes.
Nonetheless, Doroschuk attended French school throughout his youth, and eventually travelled to France to attend law school for a year at the University of Nice. His bilingual upbringing was also one that shaped him creatively.
“It was kind of like a slice of Europe in Canada,” he continues. “We were a bit different than [other] Canadians. My songwriting, I think, was influenced by that, too… translating concepts from English to French and playing on words and stuff like that helped my own style with language and lyrics.”
His mom was a voice teacher for music students at McGill, where she was head of her department for 25 years. The Doroschuk household was a “music-filled” one, and his mom would often expose her kids to music from the moment they woke up.
“My mom had CBC Radio on in the kitchen while she was making us breakfast,” Doroschuk says. “When we got home, we had to practise piano for an hour every day before we could go out and play. We had two pianos in the house, so my brother Carl and I were playing piano. My brother Stefan was practising violin upstairs. There was music around us all the time. My dad was a phys ed teacher, so we had music and sports. It was a good combo.”
Doroschuk’s earliest experiences in Montreal’s music scene while he was studying film and communications at McGill went from hearing bands playing daily at the youth pavilion at Expo ’67 to seeing Led Zeppelin, Genesis and Pink Floyd live in the ‘70s.
He’d also see first-hand how much the city embraced genres like progressive rock and disco — a combo he feels he brought to the ’80s table. “That’s what I think ‘new wave’ was for me — synthesizer music you could dance to,” he adds.
Men Without Hats arrive at the Laval show on Tuesday, July 23 brimming with excitement about the homecoming gig, even though Doroschuk has had them on several occasions over the last decade, including a couple of Jazz Fest appearances and a Bell Centre gig alongside A Flock of Seagulls.
Aside from “every couple of years,” Doroschuk hasn’t been back home too often, as he and his family moved out west a long time ago and are firmly established there now. He continues to live in Victoria, B.C., where he’s been based for the past two decades. But you can’t take Montreal out of the boy, as they say.
“I miss Montreal. I miss the culture. It’s a really special place,” he says, calling the city ahead of its time. “(With) the music scene in Montreal back in the ‘80s, there was no industry there. All the industry was in Toronto. Bands that formed in Toronto had to conform to what was going on, because they wanted a record deal. They knew that there was going to be somebody from a label at the show.
“In Montreal, that wasn’t the case. There was no industry. The bands knew there was not going to be a guy with a big cigar and a big wad of cash in the back of a room offering them a deal after the show. It gave them a freedom. All the bands had a freedom of expression that didn’t happen anywhere else.”
author: Dave MacIntyre for Cult MTL
