On-Stage Violence
Watching Crystal Castles. Plus: cancel culture capsules
In July 2008, I flew to Toronto to help sign a band to Big Dada. They were called Thunderheist, a dance/ hip-hop duo of the style that was popular at the time. There’d been a reaction against the rather serious-minded, paranoid and doomy underground rap of the early 2000s, and a wave of young artists was making overtly sexualised music about partying, and designed for the dancefloor.
Big Dada had played a part in this by signing Spank Rock – though there was depth and a futuristic thrill behind their clubby, cokey exterior, and I think they were clearly the genre’s high point.1
Those years saw the onset of a globalised music scene, driven by the internet, when the tribes had dissolved into a homogenised hipster template. That summer, wherever you went, everyone seemed to be wearing Wayfarers with brightly coloured frames, bold patterned, neon leggings, skinny jeans, baggy t-shirts and angular jewellery. In Paris it was Ed Banger and Uffie, in London it was MIA and Switch, and in the U.S., it was Spank Rock, Diplo, Amanda Blank and, a little later, Santogold. Much of this music was informed by the explosion of dance-adjacent indie rock of a few years earlier: !!!, The Rapture and co. The post 9/11 doom and gloom was over, and now everyone wanted to have fun.
Amid the sped-up evolution of musical culture, Thunderheist were already slightly in the wake of this new sound, rather than at its forefront. This presents a challenge, because music heads can smell such things, and fashions change quickly. But that July they seemed to be on the rise, and were supporting Crystal Castles at a large, civic, open-air venue called the Harbourfront.
Crystal Castles had been a much hyped part of this sea-change in music, not least because of a misplaced rumour that Timbaland had sampled their track Courtship Dating for 50 Cent’s Ayo Technology, featuring Justin Timberlake. Crystal Castles were also a duo, consisting of producer Ethan Kath and singer Alice Glass. I’d listened to their eponymous debut album, but like many of that era – I suppose of any era – despite some great moments, reality didn’t fully justify the hype. The music was pleasingly spiky – all 8-bit Atari bleeps and digital fuzz – and full of great hooks, but they hadn’t been able to sustain their best ideas over the course of an album. A few months after my trip, they were on the cover of NME, giving a ‘bizarre’ interview in which they seemed too keen to emphasise their street credentials, talking about drugs, prostitutes and rat-infested squats.
My only previous Canadian trips had been to Montreal. That city had felt elegantly scruffy, artsy and leftish, with a tangible regional pride. It was as though France and North America had melded into a city, with all the up and downsides that might imply. I was struck by how many meetings I had in coffee shops, with apparently successful artist managers working on music I’d never heard of. This was, it turned out, enabled by what seemed to be a near infinite supply of government grants, aimed at amplifying and exporting that fierce regional pride.
Toronto was very different: a smaller, cleaner and less giddying New York – which it apparently often stood in for in movies. It was hot and sunny in July, basking in summer and the civic programming of which this concert was a part.
I met Thunderheist the afternoon of the show. Their manager was a Ninja employee, and I was a little worried she might feel pressure to sign them to Big Dada (a Ninja imprint,) that maybe she’d had other plans. The producer, Graham, wore Wayfarers with colourful frames, and was friendly and relaxed. The band’s lawyer was there, as well as their manager. ‘It’s great to have my team around me,’ he said. Did he mean to include me in this, I wondered? Was the label deal thus a foregone conclusion, or was I still an outsider, with more work to do?
His bandmate, Isis, was a Nigerian-born rapper with a bold, funny personality. She had an annoying boyfriend, who kept calling me ‘English’ and seemed like a wealthy, entitled type, and was not to last long. Isis kept doing impressions of her father, in a Nigerian accent, gently mocking his daughter’s potential fame: ‘Oh, I thought you were a big star now?’
Backstage, we briefly encountered Crystal Castles. Ethan Kath stared and scowled out from under his black hoodie, as if daring us to approach, to break into the bubble he seemed determined to maintain around him and Glass.
I can’t remember much of Thunderheist’s performance. Perhaps that’s a dereliction of duty. I know I stood at the side of the stage to watch, the sun still out and the water gleaming beyond the crowd. After they came off, I would have congratulated them and we’d all have drunk beers or shots or whatever was offered, and I do remember they were happy and buzzing.
And then it was nighttime and Crystal Castles took to the stage.
This I do remember: The volume of the screaming, crunching, 8-bit electronics, the intensity of the crowd, and more than anything else, the stage antics of Alice Glass. She wore Chuck Taylors and torn, purple tights, stalked the stage, climbed a scaffold at its side, bent double before the crowd to scream her vocals. She was very thin and pale with a jet-black bob and a lot of eye make-up. There was a drummer too, in a white t-shirt. As the set reached a crescendo, she climbed onto the drum kit, singing from her perch. The drummer didn’t seem to mind at first. But then she was suddenly destroying his kit – kicking it and wrenching it apart with her hands. The drummer, clearly having had enough, stormed off the stage and past Thunderheist and me, furious.
But Glass hadn’t finished. Now, she mounted the very large, expensive-looking mixing desk, which was operated by a huge, grey-bearded, don’t-fuck-with-me type. To his horror, she began slamming one of her feet down onto the desk, like someone crushing a loathsome insect, ramming her heel into its surface, and perhaps even its circuitry, its guts.
All hell broke loose, and she was climbing down and running away. She passed us, catching our eyes, her own looking impressively wild, and ran off somewhere into the bowels of the building. The music had devolved into a low, rhythmic hum – which wasn’t displeasing, sonically. Next came Glass’s bandmate, in his trademark hoodie and a denim jacket. Now, his carefully maintained blank stare was replaced with wide-eyed alarm.
‘Did you see where she went?’ he shouted. ‘Where the fuck is she?’
We pointed, and he ran off after her.
Like something from a slapstick comedy, the grizzled soundman came next. ‘Where the fuck…’ he bellowed. ‘…is that fucking cunt?’
As I remember it, we all shrugged apologetically.
‘I am going to fucking kill her,’ he said, and took off in the direction of the band.
Glass came back, appeared on stage, flounced around a bit, then ran away again. Then came Kath, and then the soundman, and after that it somehow came to an end.
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Isis went off with her boyfriend, and I went into the long, late hours of hanging with an artist until they call time, when you just want to go home, when your face hurts from smiling and your soul is drained from the relentless enthusiasm. I was staying with their manager, Tash, and she drove Graham and I out to the suburbs, where we went for late-night food and talked, so much talking. I remember How Soon is Now? came on the car stereo, and Graham turned it up very loud, and I was grateful for the respite this offered. In this strange, desperate state, its power was enhanced, and I was surprised to have forgotten how good it was.
I slept on Tash’s floor, and took off in the morning before anyone awoke, sending her a text to say thanks. We signed Thunderheist, but despite everyone’s best efforts, the project didn’t really break through. Would it have made a difference if their show had been more like Crystal Castles’?
A few years later, Crystal Castles imploded, and Ethan Kath was accused by Glass and several other women of sexual assault.
I’ve often wondered how much damage was done to that sound desk, and who ended up paying for it. The taxpayer perhaps, this being Canada. Why is it so exciting to see someone behaving so terribly? And why are so many musicians mad, bad and dangerous? Perhaps the latter is simply a consequence of the former.
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Cancel culture capsules
Listening to an interview with perfumier Scout Dixon West, I was struck that bully-mob cancellations were still happening as recently as 2024. Sometimes I fear I was too optimistic in claiming it was all over. Dixon West’s cancellation was carried out primarily by women, she said. Accusing her of being some kind of right-winger, they told her: ‘Good luck selling your niche perfume to women in Ohio.’ Once again, the sneering class hatred aimed at ‘deplorables.’
In the same week, I read Kate Clanchy’s maddening elucidation of the cancelling of children’s author Rachel Rooney, in part by a wealthy, potentially jealous establishment figure (and nepo baby.) The way Clanchy tells it, Rooney was destroyed partly because her union, the Society of Authors (of which I’m a member) behaved with atrocious unprofessionalism and bias.
‘It blows my mind that these people don’t realise how evil they are,’ Scout Dixon West said of the mobs.
Maybe we haven’t seen the end of it all. Some say Woke 2.0 is here, hardened and unmoored from specific fights and mutated into the omnicause - driven in part by young women rushing leftward. Will there be more cancellations yet to come?
This was my first, deflating experience of working very hard on something, only to see it be snapped up by a bigger label.