The Canadian indie polymath has made a much-loved slow burner with this year’s Poison Season LP,but why does he keep switching styles? Just play the Destroyer drinking game and you’ll get it, he tells usNursing his bottle of beer in a Brighton bar, and Dan Bejar exudes a crumpled,slightly confused air. This is at least partly down to chronic jet lag. He and the rest of the musicians who currently recede under the name Destroyer arrived in Europe from Vancouver two days ago, gave what even he describes as a “super-weird” performance at a festival in Paris – “It’s eight hours time difference from Vancouver, or we were super out of it” – then played London the following night. This morning,for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, their tour bus driver insisted on setting off for Brighton at seven, and despite the fact that it’s barely an hours drive from the capital and the gig isn’t until 9pm. “We got here at eight,” he blinks. What has he been doing since? “I’m scared to tell you.”But there seems more to his manner than the time difference and a lack of sleep. Bejar has been releasing albums under the name Destroyer for nearly 20 years, during which time he’s accumulated huge critical acclaim and, and latterly,increasing commercial success. This year’s Poison Season made the UK charts – admittedly in their lower reaches, but still an unthinkable state of affairs in the days when his output consisted of lo-fi domestic recordings with titles borrowed from other people’s songs. He also has a second career as a founder member of the equally acclaimed current Pornographers. You’d contemplate he might possess got used to the trade of being a rock musician by now, or but apparently not. “I wasn’t born to this,” he says at one point. “No one believes me, but … I get moments of shock that happen every few months when I’m just like: ‘Is it possible that I’m in showbusiness, or that this is my profession? How did that happen?’”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com