His impressions of life on the North Coast aren’t fond, his thoughts those of someone who stepped away from a path that could have led to a very different result.
Nick Thorburn lived in Prince Rupert for six years, leaving town when he was thirteen back in 1995, shortly after the murder of Trgyve Magnusson, a visiting fisherman from Point Roberts, Washington who was brutally killed at age 34 in one of the darkest of moments for this city.
Magnusson’s murder at the hands of five youth, sparked much soul searching in Prince Rupert and still to this day is one of the least talked about events in the city’s history, a night of brutality that left a widow and three children behind wondering how such a horror could take place and leaving one young person wondering how he managed to avoid getting caught up in that spiral of violence.
Thorburn as we learn through a nationally distributed story was friends with one of the killers, and the impact of that friendship and where it may have led him, has apparently stayed with him and haunted him for these thirteen years since that night in July of 1995 .
His memories of the sub-culture of youth that he ran with at the time will be a difficult one for many in our area to digest, a descriptive narrative of blatant disregard for life and sense of hopelessness that he believes stalks many of B. C.’s isolated and resource based communities.
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Thorburn’s thoughts were carried across the country through the Canada.com service, part of a review of his band Islands and a new recording which is receiving strong reviews for the most part and favourable comparisons with the likes of Arcade Fire and Wolf Parade two rising stars in the music world.
The bulk of the article refers to the new recording Arm's Way, but a good portion of it is tied up with a single called “Pieces of You”, where those events of thirteen years ago provided the genesis of the song (a You Tube version is provided above), a time when a fisherman lost his life in a most brutal fashion and Thorburn stepped away from a fate very different from where he is at today.
It’s a song that will stir up some long repressed memories in Prince Rupert, memories that are possibly still raw in this community and serve as a reminder of that troubled time in a very personal way.
Indie rocker looks back to a murder
Mike Devlin
Times Colonist
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Nick Thorburn of indie rock sextet Islands splits his time between two fashionable cities -- his home in Montreal and his girlfriend's flat in Brooklyn.
But one of the more intriguing songs on his group's second effort, Arm's Way, has its roots in his troubled years in a B.C. coastal community.
Thorburn, 26, began writing songs while attending Carihi secondary school in Campbell River, and continued to spin musical tales after moving east to Montreal in 1999, first under the moniker The Unicorns, and later, Th' Corn Gangg.
Both groups gave way in 2005 to his current project, the critically lauded combo Islands.
Thorburn has written of his Vancouver Island roots at various points in his career -- some of Islands' cover artwork is also a nod westward -- but never this cleverly; the Arm's Way song Pieces of You involves the troubled six years he spent in Prince Rupert, and a vicious murder that occurred there in 1995.
Thorburn, then just 13, and his family moved back to Campbell River right around the time that five youths, aged 13 to 16, were charged with second-degree murder for a vicious, random killing of a local fisherman. The case shook Thorburn to his core; he was friendly with one of the killers.
It took Thorburn years to process the murder, but his wariness subsided. It was difficult to write about such a painful time, but reaffirming in a way, he admits.
"I'm not saying I would have been [part of the murder], but I was definitely in with a different kind of crowd that had no regard for human beings. If we had stayed in Prince Rupert, I would have been a completely different person."
He is still coming to terms with the successful man he has become. Last year, Islands put the cap on a string of positive notices (which put the group near the vortex of fellow Montreal indie all-stars Arcade Fire and Wolf Parade) by signing to label Anti-Records, home to Tom Waits, Nick Cave and Merle Haggard. The label will release Arm's Way on May 20.
Critics have noticed a distinct theatrical influence in the band's baroque pop. Thorburn, who performed for years under the stage name Nicholas "Neil" Diamonds, received his degree in film studies and production from Concordia University.
"I never had any aspirations for acting, but I do want to put on a show for people. I want it to be visually rewarding for people. When they come to a show, there has got to be something that is a little different than putting a record on the stereo."
Thorburn, who is joined in the band by multi-instrumentalists Alex and Sebastien Chow, drummer Aaron Harris, guitarist Patrick Gregoire and bassist Patrice Agbokou, has been performing of late with his face painted white, in honour of Bob Dylan's ambitious 1975 tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue.
Ditto for the biggest and boldest moment of Arm's Way, the epic opening track, The Arm. Thorburn wrote the song in the summer of 2006, well into the writing process for the new recording. It was the turning point, he says. Islands had other songs in the can at that point, but none captured the vibe he wanted for the record.
"[The Arm] just sort of crept out of me. I don't feel like I was prepared to write that song. It just sort of happened. When that happened, I took a step back, and knew this was the direction the record needed to go in."
The recording's artwork is another bold direction for the band; everything from two toddlers-in-arms and a DeLorean to Bigfoot and mushroom clouds are buried within the art. The collage (which references lyrics on Arm's Way) were done by a Brooklyn painter Thorburn stumbled upon.
"It's pretty mixed," Thorburn says of the initial reaction to the album's cover art, which includes rib cages blown apart to look like landscapes. "I don't smoke marijuana myself, but I imagine it would help."
Arm's Way is a grand artistic statement, the kind he couldn't fathom while living in B.C.
"A town like Prince Rupert is just a litany of misery. Small and economically depressed towns have kids who are bored and don't have the resources or the means to express themselves in a non-destructive, non-violent way. Thank God I had music."
mdevlin@tc.canwest.com
(The above article appeared in a variety of Canada.com newspapers across Canada last week)
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