A year and a half ago, in the final days of the Before Times, The Burning Hell’s Ariel Sharratt and Mathias Kom were on the far side of the planet, preparing for the release of their newly recorded album, when the unthinkable happened. The world shut down.
Their album, Never Work, very quickly turned from an apropos tongue-in-cheek perspective on the state of the gig economy into something that bizarrely prophesied their immediate career prospects and societal collapse.
Now, after months of sporadic shows and livestreams, they’ve announced that they’ll finally be able to hit the road and fully embark on the tour they began so long ago.
I imagine that in another couple of decades people will be asked, “Do you remember where you were when the pandemic began?” Like 9/11 or the assassination of John F. Kennedy, it’ll become some cultural milestone, a universally shared benchmark used to break up a lull in conversation.
Hopefully, most people will be able to answer that question by correctly stating they were comfortably hunkered down at home with their family and a massive stockpile of soup and toilet paper. Alas, as some of Atlantic Canada’s most heavily-exported musicians, Kom and Sharratt found themselves im Ausland, as the Germans say. Nowhere near home, they were in the middle of an Australian tour when the pandemic was declared.
“In the dizzying week-long adventure of trying to change flights and get home, it became clear that we’d have to postpone everything,” says Mathias Kom. “But we figured pandemics can’t last forever, right? Surely we’ll be fine just to reschedule the tour for November?”
Despite the global upheaval, Kom says that their label suggested that Never Work be released into the world—albeit delaying the official release date to a more suitable May Day—and leaving the tour, ultimately, up to fate (And science. Mostly science).
“The songs themselves were written and recorded in the olden days of 2019, long before the pandemic was even a glint in a basement-dwelling conspiracy theorist’s eye,” notes Kom. “So, while the irony of putting out a record of songs about the precarity of labour during a pandemic has been richly appreciated, the songs are really a reflection of the larger picture—the failed promises and secret sting of the gig economy, automation, tech bros in golf shirts running the world, the quickly-fading shine of neoliberalism, the preposterous concentration of global wealth, and so on.
“Taken as a whole, things were really rather dystopian long before 2020 rolled around; the pandemic is just a very sour cherry on top of the overbaked capitalist cake we’ve all eaten too much of.”
It might have been easy to turn Never Work into an inconveniently timed “I told you so!”, an inevitable outcome that had a superabundance of clues pointing in its direction with Mathias and Kom acting as the canaries singing out in this coal mine. Instead, they describe it as their most futuristically optimistic album yet, even if a few eggs had to be broken for that omelet to be made.
“In fact, ‘Never Work’ is a ’60s slogan – it’s a riff on Guy Debord’s famous bit of graffiti, ‘ne travaillez jamais’,” explains Kom. “So, the record is less a celebration of a future of leisure and enjoyment through progress, the way the Jetsons-style dreams of the nuclear age were sold to consumers in the 60s (and even those dreams usually involved labour—George Jetson worked his space-age ass off for a tyrant of a CEO who continually fired him), and more a humourous, Situationist-inspired refusal to take the whole project of modern capitalism seriously in the first place.
“And I think the record is really quite hopeful in its cynicism, if that makes any sense: acknowledging that life has been made perversely difficult for the vast majority of humanity, while also imagining a kinder, fairer future. The aging lovebird characters who duet in the title track set fire to an old bank in the third verse, but they do it just for fun, not out of protest—the bank is a relic of a collapsed society, just a part of their trip down memory lane.
“In ‘The Robots vs. Mrs. Patel,’ the supposedly evil self-checkout machines eventually join our supermarket clerk heroine in defeating her boss and bringing the entire exploitative franchise to its knees (and by the way, while Mrs. Patel is fictional, Easy Day is very real; one of the largest supermarket chains in India, with corporate ties to the Waltons).
“Even the darkest song on the record, ‘Two Jeffs’ (based on the true story of Jeff Lockhart Jr.), ends with the hopeful promise that one day the Virtuous Jeffs of the world will defeat slimeball billionaires like Bezos.
“Elsewhere on the album, office drones smash up their workplace after learning of their impending redundancy; a classic line from The Goonies is repurposed as a socialist anthem; Alexa becomes the first artificially-intelligent union organizer; we all dream of a future of ‘everything for everyone.’
“I’d say it’s really the most hopeful album I’ve ever written.”
That being said, optimism well in hand, Never Work does address certain inequities when it comes to the creative industries. It’s a complex topic that rarely ever boils down to getting what you pay for and may be the most commonplace disservice casually inflicted upon what almost seems like an entirely separate class of people.
Mathias Kom suggests that the fault here is a matter of perspective on one hand and pure exploitation on the other.
“Musicians, like other artists, are workers—and music is work. But we’re still generally uncomfortable talking about art in those terms, and the work that artists do often doesn’t fit neatly into the understanding of ‘work’ that we’ve all been raised with,” says Kom. “I think this points to a broader, more fundamental slippage in our collective understanding of the term: ‘work’ as effort, tenacity, creation, and so on versus ‘work’ in the much narrower terms of creating wealth via our labour for a relatively small group of others, who dictate the terms and get to decide where the goalposts will move next.
“As for the music ‘business,’ it’s always been an exploitative system in one way or another, because it has always depended on the labour of badly-paid creators who have worked their asses off to bring beautiful, important things into the world. But even more importantly, from the hopeful singalongs of the folk revival to the thousands of DIY punk scenes that rise and fall and rise again to the bedroom-studio geniuses of today, the music business has also always contained the seeds of its own continual, beautiful destruction.
“To put it simply, musicians will always ‘work,’ because creating, recording, and performing musical things can be one of the most transcendent and incredible experiences imaginable. But one day, not too long from now, we will also hopefully ‘never work’ again.”
However, The Burning Hell, after an extended period of livelihood mitigation, has announced that they will finally be able to return to touring. Having successfully help off on counting their “vaccine-chickens before they hatch” for many months, Never Work will be hitting the road, starting with Atlantic Canadian dates in October. The band will also be joined by Kelly McMichael, who will be playing keys and guitar, and for the Atlantic dates, she’ll also be opening with a set of her own.
TBH & Kelly McMichael Atlantic Canada Tour:
10.22.21 – St. John’s, NL @ Rock House
10.24.21 – Charlottetown, PE @ Trailside
10.27.21 – Fredericton, NB @ The Cap
10.28.21- Halifax, NS @ The Carleton
TBH & Paper Beat Scissors – UK Tour:
11.01.21 – Manchester @ Night & Day
11.02.21- Glasgow @ Glad Café
11.03.21 – Newcastle @ Cumberland Arms
11.04.21 – Ormskirk @ Chapel Gallery
11.05.21 – Liverpool @ Outpost
11.06.21 – Hebden Bridge @ Trades Club
11.07.21 – Eaglescliffe @ Eaglesfest
11.08.21 – Nottingham @ The Chameleon
11.09.21 – Sheffield @ Dorothy Pax
11.10.21 – Sheffield @ Dorothy Pax
11.11.21 – Cardiff @ Clwb Ifor Bach
11.12.21 – Brighton @ Hope & Ruin
11.13.21 – Ramsgate @ Ramsgate Music Hall
11.14.21 – London @ The Lexington
TBH – Europe Tour:
11.18.21 – Hamburg @ Aalhaus
11.19.21 – Aalborg @ Studenterhuset
11.20.21 – Kiel @ Hansa 48
11.21 21 – Berlin @ Marie Antoinette
11.22.21 – Berlin @ Marie Antoinette
11.23.21 – Darmstadt @ Jugendhof
11.24.21 – Cologne @ Gebäude 9
11.25.21 – Schaffhausen @ TabTap
11.26.21 – Schorndorf @ Manufaktur
11.27.21 – Munich
11.28.21 – Fürth @ Badstr. 8
11.29.21 – Vienna @ Replugged
11.30.21 – Dresden @ Ostpol
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Interview with Mathias Kom conducted by David Yazbeck for The East.