The Trews' Unlikely Tropical Birthplace

Posted on Nov 18th 2009 5:30PM by Drew Berner
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They may have been born and raised on Canada's East Coast, but the Trews may not have found their maritime pop-rock sound if they hadn't spent two years living in the Caribbean.

Colin and John-Angus MacDonald, the band's singer and lead guitarist, spent the majority of their formative years in the tiny town of Antigonish, Nova Scotia, about 200 kilometres outside of Halifax. But when their father moved their family to the Caribbean -- settling in Jamaica and Barbados for a year each -- the brothers found their penchant for rock riffs in high demand.

"Nobody played rock at all down there. The influence of rock always got amalgamated into the reggae or soca or calypso vibe and Colin and I were playing Nirvana and Oasis songs," elder brother John-Angus MacDonald tells Spinner. "People loved them but it wasn't really part of the culture. Not a lot of people [played rock music], so we would get gigs playing house parties all the time."

That first seed grew steadily, so much so that when their friend, Jack Syperek, came from Canada to visit them, the brothers hounded him to buy a bass and learn how to play so they could start a band when they returned to Nova Scotia. He complied and is now the Trews bassist.

But not all their time in the tropics was sun, sand and surf -- MacDonald stressed that living in Jamaica was especially difficult for him. "I lived in Kingston, which is nothing like the Jamaica on the [vacation] commercials. It's a big, mean city -- pretty reckless and violent," MacDonald admits. "We would go to bed some nights hearing rival gangs shooting at each other blocks away. And there were no-go zones like Trenchtown, where Bob Marley romanticized so much about -- you can't go there anymore. Literally, they're hanging colours from the street lamps and if you're not wearing those colours then you'll get gunned down."

Luckily the young Trews-to-be made it back to Canada, reunited with Syperek and tapped cousin Sean Dalton to play drums and round out the band's lineup. Three albums and four Juno Award nominations later, they're a household name in Canada, but MacDonald insists that fame and recognition play no part in the band's drive to create music.

"If we weren't on tour we'd be sitting around in a kitchen with acoustic guitars, or if it was the summer we'd be sitting around a campfire with acoustic guitars and we'd be strumming songs," MacDonald says. "It's something that's second nature to us. My dad always played, he was sort of playing in a struggling band when he had my brother and myself. By the time my younger sister came along he had moved on, but I think Colin's first bed in the first house we lived in was a guitar case."