Stars' Torquil Campbell Rants Against Fighting in Hockey, Don Cherry

Stars' vocalist Torquil Campbell and crooner Michael Buble might be fans of each other's music, but don't expect the two of them to agree on whether fighting has a place in hockey.

On today's CBC radio program Q with Jian Ghomeshi, Campbell launched a pointed rant against fighting in hockey which he described as "animalistic violence." The view is in contrast to Buble's comments last October on the game.

"It occurs to me that if you let your seven or eight-year-old boy watch two grown men try to injure each other like that, you might as well take your eight-year-old daughter to a strip club," Campbell said."You are reinforcing every negative stereotype about their gender. You are telling them that violence is a way to solve problems, it's a way to express yourself and it's ugly. And it's got to stop and it doesn't have to stop five years from now, it's got to stop right now. It's dysfunctional and deviant and this country celebrates it and we need to stop doing that. It's really, really gross, I think."

Campbell also took aim at longtime Hockey Night in Canada personality Don Cherry for his stance on fighting. Cherry has routinely shown fights on his "Coach's Corner" segment during broadcasts.

"And for people like Don Cherry to make a kind of career out of talking about this as a celebration of manhood, he really needs to be called to the mat for that. That is really disgusting to put forward to young people that a way to make millions of dollars is to summon up so much rage in yourself that you repeatedly punch someone in the head in the hopes that you'll injure them," he said. "That's sad and pathetic and Don Cherry should be fired for encouraging it."

The singer said the rant was inspired in part after Ghomeshi interviewed Toronto Star writer Mary Ormsby and musician Dave Bidini on hockey violence. Campbell also said he used to watch the game with his late father but doesn't any longer as he feels "traumatized" and "sickened" by the fighting. He also said parents shoulder some of the blame as they wouldn't let their children "watch two drunks beat each other on the street."

"They wouldn't say, 'Hey kids, let's gather round and cheer these two drunks beating each other to pieces on the street,'" Campbell said. "So why is this considered a part of our national pastime and why do people put up with it? And why is it any different than exposing your child to any kind of deviant, dysfunctional behavior and expecting it not to have an effect on them? I think it's very sad and it's depressing."

The musician also described fighting as "serving an economic and a kind of aesthetic purpose in the game," adding it seemed "very calculated" and not benefiting either fighter involved.

"When I watch a hockey fight, at the end of the fight I see two young men who are traumatized. You cannot tell me that those guys - they look traumatized to me. It looks like their hearts are racing, it looks like they're angry, it looks like they're upset. And I immediately think of the children. I now have a child and when my child is exposed to anger, it disturbs her a lot. I don't see why we think this is okay."

Finally, Campbell said one way fans could protest would be to notify NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman as well as the teams' general managers saying, "I'm not going to buy tickets to your games any more because I don't want to expose my child to violence when I don't know it's going to happen. At least in the UFC there's some rules!"

Campbell's comments seem to be rather different than Buble's opinion last October where he said "I think there's got to be atonement on the ice. You take a shot at a team's best player, then you need to pay the price."

Buble, a co-owner of the Vancouver Giants major junior hockey league team, also dismissed the possible connection between fighting and the recent suicides of hockey enforcers Wade Belak, Bob Probert and Rick Rypien.

"[Critics] believe there's a correlation with the fighting, I don't believe there is," he said. "I think there are other things involved there."

In other Stars news, the band are currently working on a new studio album, the band's first since 2010's The Five Ghosts.