One of Canada’s most mercurial artists, Joel Gibb is the lead singer, songwriter and choir captain of The Hidden Cameras. Forming in Toronto in 2001, Gibb and his gang of musical provocateurs have created music and live performances legendary for their raucous, unfettered celebration of freedom and sexuality.

Released on the eve of Canada’s sesquicentennial celebrations, ‘Home On Native Land’ is an inquisitive ode to Gibb’s homeland; it’s a stealthy return to Canadian soil both philosophically and physically. After relocating to Berlin for some time, The Hidden Cameras pick up and head west to commune with musical ancestors and explore the gentle folk sounds of the Canadian countryside. But as with everything Gibb does, there’s a darker undercurrent flowing beneath the Canadiana terrain. With the title ‘Home On Native Land’ being a play on the national anthem line ‘home and native land’, this title questions the definition and identity of Gibb’s nation, referencing the raging debate about repatriation of First Nations in Canada. Ever the master of subversion, Gibb arches an inquiring eyebrow at the personal as well as the political through his songs, returning to themes of belonging and identity from within. As a commanding, provocative figurehead of the LGBTQ community, Gibb inhabits the guise of the lonesome cowboy to his own ends, plumbing the depths of musical memory and delivering a beautiful album of life ­affirming experiences in all its colours along the way.

‘Home On Native Land’ was written and recorded over ten years by Gibb with friends, bandmates and icons including Rufus Wainwright, Feist, Neil Tennant, Bahamas, Ron Sexsmith and Mary Margaret O’Hara. Gibb once again assembles a band of musical accomplices and takes them on an adventure in revisionist history, forming a chorus of voices over a score of dulcet tones and twanging rock. The album makes new offers to the Canadiana genre with infectious melodies (“Big Blue”) and wild hymns (“Drunk Dancer’s Waltz”), overarched by Gibbs’ trademark, honeyed vocals and sighing guitars. His talents as a songwriter and composer remain undimmed, his on-point lyrics oozing with hopefulness, joy and sorrow.

Alongside several new compositions, ‘Home On Native Land’ also borrows from the classic country songbook, reimagining soulful standards like “Dark End of the Street,” and “Don’t Make Promises” originally recorded by Tim Hardin. “Log Driver’s Waltz” is a cover of one of the most successful and beloved Canadian folk songs of all time. On “He is the Boss of Me” Gibb turns the tables and covers himself, giving a classic Hidden Cameras song a proper studio recording, transforming it from an early 4­track demo from 2001 debut EP ‘Ecce Homo’.

Tracklist:
1. The Day I Left Home
2. He Is the Boss of Me
3. Ode to an Ah (ft. Neil Tennant)
4. Dark End of the Street
5. You and Me Again
6. Log Driver’s Waltz (ft. Rufus Wainwright, Feist, Mary Margaret O’Hara)
7. Be What I Want
8. Counting Stars
9. The Great Reward
10. Big Blue
11. Don’t Make Promises (ft. Ron Sexsmith)
12. Drunk Dancer’s Waltz
13. Had a Feeling ‘Bout You
14. Twilight of the Season (ft. Ron Sexsmith)

Within Joel Gibb’s every move lies the steadfast elegance of a conductor. Fervently-tempered, yet exquisite like a floral bouquet on a Victorian chest. Somewhere between Oscar Wilde and Charles Baudelaire, sumptuous, unbridled.

Since 2001, the Canadian has played with his band The Hidden Cameras. In the churches of Toronto he staged the most legendary nights of the city. Male gogo dancers offered a performative space for overturning normative categories, questioning religion, and celebrating sexuality. Gibb shaped Toronto’s music scene at a time when it was practically nonexistent. He was the first Canadian artist to sign with Rough Trade. In the meantime, Joel Gibb lives in Berlin and has found his place, as songwriter and as artist. On “AGE”, he is no longer concerned with who he is, but rather, with how he came to be.

“’AGE’ deconstructs my musical roots”. There are the faintest references in every piece, almost inaudibly miniature, but they are there. Actually, to understand “AGE”, you have to place your ear to the ground and try to will yourself to hear the growth of the roots beneath its surface while closing your eyes and sifting out all other sounds, including your own heartbeat.

With “Year of the Spawn”, there are trumpets, trombones, a French horn, and behind this thicket, between the ghostly overtones, the ice-cold drum beat of Bauhaus’ “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” flickers throughout the second verse. Chilly Gonzales is on the piano. Joel Gibb works like a graphic artist. He engineers meticulous sound-sculptures and collages whose exactitude stays concealed at first behind an aesthetic of extremely harmonious, yet also dreary, pop music.

“Gay Goth Scene”, for example, was originally intended as a joke, as an ironic finger exercise. Now, it sounds sacred like a requiem for forbidden love. The song is already more than ten years old. Gibb wrote it while still living at his mother’s. In Toronto, he even organized Gay Goth Scene shows with friends. Once again, beneath layers of violins and Gibb’s dark baritone, one finds a meta-level that hints toward his childhood. Mary Margaret O’Hara’s voice is also to be heard on the track. The same Mary Margaret O’Hara who can be heard in Morrissey’s “November Spawned a Monster”.

“AGE” is, to a certain extent, Joel Gibb’s coming-of-age album. He retrospectively explores the most diverse shades of age. Age should not only be comprehended in terms of years; its meanings are too multi-layered. Age can mean anything, but above all, age means to assume moral responsibility. It is no coincidence that Bradley Manning’s profile by GB Jones graces the album’s inside cover. We already live in the Bradley Manning age. For Gibb, Manning is one rare man with decency who has acted honorably with regard to his human responsibilities. Gibb presents Manning as an icon, as a queer freedom-fighter.

For Gibb, being a songwriter means writing about what you know and to take on responsibility. Honesty is his supreme maxim. “If I can’t be honest with oneself, what kind of a bad artist will I be?” Age is a manifesto of truth written primarily in F-minor. And F-minor, we all know, is the key of lament and dejection, yet also of longing and a dark, helpless melancholy. Like with Wilde and Baudelaire, it can also be seen with Gibb that behind every flowery aesthetic is a skeptic looking out the window.

To speak of an artist’s “growth” is an unforgivable cliche, but it’s hard to describe Origin:Orphan, The Hidden Cameras’ latest release, as anything but an evolutionary leap beyond their previous efforts. With this album, their fourth studio record proper, Toronto’s self-proclaimed “mild-mannered army” have sunk their roots deeper, branched wider, and gained a new musical maturity–simultaneously finding inspiration from more unexpected sources and creating some of their catchiest songs to date. “This album is a foray into new territory,” says Joel Gibb, the Cameras’ founder and front man, “exploring genre as a theme in itself while retaining classic Hidden Cameras moments.”

Gibb has been spending time in Berlin for the last four years, and attributes at least some of the band’s mounting sophistication to his exposure to German classical music. “Ratify the New”, the first track on Origin:Orphan, for instance, starts with a single droning note, sustained for nearly two and a half minutes before Gibb’s voice breaks in. The single note is a musical device that recalls the prelude of Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold, which opens with 136 bars in the chord of E flat major. Yet European high art is not the only influence on the heady brew of this song about the death of old things and the birth of fresh ones. Jamie McCarthy’s violin, tuned to sound like an erhu, the Chinese two-stringed fiddle, repeats a melodic phrase together with drums and cello to sound strikingly like a traditional Chinese orchestra.

It’s no secret that The Hidden Cameras is Gibb’s baby, and, in some ways, we can regard the band as a solo project. He writes all the songs, sings them, plays guitar and a number of other instruments on record, and designs the CD covers and stage sets (he also exhibits his art in galleries around the world). Since his live debut in a Toronto West End art gallery in 2001, a rotating cast of regulars and special guests has contributed to recordings, videos, and live performances across North America and Europe. “We’ve toured Europe many times,” he observes. “We’re an increasingly international band. Origin:Orphan bridges cities; tracks were recorded in Toronto, but overdubbed in Berlin and London.”

Rather than the simple rhythms and hymn-like tunes of years past, Origin:Orphan features more intricate textures and varied atmospheres, often darker ones. The processional pace, minor key, and dramatic orchestration of strings and horns in “Walk On”, for example, give the song a melancholy, almost mournful tone. The album’s title song is another case in point, its echoing drums, a stuttering loop of sampled guitar, and lyrics that meld existential angst with scathing criticism (“A whore when he speaks/A whore when he thinks”) combine to suggest a sinisterly seductive desolation.

Yet upbeat, up-tempo pop songs with joyful, taboo-busting lyrics have always been The Hidden Cameras’ forte, and Origin:Orphan has more than its fair share of them. In “Underage”, Gibb uses jangly guitars that reveal a hint of Afrobeat to craft a tuneful allusion to the advantages of youth (“Let’s do it like we’re underage, that’s the way to be”). A thrift-store Casio keyboard and a chugging beat straight out of the 1980s makes “Do I Belong?” an ode to the anxieties of life and romance, sound surprisingly optimistic. And the eminently hummable and danceable “In the NA,” the album’s first single, finds Gibb playing every instrument except bass and drums. “I worked more on this song than any in my entire life,” he says. “In the NA” also demonstrates that Gibb’s taste for obscure but evocative wordplay remains as strong as ever, the nonsense syllable of the title, acting as a stand-in for any number of words. “It transcends meaning,” remarks the songwriter. “It’s a variable, like x, y, or z.” (A video for “In the NA” is Origin:Orphan’s first, featuring a phalanx of lab-coated spastics who staff an entropic office in a meadow.)

The last track, the 1950s-style ballad “Silence Can Be a Headline”, forms a companion piece to the first, bookending the album with nods to classical music and bringing Origin:Orphan full circle. “It’s a piano pop song that relates to Schubert’s lieder, particularly his Nacht und Traeume (Night and Dream),” Gibb states. “In a sense,” he goes on, “each song here finds its own genre. All the songs are orphans in that way.” It seems unlikely, though, that audiences will leave The Hidden Cameras’ new release orphaned. Origin:Orphan is an invitation from the band to us, an invitation, as the first song suggests, to ratify the new.

The Hidden Cameras in collaboration with Rough Trade Records, today announce a 20^th anniversary expanded reissue of their album ‘Mississauga Goddam’ to be released on October 11^th 2024. The reissue features features bonus demos, b-sides and live session recordings. To mark the announcement of this reissue, a never before seen video of the band performing ‘High Upon The Church Grounds’ live at Old Vic Church in Toronto is also being shared today. Also newly available today is a HD upgrade of the video for one of the singles from the album, ‘I Believe In The Good Of Life’, watch here.

“I’m so happy to finally make this live recording and video available of ‘High upon the Church Grounds’ as it encapsulates the essence of what we were doing in 2002 perfectly. The song was written in Vienna as I was backpacking across Europe before I started a band or even performed live ever. It was written with the idea of a large band performing alongside me with „drums and bombs blowing up and about“ and a choir chanting as ‘saints’ – a seemingly never-ending song that starts as a humble folk song and ends as a bombastic krautrock anthem. A song about the church performed in the church at the turn of the millennium. This particular performance was in the chapel at Old Vic in the University of Toronto. We blew their fuse with all the gear and lights we were using during the soundcheck. This was also the performance that Geoff and Jeanette (from Rough Trade) attended and signed us shortly thereafter.”  Joel Gibb

The Hidden Cameras burst onto the Toronto music scene in the early 2000’s boasting an irresistible combination of pop and queer sensibilities. Playing self-proclaimed ‘Gay Church Folk Music’ a new genre of their own making and songs ranging from haunted, aching ballads to foot-stomping anthems, the band’s outrageous stage shows packed such disparate venues as sweaty dance bars, art museums, a working porn cinema as well as many churches. Fronted by lead singer-songwriter Joel Gibb, the ensemble continues its musical provocations to this day, with Berlin now as its centre of gravity.

The Hidden Cameras’ second album, ‘Mississauga Goddam’followed the previous year’s startling debut ‘The Smell Of Our Own’, which deservedly gained praise high and wide with it’s breathtaking melodies, inspired instrumentation and explicit lyrics. ‘Mississauga Goddam’ was an exhilarating extension of this and much more.

Maverick frontman Joel Gibb is the band’s driving force, while the number of additional ‘Cameras’ performing alongside him sometimes number more than a dozen. This unpredictability is also testament to their desire to be more than a band simply doing what is expected. They have historically moulded and adapted their personnel and performances, depending on where they perform. They have consistently gone out of their way to play in unusual settings, with churches, art galleries, porn cinemas and old peoples’ homes have all playing host to these eclectic happenings. Inspired by the dynamic art world of their native Toronto, The Hidden Cameras often named and theme their live shows, creating specific banners and stage decorations, assembling their own imaginative stage wear and that of their now legendary male go-go dancers.

Watch a new HD version of the video for ‘I Believe In The Good Of Life’

Tracklist:

1.Doot Doot Plot
2.Builds The Bone
3.Fear Is On
4.That’s When The Ceremony Starts
5.I Believe In The Good Of Life
6.In The Union Of Wine
7.Music Is My Boyfriend
8.Bboy
9.We Oh We
10.I Want Another Enema
11.Mississauga Goddam

Extras:

12.High Upon The Church Grounds
13.I Burn My Seed
14.Music Is My Boyfriend (CBC Session)
15.Builds The Bone (CBC Session)
16.Fear Is On (4 Track Demo)
17.Steal All You Can Motherfucker
18.Divide
19.Dunes
20.Music Is My Boyfriend (4 Track Demo)
21.I Believe In The Good Of Life (4 Track Demo)
22.Bboy (4 Track Demo)
23.High Upon The Church Grounds (Live at the Old Vic)

‘Literate, Baroque, eternally harmonious… an assured classic’ – Record Collector

We are often led to believe that the albums we cherish most dearly are the ones we heard as teenagers. When our emotions are most vulnerable, our cynicism yet to calcify, our tastes a blissfully naive tabula rasa. That theory made sense to me, right up until the point I heard The Smell Of Our Own in 2003 and my various crushes surrendered to a deeper love. 20 years since its release, I am still to hear music quite as magical. 

We are often led to believe that the albums we cherish most dearly are the ones we heard as teenagers. When our emotions are most vulnerable, our cynicism yet to calcify, our tastes a blissfully naive tabula rasa. That theory made sense to me, right up until the point I heard The Smell Of Our Own in 2003 and my various crushes surrendered to a deeper love. 20 years since its release, I am still to hear music quite as magical. 

It’s easy to see how the Hidden Cameras made headlines when they first emerged from Toronto’s underground art scene. There were semi-naked go-go dancers on stage (I was once one of them), riotous live shows in churches and an arsenal of lyrics that described gay sex in ways rarely heard before in popular music: stale cum stains, numerous hard-ons, the fingering of “foreign dirty holes in the dark”. When journalists such as myself asked songwriter and band leader Joel Gibb about such things he countered that we all must have filthy one-track minds. Golden Streams, the album’s opening track, was not about piss play at all, he would say, but building a staircase to heaven from frozen pee. “Oh, come off it,” we all replied. 

But there was something undeniably divine about the music. The first sound you hear is that of a church organ. There are harps raining down golden glissandos and there are backing vocals of angels. Joel’s songs would build with holy, trance-like repetition (New Day Dawning, Shame) and judder to cymbal-led climaxes. His voice might quiver with vulnerability, or latch onto a note of sustained purity. At times it felt as though this record could not have been made by earthly creatures. But if you paid attention The Smell of Our Own was very much grounded in the human experience: musicians preparing in the background, feet stomped onto wooden floors for percussion,the odd slightly off-timed guitar strum, a proudly DIY aesthetic to run alongside Joel and Andy Magoffin’s lush production. The thrillingly open discussion of the body itself – its odours and crevices and capacity for pain and pleasure – is also something that pulls off the trick of being both spiritually liberating and yet rooted in the everyday. 

The Hidden Cameras were political in their existence, yet had no need to write anything as gauche as a protest song. When the album came out, Canada was still a couple of years away from legalising gay marriage: it makes me smile that the band’s statement concerning this was Ban Marriage, a song dripping with contempt for the community’s desire to follow heteronormative lifestyles. The words to Shame – the sheer beauty of the way Joel sings ”pick up men, and invite them in” – artfully picked at the scars left by a repressive, and repressed, society – and still do. If such desires for a freer, more beautiful society was beyond the remit of mainstream discussion back in 2003, it needn’t have been. Just listen to Boys Of Melody, with its 50s doo-wop progression and lilting vocal line. This was music for everyone: gender theorists, avant-garde artists, primary school children, choir groups, the pop charts. 

The Smell of Our Own has been with us for two decades now and I am still playing it regularly, still discovering new things about it. Certainly I have grown to accept that Joel was right about us journalists with our gutter minds and desire for a headline. Play it again and listen more closely. Let the music guide you, rung by rung, as you climb ever upwards to a higher state. You may well reach something close to heaven.