Tokyo Police Club and Arkells at Crocks, 25 September 2010

Max Kerman, who sings for Arkells, walked back on stage during the encore to sing with Tokyo Police Club, and there was not a spare ticket in the room. A Thunder Bay newspaper described Crocks that way on Saturday 25 September 2010. Three bands, one sold-out downtown club, and a headliner still touring a record only a few months old.

The date had been public since 21 June, so the wait ran to three months. In a small city that is a long runway for a Saturday show. In between came a Letterman appearance for the headliner and the rest of the summer on the road, so the Saturday in late September stayed a long way off for most of the summer.

The bill in playing order

San Sebastian opened. The Walleye’s review called them two sets of brothers and a friend named Ted, together since late 2008, and praised their stage presence for a band that young. Arkells followed with songs from their debut, Jackson Square, including “Ballad of Hugo Chavez” and “John Lennon”. Tokyo Police Club came last.

Arkells took the middle slot with a lot of their own fans in the room, according to the same review, and that fits their year. In 2010 the band from Hamilton won the Juno Award for New Group of the Year. Their second album, Michigan Left, was still a year off.

A record three months old

Tokyo Police Club had released Champ on 8 June 2010, on Mom + Pop Music, with Rob Schnapf producing. “Breakneck Speed” had gone out as a single in March and “Wait Up (Boots of Danger)” in May. On 28 June the band played that second song on David Letterman’s late-night show.

The band came from Newmarket, Ontario, and formed in 2005. Dave Monks sang and played bass, with Graham Wright on keyboards, Josh Hook on guitar and Greg Alsop on drums. Their first EP, A Lesson in Crime, came out on Paper Bag Records in 2006, and the debut album Elephant Shell followed in 2008.

Elephant Shell had taken the band to Coachella and Glastonbury. By late September Champ had been on the road all summer, so the Crocks date came after a full summer of shows.

Not their first bill together

Tokyo Police Club and Arkells had already shared a stage that summer. On Thursday 19 August 2010 they played the Varsity Theater in Minneapolis, with Freelance Whales also on the bill. Nobody billed the Thunder Bay night as a reunion, but two bands that had met on the road once already were not strangers on Cumberland Street.

Arkells take their name from a street in Hamilton’s Westdale neighbourhood, near McMaster University, where the members lived and rehearsed. Kerman and the guitarist Mike DeAngelis met at a McMaster welcome-week event. Earlier in 2010 the band opened for Them Crooked Vultures at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, a bigger room than any club in northwestern Ontario.

Where the two bands went next

Michigan Left arrived in 2011, and it and Jackson Square both went gold in Canada. Tokyo Police Club kept releasing records through the decade, Forcefield in 2014 and TPC in 2018. In November 2014 the two acts were on a bill together again, on Forcefield tour dates that included Buffalo.

The band announced in January 2024 that it would stop, and played four last shows at History in Toronto that November. A sold-out Saturday in Thunder Bay fourteen years earlier sits near the front of that long run.

A Saturday at Crocks

Crocks stood at 16 Cumberland Street South, in the downtown core close to Lake Superior. A Saturday there could mean a live act first and a dance floor later, and this one belonged to the bands. Other nights from that season are gathered on the shows page, and more rooms are on the venues page.

The Walleye headed its review “Crocks Rocks”, the sort of headline a local paper writes when a crowd has been good. Its closing detail was the encore, a singer from one band borrowed by another for the last song of a full house.