If you grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, chances are Vancouver rock band 54 40 provided the soundtrack to some of your life with a passel of hits including ‘Baby Ran,’ ‘One Gun,’ ‘Ocean Pearl,’ ‘She La’ and ‘I Go Blind.’
The scrappy rockers might seem, on first listen, to be an unlikely candidate for an acoustic album, but they seized to opportunity to revamp some of their biggest hits and a few obscurities while recording at Blue Frog Studios in White Rock, B.C.. The result — “La Difference: A History unplugged” which you can see for yourself when they come to the Southminster United Church for the Geomatic Attic,Feb. 2.
“When business is slow, they bring in an audience,” said frontman Neil Osborne of Blue Frog studios. Knowing they were going to be recording there, the band decided to re-imagine their biggest hits with extra instrumentation, which showcased the talents of multi-instrumentalist David Genn who plays piano plus guitar and mandolin on the tracks plus special guests like Daniel Lapp who adds fiddle, octave fiddle, mandolin, trumpet, Flumpet flute, Tuba, peck horn, guitar and phono fiddle to the tracks.
“ Dave can pretty much play anything,” Osborn said.
“ Daniel can’t come on tour with us. He’s the artistic director of Victoria Conservatory of Music and can’t get away from that,” Osborne said, adding the core of the band including Genn, drummer/percussionist Matt Johnson and bassist Brad Merritt will be playing an intimate evening of hits and some brand new songs the band has been working on for a full electric CD to be released later this year.
“It’s a nice departure for us. It’s nice to be able to play some of our deeper tracks that people want to hear. We’re starting to get festival gigs and theatre gigs, so this shows another side of what we can do,” he said.
This tour includes a lot of theatres, but Lethbridge is the only stop where they’re playing a church.
“They’re a little more intimate. We want to get people dancing it up. We’re going to be playing two sets. We’ll be playing the album, a few covers and a couple of new songs,” he said.
“We’ve only done a few quote unquote official gigs, but we played a couple in June and it was fun,” he said adding they are working on new material as always in addition to their other musical endeavours.
“ I’ve been producing albums. The latest is Small Glories which features Cara Luft and JD Edwards. They’re were touring Scotland,” Osborne said, adding he is looking forward to releasing the new 54 40 album.
“It will be called Future History, because this one is History,” he said.
54 40 unplugged play the Southminster united Church at 8 p.m., Feb. 2. Tickets are $42.50.