Flying Fox and the Hunter Gatherers get their road legs back after brief band break

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If you were among the handful of people at the Tongue N Groove last  summer for an unusual show full of horns and monsters and horny monsters from Winnipeg’s Flying Fox and the Hunter Gatherers, you can expect more of the same when they return to Lethbridge to play the Slice, March 25. If you haven’t  seen them, you are in for a treat. The band is getting their road legs back after a brief break. This tour is taking them west from Regina to Vancouver and back through Saskatoon. Then they are gearing up for a massive Canadian tour in the summer.


Flying Fox and the Hunter Gatherers return to Lethbridge, March 25. Photo by Richard Amery“We were busy with non -band related things. Half the band got married last year and we needed to settle down and take a break anyway because we hadn’t had a day off in two years, so this tour is  sort of picking up the pace again,” said Jesse Krause, the band’s lead singer/ guitarist and violinist.


He is looking forward to being back on the road.
“My day job is teaching guitar to mostly children. So most of my day is spent  in a room with one child, so I’m trading that for a smelly van with six guys who act like children,” laughed lead singer/ guitarist Jesse Krause.
 The band recorded a rock opera or ‘sound drama,’ of popular children’s book ‘Where the Wild Things Are,” which incorporates a variety of crazy costumes into the live show.
“We don’t wear the costumes for the rest of the set. We ease the audience into it, so by the time we put them on, they say ‘oh yeah, that makes sense,’” Krause said.


 They recruited a couple friends in theatre to design the costumes for them for ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ based on the pictures in the book.
“We were looking at Faust and the Search for the Northwest Passage and deeper things like that, but thought  that might be too demanding for a show so we decided to do a smaller production, — ‘Where the Wild Things Are.’  It’s a whole 45 minute long rock opera. There’s a 10 sentences in the book,” he said.


 He could’t put a finger on why they wanted to do a rock opera.
“I don’t think we’ve ever asked ourselves that, it just seemed like the right thing to do. We we are all involved in a production of Jesus Christ Superstar so that whetted our appetite to do something like this,” he said.


“ Generally people aren’t used to listening to something that long. People don’t listen to symphonies as much as they used to,” he said.
 So will they tackle Faust?
“We’re not sure what we’re going to do next. Maybe after 20 more years when we have the life experience to fully appreciate something like that,” he said.
 In the meantime they are focussing on the upcoming tours and  beginning writing.
“ More people coming out would be great, we‘re hoping the people who came to see us at the Tongue N Groove were thrilled, pleased, impressed, one of those words anyway, and will tell their friends,” he said.

— By Richard Amery, L.A. Beat Editor
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 20 March 2012 11:28 )