Sea of Torquility
Stars’ Torquil Campbell discusses the Montreal scene and his glamorous TV career.
Stuart Clark, 18 Jan 2006
He’s no Pete Doherty, but Stars mainman Torquil Campbell isn’t without his past druggy misdemeanors.
“We were supporting a favourite band of mine, Trashcan Sinatras, in New York City and nearly missed the show because three of us had been arrested in Central Park smoking a joint,” he explains. “Not being as alert as we would’ve been if we hadn’t been smoking pot, we didn’t realise this fucking kid in a back-pack was an undercover cop. The judge only released us two hours before the show, so we were able to go on and say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we just got out of jail!’ It was our first and last Motley Crue moment!”
Pressed further, Campbell admits that this wasn’t the first time he’d had his fingerprints taken.
“As a teenager I was arrested for buying what turned out to be Darjeeling tea, which I guess puts me on one-and-a-half strikes! The cops aside, the reason I left New York for Canada is that I didn’t want to watch the city being bled dry anymore. The days of it being a truly bacchanalian, bohemian place were coming to an end and as an artist that saddened me. It felt like New York had reached a point of no return and, sure enough, three months later 9/11 happened. While you can never excuse or rationalise those deaths, it has to be said that New York now is a far more humane place than it was pre-the Twin Towers.”
As well as leaving his old musical haunts behind, Campbell’s move to Canada also brought the curtain down on his bit-parting for TV shows like Sex And The City and Law & Order: SVU.
“If waiting eight hours in a windowless trailer for a 10 second walk-on is your idea of glamour then, yes, it was glamorous,” he laughs. “I tended to focus on the $900 a day that was going to get me out of my rent arrears. Of the two, Law & Order was the more fun because the show had just started and everybody from Christopher Meloni (Detective Elliot Stabler) and Mariska Hargitay (Detective Olivia Benson) down really wanted to make it work. There was also a social agenda to the scripts that you don’t get on a lot of programmes, so it wasn’t just punch-in, punch-off.”
©Hot Press 2011. Why be a member? | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy