We’ve teamed up with Ontario post-hardcore heroes Alexisonfire for an exclusive color vinyl box set and individual color vinyl reissues, paired with the first-ever 80-page BrooklynVegan special edition magazine, which chronicles the band’s story from their formation through their triumphant 2022 reunion album ‘Otherness.’ The magazine was culled from hours of interviews conducted with the band and their peers. In this web-exclusive piece, all five current members of Alexisonfire, along with members of Moneen, Boys Night Out, and Sum 41, reflect on the fertile early 2000s Ontario post-hardcore scene that ended up birthing some of the genre’s biggest bands. Pre-order the vinyl and the magazine in the BrooklynVegan store.
Wade MacNeil: I saw a show the first weekend of high school, I went to go see my guitar teacher’s band open up for the Misfits, like American Psycho-era Misfits. I’d been to a few shows before then, not very many, but that was the first punk show I saw that was a little bit larger, and rowdy, and kind of just really opened my eyes to heavy music culture. And the following day, myself and the bass player of Alexisonfire, Chris, we started a band.
Chris Steele: [Wade and I] formed a band called Plan 9, we were a three-piece at the time. We played downtown St. Catherines every Saturday night.
Wade: From there, I just started going to every punk show that was happening in our city, and we recorded a scrappy demo–like an EP–for our band. I would’ve just turned 15, so I was like taking the demo around to all the bars that bands played at, telling them about our band, trying to get booked on shows. I’m pretty sure like everyone I talked to just threw the demo in the garbage the minute I walked out the door, so we didn’t really hear back from any of the bars, so I started booking shows for us at conceivably the only place that would have us. There was like this, kind of like pay-by-the-hour hotel down in our city, the Leonard Hotel. Below it was this Chinese restaurant with a bar, and they’d serve us beers there when we were 15. And when we were in there, I asked the owner if he’d let me put on a concert there, and he said yes, so I started promoting punk shows there. We kind of started building up our own little scene, of all the kids that were around our age or a little bit older, finding the bands that were I’m sure probably similarly not playing at the real bars. I started promoting shows there and was also this Jamaican bar called Palm Grove downtown that also let me put on shows there, and we kind of started playing gigs at that Jamaican spot and the Chinese restaurant. We started to build something, and that’s how I met George from Alexisonfire, he started to come see us play. And that’s how I met Dallas as well. He came to one of those shows, saw us play on Halloween or something, we managed to fit like 150 kids into this Chinese restaurant, it was fucking crazy. [He] asked us if we wanted to play a show with his band–and he was a few years older than us, so he was playing at the real bar, the one punk bar in town.
Dallas Green: Wade was always very resourceful. He was doing shows when he was a kid, like 15 years old he was promoting shows, convincing Chinese food restaurants in St. Catherines to let him have a bunch of teenagers come in and throw concerts for pitchers of beer.
Chris: There was a scene happening in the late ’90s / early 2000s in St. Catherines. We were playing these Chinese buffets and Jamaican clubs and cafes, and people were coming out, there was a good energy. Just from the St. Catherines music scene, we met all of the rest of the guys. Our original drummer Jesse Ingelevics played in a punk band. George played bass in sort of a metal band. And Dallas played guitar and sang in a three-piece rock band. We had occasionally crossed paths and played the same shows, and over time, we–just in passing–kind of got to know one another, just from playing shows together, chats here and there.
Dallas: First band I played in was called Needle Park, we played mostly atmospheric instrumental music à la Mogwai or something like that, but then occasionally we would throw in just a total rock and roll cover. Like we would do “Remedy” by The Black Crowes or “Baby Please Don’t Go” by Van Morrison. After that I started the band Helicon Blue with my same friend Marce [from Needle Park] on drums, and we played around town in St. Catherines a bunch. We’d made a couple EPs on our own in my basement, and we were playing our own music at gigs, and that’s where I met Wade and Chris and George and Jesse.
George Pettit: We were all playing in different bands that had played together in some capacity. Dallas had played in Helicon Blue, I was in this band Condemning Salem, Wade was in Plan 9, so we’d all kind of known each other from the scene. I think all of our bands were kind of fizzling out at the same time, so Wade started calling around and put together a practice with some of the people he knew locally, and that was it.
Dallas: It was incredible because just on the cusp of that sort of whole screamo/hardcore thing getting pretty popular, right before that, the origins of all that, we were able to see a band like Moneen who were hugely influential on Alexis, because they were a band that we could go see that were actually also touring around. Like you could see Moneen come through and play St. Catherines on tour–they’d be doing an entire Canadian tour–and you’d just be like, “Holy fuck, like a band from Brampton, Ontario is touring Canada.”
George: Moneen were a local band in Southern Ontario, they signed to Vagrant Records. There was a moment where we were kind of like, “Which one is gonna break in Canada?” and we always assumed it’d be Moneen. They just left it all out there–I think I learned a lot about performance from watching them because they just would go to the other place. They were crazy to watch live; for a band that was very melodic, they were playing some of the craziest shows I’d ever seen. The whole place would be a mess at the end of it. And it seemed like it came from a place of… it seemed genuine. There were lots of bands that went up there and postured and did things, but they just seemed to be genuinely out of their fucking minds, and that was attractive.
Dallas: All those bands that started around that same time like Boys Night Out and Silverstein and us and The End and Moneen, and us all getting signed… like Moneen got signed to Vagrant Records, Boys Night Out was on Ferret, Silverstein was on Victory, and we got signed to Equal Vision. It was this crazy thing going in Southern Ontario. If you don’t really know what Southern Ontario is, it’s a strange place for a musical explosion to happen. But it makes a lot of sense with what we’re surrounded by. So it was just a really great thing to be a part of. We were able to go like every weekend and play a small town 40 minutes away from us, or two hours away from us, at a legion hall or some rec center that a kid had rented out. And we were able to play for lots of kids every weekend in those early, early days. It was awesome. I think we’re all very grateful for that scene that we grew up in.
George: There were lots of young people with a lot of ingenuity and a lot of ability and when it came to putting on shows, there were lots of places to play, just because any town that had a union hall or a Knights of Columbus hall or a church basement or something like that that you could rent for peanuts, so $100 you could rent one for the night. And then they’d borrow a PA from their school or someone had a PA, and you’d bring that to the show and as long as you had a plug to plug it in, you could bring all these local bands that would come and play. Toronto’s obviously the big city that’s closest to us, but we played everywhere in Southern Ontario. We played in Barrie, Hamilton, St. Catherine’s, Sarnia, Uxbridge, Oshawa, Whitby–these are all these little kind of towns that didn’t have a lot going on, but there was a kid in each one of those towns that knew how to put on a show. Southern Ontario has always had a really strong music scene, especially independent music, in a variety of different genres. It was very eclectic. In St. Catherine’s, you’d see Broken Social Scene play one night, and then like Sick Lipstick would play another night–all the local bands were all over the place, it was cool.
Jordan: That camaraderie in the scene–it was all about networking, and finding your niche within that Southern Ontario scene. It was pretty exciting, and you couldn’t help but kind of get sucked into it because it was so many likeminded individuals doing the same kinds of things that you were doing and it was just very inspiring.
Wade: There was a lot of emo and hardcore existing outside of bars, at like legion halls and Boys and Girls clubs, stuff like that. There were a lot of hardcore bands and emo bands from the States rolling through and playing these kind of like all-dayers. There was a pretty big mix of stuff, like, Piebald would play but they’d be playing with like, a bunch of hardcore bands or something. Both of those music communities in Southern Ontario weren’t large enough that they were carving out their own space, so there were a lot of eclectic bills happening. Those were mostly the shows that I was attending, and when we started playing, those were the shows that we started playing as well. There were a lot of bands from Upstate New York coming through, like a lot of hardcore and metal. The punk stuff that we were listening to existed in more of a bar space, like in Toronto, there were some more specific clubs dedicated to that music community.
George: At the beginning of Alexisonfire in the early 2000s, this wasn’t a popular style of music by any means. It wasn’t on TV and it wasn’t on the radio, and by playing it, it meant that we were committing ourselves to a DIY music scene. And that’s all we really wanted to do at that point. For the first several years of Alexisonfire, we just were touring in the van, and that was our biggest aspiration.
Wade: The music we were playing was still existing in really small spaces. Like all the shows we were playing, maybe there were like 60-70 kids, and the majority of the shows that I would go to when I was younger were that. That didn’t seem like a bad show, it was just like: these are all the people that are into this music in this city. So, I feel like when it started to feel like it was catching on was when people from what we considered “the music industry” showed up. Because we were entirely self-sufficient; we were recording our demos with our buddies, we were burning the CDs ourselves, making the art, putting everything together, one of our other friends who was in another band was helping screen our shirts, I was promoting our concerts–and then people from the “music business” started showing up, which we thought was fucking absurd.
George: Because we had Canadian content guidelines in Canada, they had a thing called Factor, which you could apply for a grant and they give you like $10,000 to make a music video, and we got that grant early on in our band, and we made a music video.
Dallas: We didn’t think that anybody was going to see the video. We didn’t think MuchMusic was gonna play the video either. We just thought, “Cool, we got the grant, we made a video. Maybe a few people will see it at 3 o’clock in the morning.” So when it came out and people started requesting it, it got our band in such a bigger audience across Canada. It opened a door that we just never thought was possible.
Wade: It was pretty mindblowing. There are a lot of gatekeepers that are in charge of that stuff that decide this is not music for television, this is not music for the radio.
Kenny Bridges (Moneen): Alexis helped open a huge door for Canadian bands. When they managed to get their music played regularly on the music video station here, it changed everything. A whole new audience was discovering music that they would not normally get to hear. They showed us everyone has a chance. You can be an aggressive band with strange time signatures, rolling around on the ground screaming and you never know. You might just get on Canadian TV.
Connor Lovat-Fraser (Boys Night Out): Seeing and hearing a band like that on mainstream media helped to bring more attention to the validity and viability of the genre.
Jason “Cone” McCaslin (Sum 41): I had not seen any bands like them getting videos played in regular rotation in the day on MuchMusic. I think they allowed for bands to come after with the screaming and melodic vocals, and influenced people to pay real attention to that style of music.
Pick up the BrooklynVegan-exclusive Alexisonfire box set, individual reissues, and magazine in the BV shop.
Read an excerpt of the magazine here.