During the early days of the Trump administration, punk rocker-turned-Parliamentarian Charlie Angus turned back to music and protest, leaving his seat in parliament to focus on fronting his band The Grievous Angels and launching a newsletter called The Resistance.
Before a recent trip to Edmonton, he spoke to Roots music Canada about what it has been like for the past year in his newfound position helping Canadians from beyond parliament.
Charlie posts almost daily in The Resistance about his worries about a totalitarian regime and how Canadians can prepare.
“This is not business as usual… I felt like Cassandra, saying life is not going to go back to normal,” he said.
The comment was a reference to the ancient Greek tragedy, Agamemnon, where Cassandra foretells the fall of Troy, though nobody believes her.
Charlie’s role in the Canadian music scene is unlike anybody else’s.
He fills his days with blog posts and Youtube videos posted to Meidas Media in hopes of encouraging Canadians to fight against Trumpism.
“I’ve been very inspired to rediscover Canada, travelling the country with The Resistance, speaking up against fascism, trying to warn people about what’s coming,” he said.
‘We can’t fail’
“This is an important moment that we can’t fail.”
Although this sentiment in itself is of the “punk-rock” nature, Charlie described his music more as Canadiana than punk these days, highlighting the ability for the Grievous Angels to refine their sound as a group over the course of the years.
But, he said, “I’ve never been able to separate the politics from the music — writing about working class people, writing about towns that are struggling. There’s a political undercurrent that’s always been there.”
Charlie is a passionate musician who has taken this newfound time to develop a deeper connection to his band, their sound and the art they make in general.
“This band is on fire,” he said.
“It’s the process of playing together and creating a sound that really makes me want to write songs.”
Their newest record, Revolution, is an eclectic mix of the old and new, mixing newly written songs that showcase Charlie’s understanding and knowledge gained over the course of his political career with a splash of remakes from earlier songs they made almost 30 years ago.
“‘Samson’ and ‘Delilah’ — we recorded those when we were like kids… they’re very, very different sounding songs now.”
This idea of reinterpretation is something Charlie holds close. Like great artists before him, revisiting old work is not a step backwards, but a reflection of how far he has come.
‘a lot more freedom to speak’
“Sinatra reinterpreted songs all throughout his career at different stages, and they had different interpretations… some songs are like, Wow, they feel so fresh’ — people are like, ‘Oh my God, did you just write that?’ It’s like, ‘No, it’s 30 years old.'”
Through the Grievous Angels, Charlie is finding a way to serve his community in a better way than just through his political activity.
“I’ve got a lot more freedom to speak,” he said.
“You stay in a very constrained box in terms of how you talk about politics… but now I feel like there’s an ability to reach out, to talk to people that I wouldn’t have before.”
Given the severity of this moment in time, and the federal government’s approach to Trumpism, Charlie believes art plays a larger role in politics than ever.
“Music is part of the fabric of life,” he said.
“What music does is that it reaches people on a level that politics doesn’t.”
The record Revolution is not the finish line, he said.
Instead it is a jumping off point for the future of the band.
“We just recorded the Revolution album. So I’m trying not to write any new songs, because what happens is I get excited, and we start writing songs and we start playing [new] songs.”
What’s next for Charlie and The Grievous Angels is not a new exploration of sounds unheard from them before, but a refinement of what they have already created.
“We have this amazing backlog of like 10 albums worth of great songs, and we’re much better musicians than we were when we recorded a lot of them,” he said.
“We’ve been talking about doing a live album of many of the songs that are big songs in the set, but that are not on any of the newer albums — older songs that really define the live sound in a big way.”
