Dress Up with TOPS

PUBLISHED IN ISSUE 14
PHOTOS BY CLAIRE MILBRATH
INTERVIEW BY FANTAVIOUS FRITZ

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The first time I met TOPS was on a computer screen over Skype. I was really excited to meet them, but sadly I barely heard anything they said because the Internet connection wasn’t very good. Somehow we became great friends and had a lot of really fun and memorable times together in real life, making music videos and hanging out. Today we re-lived our first encounter over Skype on our computer screens to commemorate our friendship, some answers I personally made up because I couldn’t hear what they said.

What were your favorite bands when you were in grade 7?

David: Definitely one of them was Blink 182 that’s for sure. And Tupac. And.. I’m just gonna go with Tupac and Blink 182 for now. Because I had the All Eyez On Me CD and Enema of the State and they were both fuckin wild.

Riley: I had Enema of the State as well, and I had a couple Limp Bizkit albums. Some Kid Rock, Dr Dre, Eminem, ummm, and my friend’s dad was into ska music so I had Reel Big Fish as well.

Jane: I had a smashing pumpkins tape. Also I had a lot of No Doubt, my sister was a big No Doubt fan.

David and Jane, what would a typical high school house party in Edmonton be like?

Jane: A typical house party, first I would get my alcohol, so I’d get like my schnapps or whatever and—

David: There would be like these roving bands of kind of gangster style kids and their whole thing was like getting a Nissan Sentra or ‘90s Acura or like Honda Civic and have it all suped up. But they were only like 17 and they would drive in a group of like 8 cars around with 10 people in each car and they would crash parties and destroy the house and break all the windows and that kind of stuff. And once I threw a house party show and they came and destroyed the place.

Had any of you ever been to Japan before this tour?

Jane: No none of us had been, it was crazy. It was really, really fun.

Did you guys meet a lot of friends along the way?

Jane: Mitsuki!

Riley: Oh ya, on the way to or from Hiroshima to the next town, we stopped at a rest station and then we all went inside. Also every time we went to rest stops we would fuck around for a really long time because there’s so many novel things about them. It would take us probably like 45 minutes to get gas and go to the bathroom and like buy a snack. When we all came back to the van, there was this other person there and we thought it was like one of the tour managers friends but it turned out to be this 19 year old college student and then the tour manager later told us that she was just a hitch hiker, she was just hitch hiking at a rest stop and then she just came along for the ride for like a week, and she would sell merch at our shows and stayed with the tour managers friends. We had some conversations but there was a bit of a language barrier. When I tried asking her what she studied, she said “sightseeing.” She said her major was “sightseeing.” I couldn’t get the conversation to go further to understand what she really meant. But it was nice to get to know her, to share each other’s vibes for a week.

If you guys weren’t playing music what would you want to do?

Jane: I think I would want to be a filmmaker. David what would you do?

David: Riley has to go first.

Riley: I have no idea.

David: I’d want to run some joke businesses.

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