Where The Hell Did Henri Fabergé and The Adorables Go?

I grew up with friends who were Aggressive Music Nerds. They knew about bands' creation myths and unreleased EPs and where to get vinyl before that became a thing. I had no idea about any of it and just sort of nodded and said “Sloan?” when anyone looked at me for a response. To this day I still don't know if that was a cool move or super embarrassing, but they took me along to concerts and showed me albums, and I slowly absorbed some awareness of what was happening in Canadian music at the time, which, if you know anything about early 2000s Canadian indie, was a lot. I went along with them throughout our high school years to concerts of people who would become famous—Feist, Broken Social Scene, Arcade Fire—or at least Canada-famous, which was the same thing to us. We would hang out in ex-churches and basement bars, trying to scam drinks and feeling XXX-tremely cool about being a part of something loud and fun. Remember when I said I knew nothing about music? "Loud and fun" is what stuck out for me at these gigs, in case my cretinous failure to appreciate what was happening around me was in any way unclear.

But despite my lack of knowledge, even I could nerd out about Henri Fabergé and the Adorables, a gigantic group of musicians from various bands and solo projects that me and my savvier AMN friends loved individually and together. Their gigs were unpretentious, wild, and even I felt like I "got" what was happening, musically. After a few months of starry-eyed gig-gazing, I went away to uni and saw both HFab and the Adorables less and less, though some or all of them would occasionally make the trip up to play the only good music venue in my small university town. As the years passed I more or less forgot about my brush with real music fandom, and the Adorables drifted out of my consciousness. Or they did, until I came back to Toronto four years later to find Fabergé onstage, nude and making out with my boyfriend as part of Feint of Hart, a cross-dressing homoerotic punk rock opera he'd co-written for the University of Toronto's Hart House. I caught up with him to ask what that the hell that was about and where me and my friends' favourite band had gone.

Noisey: Henri Fabergé. That can't be your real name.
Faberge: I have a bunch of pseudonyms. That's the one you get for now.

How intense. Why the alias?
There are some powerful people in my family, and not all of them approve of my brazen activities. Most of the men in my family held high rank in the navy. Admirals, Commodores…we even have a Sea Lord in there. Sea Lord. Like, that is straight up a ridiculous job title.

Sea Lord is a British thing, isn't it? Either British navy or Greek mythology.
I was born in Winchester. I still seek out Branston pickle in every market.

Why'd you leave the Motherland?
Military families move around, you know how it is. My grandmother was originally from Quebec, actually. She worked for The Man Named Intrepid during the Second World War, when the American intelligence agencies were recruiting Canadian women for clerical work in the name of national security. My grandfather had been stationed out of harm's way in New York City by his Admiral father, and when he and my granny fell in love it made sense to move back to England. I think my father had a romanticised view of Canada so he was eager to end up here.

Well, in the interests of not upsetting the Sea Lord, I'll direct any further questions to Fabergé. I was a big fan of you and the Adorables in the early/mid 2000s. Where'd you guys go?
The Adorables were meant to be an experimental critique of the Toronto music scene at the time. There was a lot of buzz around "indie collectives" being one big love-in, so we started as a grotesque extension of that premise: I would recruit new members after meeting them in bars, tell them to choose an instrument they didn't know how to play, and our live shows were our only rehearsals. And it was more of a benevolent dictatorship. Then we got precious and wanted to actually sound good, and by the time we were putting out an album and being approached by labels to join the stream, it felt like the right time to tap out. That colour-by-numbers trajectory wasn't appealing to me. We haven't stopped playing shows, I just don't advertise them that much. That, and I had hand-picked people with crazy potential who were inevitably going to move on. At one point the rotating roster had Maylee Todd, Born Ruffians, Laura Barrett, some of the Hidden Cameras, Woodhands…I think there have been over 40 Adorables. So now I have to put together a new incarnation of the band for every show, with maybe one rehearsal tops. It's exhausting. But also a lot of fun.

Was it weird to see similar sprawling Canadian indie bands of that time period (Broken Social Scene comes to mind…) get crazy popular while you guys just sort of quietly dispersed to other projects?
Those guys are older, and like a lot of bands were focused on establishing themselves as one specific entity. I've never been that interested in conventional rock band styles. There is such a clear division between performer and audience, even if you're out in the mess getting sweaty, you're still going to climb back onto that pedestal. I'm more interested in expansive storytelling, and in giving agency to the viewer to feel like they're a part of that world. After our first tour, I moved to Edmonton for a while to work on a rock n roll puppet show, so that's when some of the Adorables had time to finally focus on their own music.

Rock 'n' roll puppets? Tell me more.
I fell in love with a woman named Juliann Wilding, a fashion thug who was throwing illegal parties out in Alberta in a condemned warehouse space, and who has since developed into a really incredible designer and stylist. We instantly clicked and have been collaborators ever since. Our first project was a really fucked up satire of homelessness and gentrification, called "Don't Go Down To Boil Street." She made these disturbing puppets, we co-wrote the script and I wrote the songs. We got Mac DeMarco and Alex Calder (Captured Tracks) to be in our house band, but they were still in high school, so the audience was a weird decade-apart mashup of their friends and ours. The aftershow dance parties got pretty messy.

Where do you think you fit into the Canadian music scene?
Still trying to figure that out. Toronto is lousy with "personalities", people who are known for being seen and on the scene. I barely leave my house, but I still fear that more people know me to see me than necessarily know the work that I am creating. I collaborate with musicians, comedians, performance artists, visual designers…but I don't feel like [x I'm not really x] a card-carrying member of any of those scenes.

Do you think things are different from the Adorables' heyday?
Back then, there were two streams in full effect getting most of the attention: carefully crafted but spiritually dead pablum, and an explosion of half-assed joke bands whose philosophy was "music is for everybody, anyone can buy some shit at the dollar store and bang on a pan and isn't it wonderful?" It is hard enough to stand out as an artist in this dystopian consumer landscape, and the big grant money in Canada gives an unfair advantage to the former, those non-threatening carbon copies of previously successful formulas that scream Modern Canadiana. The people making some really incredible but less conventional music just kept plodding along, mostly unnoticed outside of their niche scenes. What I do find inspiring now and what gets me out of bed every morning is that Canada is churning out talented kids who are not only creating sick music, music that is challenging and new and vital and not pandering to anyone, music created for themselves, but they are hungry to have their music played all over the world, they want to be taken seriously and push people to explore these ideas with them. There is a revolution of weird in Canada, Grimes and Doldrums and Sean Nicholas Savage and Mac DeMarco that puts songwriting and performance first and foremost, and they are absolutely killing it.

So why should I come crawling back after you and the Adorables broke my teenage fangirl heart? I don't hear from you for years and all of a sudden you're a resident artist at the University of Toronto getting nude and making tunes with some of my newer Toronto musical loves?
I needed to step back and get a sense of the larger HFAB story, which is now becoming a transmedia storytelling project and the music is only one element of that. But don't worry, the new music is still the same overly theatrical garage-y shit. It's just the lyrics are now presented in a context that they only previously hinted at: a full-on soap opera with costumes and bizarre set pieces and waaay too many people in the cast. Hart House invited us to host a monthly music show. Instead, I pulled together an unconventional collective of musicians, comedians, performance artists, and with Juliann [Wilding] as the production designer we set out to create the most epic episodic fairy tale we could pull off. It was always teetering on the edge of disaster but that's what made it so magical.

I only made it back to Canada for one of seven Feint of Hart episodes, and I spent it very drunk with a stranger in my lap. Sounds pretty standard. Do you remember any of it?
Elizabethan drag queen 'Queer Elezzibitch the Fist' singing Dire Straits and then breaking up with you in a fit of pique. Do you think your British heritage is responsible for the proliferation of cross-dressing homoerotics in your show? It felt like kind of a drunken panto.

I guess this show is pretty gay. It is about a love affair between two men. But it treats same-sex relationships as a normative standard. It's more about the inherently repressive constraints we allow ourselves to be contained within. Mainly everyone's trying to kill Henri Faberge. He pushes a lot of people's buttons. And by buttons, I mean dinks.

So have you moved over to theatre now? RIP, the Adorables?
The house band is classic Adorables. And I still don't know if these narrative shows constitute theatre. It has characters, and scenes, and a story, sure. I just don't know, it seems a strange descriptor. Without sounding like too much of a dick, I'd say its more of a metaphysical exploration of self.

No lie-o, that does sound pretty dickish. What’s next for you—musically, artistically, METAPHYSICALLY?
I’ve got a lot of projects on the go, but we’re trying to focus on what we originally wanted to do with Feint of Hart—that is, perform this condensed version of our original seven-part production in Toronto, record a soundtrack album and tour it in the UK.

So this was all a conspiracy to get yourself back to Mother Britain.
Yes, but on my terms. Sponsored by Pimm’s, probably.

Follow Monica on Twitter @monicaheisey