Bruce McCulloch, perhaps best known to Canadians of the ’90s as one fifth of the Kids in the Hall, will perform his show “Young, Drunk, Punk” at Farquhar Auditorium Jan. 24.
The title for his show comes from McCulloch’s early years. “It sort of starts in my formative years when I was starting in Calgary, when I was trying to figure out who I was. So it is young of course, it is drunk a little, and punk in both uses of the word. I was a little bit of a punk and it’s the punk spirit of the outsider,” says McCulloch.
McCulloch describes the show as comedy and monologue with music behind it. Craig Northey of the band Odds plays music and scores some of McCulloch’s poetic pieces. McCulloch also sings some songs. There will also be a few references to Kids in the Hall, although McCulloch says, “No one wants to hear you talk about success although we were only sort of successful. There’s a couple of stories and passages from there. I tell a story about breaking up with a woman and leaving a crucifixion machine from one of our sketches at her house.”
While some Kids in the Hall references are bound to come up, McCulloch says he hopes people aren’t thinking, “I really like that Kids in the Hall guy and he’s doing some Kids in the Hall stuff.” McCulloch says he went through a period where he worried about living with his Kids in the Hall fame. But he says he’s embraced it. “I was having lunch with Dave Thomas from SCTV, and we were joking and I was saying, you know they’ll be wearing toques at your funeral. And, yeah, when I die, they’ll say the kid in the hall who wrote the Dave’s, I Know. That actually is me, and the Kids in the Hall stuff I did is my sense of humour. So I don’t mind it at all.”
Although the title of the show is a direct reference to McCulloch, he says, “It’s not just really about me. I talk about relationships, which is about everyone. Or I talk about the notion of me and all the people I knew. We outlived our families,” he says, in reference to being a child of divorce. McCulloch says having his own family has “given more to write about and more to reflect on. And you know, when you have a kid, you think ‘who was I when I was the age of my daughter.’ ‘Oh she’s saying things I could have never said to my dad.’ So I think it gives you a loop of understanding back to yourself and just lots more stuff to write about.”
It’s not only becoming a father that has made McCulloch look at what makes him who he is. It’s an obsession. “I’m really obsessed with who we are, and we’re all outsiders in a sense, and it’s the thing I learned through the Kids in the Hall—where we all feel like we’re these losers and then there’s a lot of us. So I think it’s really about the spirit of finding your place in the world which I’m the most interested in.”
