Tokyo Police Club played their last show ever in Victoria this past weekend at the Rifflandia Music Festival.
They are one of those bands that transport you back to a simpler time and place in life and helped to pioneer a sound within the Canadian indie-rock zeitgeist throughout their long careers.
Tokyo Police Club started the band after high school in 2004, named their band using a 2000s-era online band name generator, then started cranking out hits like “Your English is Good” and “Nature of the Experiment”.
Victoria Buzz had a chance to sit down with Graham Wright, who plays keyboards, guitar and does vocals for the band.
Wright says he is not sure what he will do or what will happen once the band’s final tour is over; however, the tour’s first show was at Rifflandia, so that feels far away at the moment.
“It was ‘show zero’ as we called it,” Wright told Victoria Buzz.
“It was a great way to kick it off, we really found our footing as we went and the crowd seemed to find us as we went. By the end of the set I was really feeling like I was in it—so it felt like a good beginning.”
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The tour will last three months, so Wright says he and his bandmates are all just laser focussed on getting one last tour under their belt before letting go of the band.
“Genuinely, I don’t know how to think past that,” said Wright.
“So much is going to happen and I’m going to have so many feelings that it feels like all the planning I could do right now would be wasted anyway, I’m going to be like a new person.”
Wright spoke about the city of Victoria and the times he and the rest of Tokyo Police Club have made their way out here from Toronto.
He said that through this tour, he will likely do the same with any city they played in, thinking about how the city has impacted them and helped their careers.
“We were trying to recollect—we’re going to do this in every city—the first time we played in Victoria, we played Lucky Bar,” Wright explained.
He says they weren’t on tour with another band. The openers were a local band he couldn’t recall, but he does remember fondly his interaction with the opening act.
“I think we were like, 20, we were standing outside the venue and I just remember giving so much advice, which was so irresponsible of me and in my head I was like ‘I am helping these guys, I am wise, I know a lot.’”
“I don’t know what I was saying, but there was no way it was good advice,” he laughed.
He also recalled other shows Tokyo Police Club has played over the years in Victoria at the Alix Goolden Performance Hall with The Arkells, at Sugar (the former name of Capital Ballroom) and at Rifflandia once before as well.
“All of which goes to say, I just remember a lot of really characteristic shows, real like sweaty, down and dirty beginnings and really beautiful, appointed, sort of middle tier when we were at our biggest,” he said.
Wright also said he always loved taking the ferry over to the island because it always feels like the beginning of a little adventure.
“Oh now we’re in Victoria, now we’re on the magic part of the tour,” he noted. “It always smells so good.”
Now that Rifflandia is over, they just have to make their way across Canada and the United States one last time before the band is over, at which point Write noted they would “sleep for weeks” and see what happens next.
There is no doubt that Tokyo Police Club went out with a bang for their Victoria fans.
