The Cunninghams perform. Among the biggest acts they have opened for is Sam Roberts.
Thornhill
August 21, 2008 12:14 AM
Meet The Cunninghams
By: David Fleischer
Are The Cunninghams a quartet of nice, suburban kids or brash, effete rockers?
You decide.
The Thornhill rock band has its music nailed and the look to match.
Similar to The Ramones or Traveling Wilburys, the band members have chosen new names, marking themselves as a faux musical family.
So guitarists Justin Abrams and Mike Levine are reborn as Nigel and Pierce Cunningham, respectively.
Drummer Mike Almos becomes Reggie and Zack Weinburg is now Clapsbury.
“We wanted to embody or symbolize an attitude of pretentiousness,” Nigel said.
“That’s how we feel about our music: it’s bold, it’s confident.”
“We also all had brown blazers,” Clapsbury said.
For public appearances, the band members don the corduroy jackets with jeans, dress shirts and private school-type ties.
“We wanted to do something that show us as one unit, one family,” Pierce said.
“The Cunninghams embody a certain message. Mike Levine, Zack, Mike...those names don’t convey that message.”
"Music brought us together,” says Pierce, explaining how he jammed with Nigel when they were in high school.
“Music was the glue,” counters Clapsbury.
Nigel knew the other band members and discovered musical synchronicity after bringing his mutual friends together to jam last year.
“We’re a tighter unit now but, right from the beginning, all the ingredients worked. We baked a damn good chocolate cake,” Pierce says.
After three months of practice, they began playing shows and have earned some impressive achievements in less than a year.
Their sixth gig was opening for rocker Sam Roberts at the 800-seat Opera House in Toronto. It came as the result of winning the nationwide Mazda Music Tour contest.
They beat 400 other bands in an online vote, culminating in a Battle of the Bands at Ryerson University.
“It was like a sea of people,” Reggie recalls of the Sam Roberts show. “The first song, I probably looked like a ghost.”
They describe the experience as a huge rush they didn’t want to end and take pride in having put on a perfect show.
The band members talk effusively of the excitement of playing in a venue in which they used to see shows and of the great opportunity to sit with Mr. Roberts and his band, simply talking music and drinking beer.
At the same time, they claim they expect to headline at the Air Canada Centre before the end of the year and feel sorry for Mr. Roberts having had to take the stage after them.
“We’re a difficult act to follow,” Nigel says. “You can write that down.”
Until world domination is complete, they are watching their website grow, seeing more people they don’t know at each show and hoping a newly-recorded six-song EP can take them to the next level.
The increasing work makes it harder to find the time to book shows and the other minutiae of self-management and they are happy to hand the reigns over to the major label or professional management company able to handle them.
The Cunninghams take pride in having music that can’t be nailed down, sounding alternately rocking or quiet, appealing to all ages.
Despite their young age, it is The Beatles who they cite as their key musical touchstone.