MuchMusic won’t play Gentleman Reg’s video.
Shot for his exuberantly catchy tune “The Boyfriend Song,” the video features Gentleman Reg (AKA Reg Vermue) singing and strumming an acoustic guitar. In the background, a crowd of half-dressed friends are tangled up in a playful orgy. It’s a heady scene of boys and girls kissing and groping in a shadowy mass while Reg croons, “Boyfriend, boyfriend, where are you?”
MuchMusic has “always outwardly rejected the ‘Boyfriend’ video,” says Vermue, calling from his rooftop garden in downtown Toronto. “They kind of played the quality card I guess, saying it was too low budget and stayed away from the content. But do I believe that…I don’t really know.”
Too risque for Much or not, the video was a hit in May at Inside Out, Toronto’s queer film festival. Gentleman Reg has played Pride festivals from New York City to Waterloo, Ontario. On Saturday, he’ll treat Halifax to a performance on the Common, immediately following the Pride parade. He is “very curious…about Halifax’s Pride because I don’t have a sense of how big it is, or how big the queer community is there.”
Vermue came of age in Guelph, against a backdrop of music lessons and parents who sang barbershop. He credits Guelph as a progressive environment that left him well equipped for his move to Toronto, where he began performing as Gentleman Reg. It was there he joined forces with Three Gut Records, a label that created big buzz with releases by The Constantines, Jim Guthrie and Royal City. He also collaborates with The Hidden Cameras and Broken Social Scene.
It was a tight-knit, happy family for years, but Three Gut recently closed shop. Reg calls the timing “unfortunate” because he is still promoting and touring his most recent record (2004’s Darby and Joan). The new songs he is writing are veering away from the personal to include “more fictional writing.” He has yet to find a home for his next release.
Vermue’s style has developed over his three records, both musically and lyrically—particularly in terms of how his sexuality figures (or doesn’t) in his songs.
His first release, Theoretical Girl (2000), was “very much about disguising things, and there are even some lyrics on there that hint, to me, about being gay. But I specifically sung them in a way so that you would never be able to understand what I was saying.” Make Me Pretty (2002) has been dubbed Vermue’s “coming-out record.” He more or less agrees with this: “It wasn’t really the goal for it to be that, it just sort of turned out that way. And I’m glad it did. I think it was a good thing to do and it was a good time to happen.” Song titles like “Two Boys in Love” ring loud and clear, even when lyrics express hesitance and fear of consequences (“Statement patiently at rest…Hoping it doesn’t bring/Family burden like it could….The love got scared”). The songs are intimate, lilting, gentle.
It’s on Darby and Joan that Vermue’s self-confidence really shines through. It’s more rocking, and the instrumentation is fuller, with added keys, violin, pedal steel and glockenspiel. Even the songs with broken-hearted lyrics have an upbeat lift. Still at centre stage are Vermue’s lovely vocals. Not surprisingly, Vermue’s main attraction to music is a distinctive voice. He lists Rufus Wainwright, Aimee Mann and Joan Jett among those who inspire him, and “that masculine gruff that’s going around” and boy bands among those who don’t.
Darby and Joan is an old British phrase generally understood to describe a happily married, settled-down old couple. Vermue’s moniker makes it clear that there is something about this old-fashioned, romantic aesthetic he enjoys, reminiscent of “the period of the dandies, and just when there was a little bit more of an elegant way of being for men. When men were maybe a little bit softer or something, and that was not looked down upon.” On the cover of the album, Reg appears buttoned up in a vintage red and gold suit, looking distinguished. But he doesn’t want us to forget that “then, you know, I take off the jacket…and it’s all fair game.”
Gentleman Reg w/The Cliks, Saturday, July 22, on the Halifax Common, after pride parade, free.
This article appears in Jul 20-26, 2006.