IN CONCERT
What: 54-40 Unplugged
Where: McPherson Playhouse
When: Thursday Feb. 22, 7:30 p.m.
Tickets: $52.25
When Neil Osborne was an angry 20-something, he used to say he’d shoot himself if he was still in his band, 54-40, at age 30.
“Then I said: ‘If I am still doing this when I am 40, someone please shoot me,’ ” said Osborne.
Today, 37 years after it formed, 54-40 is still going strong, with its 14th album, Keep On Walking, released last month. So far, the only shots fired have been up the charts.
The band has had three platinum-selling albums — Dear Dear, Smilin’ Buddha Cabaret and Trusted By Millions — and a Canadian gold-selling album, Since When.
Its self-titled album in 1986 generated legendary songs such as I Go Blind — later recorded by American band Hootie and the Blowfish and played on the popular TV sitcom Friends, earning the members of 54-40 healthy royalty cheques.
Inducted twice into the Canadian Music Industry Hall of Fame, they’ve been the youngest band on a festival stage and the oldest, as their music transcends generations and the lyrics maintain an accessible throughline.
Osborne said the energy from making music — and the buzz from the audience feeling it — doesn’t grow old. “Once you’re hooked, you’re hooked.”
Performing at this age is a privilege and an honour, and at the end of the day, “f---ing A”, Osborne said Friday.
Tonight, at the McPherson Playhouse, fans can expect to hear the band’s hits reworked and stripped down to their acoustic best in a concert dubbed 54-40 Unplugged.
The show is the band’s first major concert in Victoria since Rock the Shores 2015, when the quartet roused a crowd of 10,000 in Colwood to a festival high.
Thursday’s concert will include an intimate new take on hit songs, as heard on 2016’s La Difference: A History Unplugged, as well as stories from behind the scenes.
Like the band members, many of the band’s hits have refused to get old. They include Baby Ran, She La, One Gun, Ocean Pearl, Love You All, I Go Blind, One Day In Your Life, Radio Luv Song, Miss You, Nice to Luv You and Lies to Me. The old songs will be woven in with “a lot of new songs from Keep On Walking,” as the band was writing the new album when 2016’s La Difference was recorded, Osborne said. “Some songs were already written when the idea came to do the reinterpretation of some of our hits.”
The new album contains everything from anthem-like rockers such as Sucker For Your Love to the love ballad Hold My Kiss.
Formed in 1981 in Vancouver by Osborne, who lives in Victoria, and Brad Merritt, who lives in Esquimalt, 54-40 has had only three lineup changes.
The guitarist is now Dave Genn and the drummer is Matt Johnson. The alternative rock band has maintained a bedrock of rock, punk, folk and pop. Its lyrics are steeped in stories of life and love, with a Buddhist philosophy as the backdrop.
“The lyrics really haven’t changed that much in any of our songs, as far as the writing is concerned — they’re about how we try to navigate relationships and try to get through the day or beyond that,” Osborne said.
“It’s stuff that when I sing, I think: ‘That’s good advice, I should follow that,’ ” he added, laughing.
