Roberts Creek Community Hall is a cavernous, columned space filled with smiling staff and rough-and-tumble teenagers. Absurdly loud, absurdly PG hip-hop had been playing over the sound system before and after sound check, but far from being a distraction, this cross-genre vibe served to fuel big sound and big energy. From the get-go the Revue had the crowd doing the high school bump & grind, waving their hands in the air like they just didn’t give a darn.





There has been an undertone of scheming hilarity to the past few days that I forgot to mention in Victoria. Before leaving for tour the band played a show outside the CBC building in Vancouver, and afterwards Hannah reportedly asked Jeremy if he would mind toning down the ‘reggae’ in his mandolin back-up on ‘Deep End’. Not having felt any reggae himself, Jeremy quickly set a plan in motion, and in Victoria convinced the rest of the band, unbeknownst to Hannah, to play the songs second verse in full-on one-drop style. Hannah laughed through the rest of her lyrics, and the harmless prank went over so well it deserved a sequel. In Duncan, with time to kill, Hannah on a 2-day festival trip to Ottawa, and a few empties at hand, the band rehearsed a bottle-blown rendition of the same verse. Played with different amounts of water and with toots tuned to Jaycelyn’s perfect pitch, this bumping bumpkin remix was scheduled for Hannah’s return in Roberts Creek.





Nervous glances were exchanged behind her back, from band member to band member and from band member to innocuous root beer bottle at the foot of each mic stand as the song began. At the verse, Peter played his two intro bass slides before invisibly pulling Hannah’s patch cord from her amp, leaving her musically powerless. The rest of the frontmen put their bottles to their microphones and, grinning like geniuses, played their glass calliope to perfection as Hannah looked around in disbelief.





The set could have ended there – not much could have capped the magic of those few moments – but this was only mid-set, and now the sunglassed, open-shirted Creekers were fully engaged. Jeremy’s ‘High School’ seemed apt as the encore opened, and Aidan’s spastic riffing on Hannah’s ‘All I Need’ brought out the punk-rock sensibilities in the young crowd. Calming them down was work enough, however, and an unplugged ‘Curse of the Currents’ was possible only with Ben’s prompting, “If you feel like clapping… sing along.”

We said a sad goodbye to Bjorn, Barbara and the menagerie and collected our bicycles from the Showroom in Duncan. The Duncan Days festival was still going strong, all banjos and jangly guitars from across the train tracks, but 50km lay between us and Nanaimo so we took reluctantly to the road in the oppressive heat. There’s not much to say about the ride from Duncan to Nanaimo, really – just a familiar progression of merges, shrapnel’d shoulders and speeding logging trucks. After an hour of cycling a highway-side under a midday sun you begin to feel like a character in a 90’s video game performing the same cyclical actions with no real end in sight: pedalpedalpedal, dodge the glass, pedalpedal, bomb the hill, pedal, hug the shoulder, eating granola bars for power-ups and suffering the humiliating time-delays of flat tires.

Apparently fueled by monotony, we arrived in Nanaimo ahead of schedule and decided to push on to Gibsons. A seamless connection of ferries, Nanaimo-Horseshoe Bay and Horseshoe Bay-Langdale put us on the Sunshine Coast just as the sun was setting.





If the days ride put us in the mindset of players in an arcade, School Road was our Big Boss. Our night’s digs lay at the top of the steepest grade thus far, and, as we were told later, in conquering it we made the transition from Lower Gibsons to Upper Gibsons. We were treated to no rolling credits, just breathtaking ocean views, ice-cold beer and plenty of jam space.