Jonny Dovercourt Interview
Jonny Dovercourt is the co-founder and artistic director of the Toronto non-profit organization and concert series Wavelength Music. Jonny has also worked for arts institutions including long-running new music space The Music Gallery, small press Coach House Books, and the Images Festival of experimental film and video. Jonny is also the author of Any Night of the Week: A D.I.Y. History of Toronto Music, 1957-2001.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I got into independent/alternative music mostly through watching music videos as a kid growing up in the '80s in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough—also home of Barenaked Ladies, Mike Myers, and The Weeknd. Canada's answer to MTV, MuchMusic, actually played DIY indie videos by local bands, with two shows dedicated to under-the-radar stuff: CityLimits and Indie Street. In my mid-teens, I started a basement band with my best friend. We were inspired by punk at first, as many people were, but within a few years got more into post-punk, art rock and what came to be called shoegaze. We put out some home-released cassettes but weren't ready to go much beyond the basement.
By the time I attended the University of Toronto in the early '90s, grunge and lo-fi had taken over and I started a new band that had a bit more success and played around Toronto locally—a noise-pop band called A Tuesday Weld. I got really excited by the local music scene, which was starting to pop—though the rest of the world didn't know it yet. Around the same time, I started writing about local bands for my university newspaper, and then after graduation, I got an internship at the local alt-weekly, Eye Weekly. I started out doing the club and concert listings—which was the perfect job for someone obsessed with the local music scene—and also writing some reviews and features, mostly music but also some film and other arts writing.