Henry Cavill welcomes first child with Natalie Viscuso amid engagement rumours
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What’s In Your Fridge: Rich Jones of the Black Halos
In which we reveal the favourite records, concerts, and grocery items of interesting Vancouverites.
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Get the best of Vancouver in your inbox, every Tuesday and Thursday. Sign up for our free newsletter.What’s In Your Fridge is where the Straight asks interesting Vancouverites about their life-changing concerts, favourite albums, and, most importantly, what’s sitting beside the Heinz ketchup in their custom-made Big Chill Retropolitan 20.6-cubic-foot refrigerators.
Rich Jones
In the ’90s I was a Vancouverite by way of Ontario and the UK. I started the Black Halos with Billy Hopeless in 1994, until we exploded in spectacular fashion in 2001. From there, I spent some time living in LA, London, and Berlin, and these days I’m in Hamilton, Ontario. Billy and I dug up the corpse of the Black Halos in 2016 when I was still in Berlin, and we’ve been doing it ever since. So now I split my time between playing with the Halos and Michael Monroe, and I also do design work for other bands in my free time.
It’s a good one; when I was growing up we had a lot of music playing in our house. My parents dug a lot of stuff like Fleetwood Mac, Queen, the Beatles, the Stones, Supertramp, the Mamas & the Papas, Elton John, etc. I think you get the picture. So I was well versed in a lot of this stuff from a young age. We moved from the UK to Canada in 1981, and that following summer my parents took me and my sister to Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto to see Queen, with Billy Squier opening up.
I’m pretty sure it was the Hot Space tour. Not their finest hour for sure, but the show was life-changing for me. Inside, the smell of pot and cigarette smoke hung heavy in the air as I loudly yelled to my mother, “WHAT’S THAT SMELL?” before my attention was snatched away by a huge silhouette of Brian May swirling around the arena as he tore into the solo of “Bohemian Rhapsody”. I knew right then and there what kind of job I wanted when I got older. Screw going to work, that was what I was gonna do!
Tough one because the obvious answer would be that Queen show, but also because I’ve been to a lot of shows over the years. We actually saw Ronnie Spector play in a little warehouse loft in the East Village sometime in the late ’90s—it was like a buck to get in and I think it was in someone’s apartment. She came over to us afterwards and said how great it was to see some “young guys in leather jackets down in the front smiling” during the show. As moments go, that’s a pretty good one.
But you know what I’m gonna go with? During my last year of high school I saw the Ramones, Forgotten Rebels, and Pillbox NYC at RPM Warehouse in Toronto. That was the first time I’d really felt danger coming off the stage, and I’ve basically been trying to replicate that vibe with varying degrees of success over the years.
Rich Jones onstage with Billy Hopeless and the Black Halos.Kelly Shee.These questions are all way too difficult! Only three? Fine. Here’s where I’m at today.
The Replacements Let It Be It’s tough to pick a favourite ‘Mats record because they grew and changed so much as a band throughout their career. There’s as much appeal in the rip-and-tear punk vibes of the early records as there is in the heartbreaking melancholia that took root in their later era. Let it Be is probably the record that straddles that line the most, though. “Answering Machine”, “Sixteen Blue”, “Androgynous”, and “Unsatisfied” really point the way forward for them, but let’s not forget that this album also features “Gary’s Got A Boner” and “Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out”. Genuinely something for everyone here!
Manic Street Preachers The Holy Bible I have a lot of admiration for bands who can convincingly shift genres and approaches from album to album, and the Manics are some of the best in that regard. This is cold, angular postpunk put through the meat grinder of pre-Britpop Britain with startling results. Originally conceived as a parting shot from a band who assumed that they were about to be dropped by their label, this is an unflinching portrait of the collapsing psyche of guitarist Richey Edwards, who would eventually disappear on the eve of the promo tour for the album. Edwards’ lyrics are tough going, for the most part, and it’s miraculous that they managed to get the label to release singles like “Faster”—an ode to anorexia with a catchy chorus refrain of, “I am stronger than Mensa, Miller, Mailer/I spat out Plath and Pinter.” This is real good-time music!
Jeff Rosenstock Worry Is this record too new to be an all-timer? Who knows? Who cares? What I do know is that this is pretty much a perfect record. Jerky, noisy, and anthemic with some absolutely stunning arrangements that quickly make you realize that you’re in the company of a mad genius. The thing that I love about all of Jeff’s records is the absolutely unhinged approach to incredible songwriting. There’s almost no polish here—it’s all feeling like it’s about to go off the rails at any time, and that rawness makes everything feel so much more real and exciting.
Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster "Psychosis Safari” Oh man, there are way too many to choose from. The easy answer would be “Bastards Of Young” or “Left Of The Dial”, which are both essentially the same, perfect video. “Red Light Green Light” by the Wildhearts is also a classic in that same vein. I think I’m gonna go with “Psychosis Safari” by the Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster—a fantastic stylistic freakout that Queens of the Stone Age shamelessly ripped off not long afterwards. Get your 3-D glasses ready!
Homemade pizza dough. Hamilton is a pretty great town for pizza already, but during the pandemic I was determined to crack the formula for making legit NYC-style pizza at home. Did I do it? Frankly, no. But my homemade pizzas are still pretty damn good, and I make the dough and sauce from scratch. It’s a three-day process but it’s worth it.
Bang Bang Sauce. I’m a big fan of Wagamama’s Bang Bang Cauliflower, and I recently picked up their recipe book while I was in London. This is a sweet, sticky, and spicy sauce, and quite frankly I could put it on anything. We like to cook a lot of Asian-inspired food at home and sit and eat it while watching Midnight Diner, pretending that it’s not darkest winter in the Steel City.
Lindt Vegan Salted Caramel Chocolate Bars. We’ve come a long way from the days when veganism was all bean sprouts, tofu, and hamburger patties made from smashed-up vegetables served in a patchouli-scented backstage room in Copenhagen. Sorry, flashbacks. Anyway, this is a spectacular chocolate bar, and chocolate is always better when you keep it in the fridge.
The Black Halos plays their classic sophomore album, The Violent Years, in its entirety at the Rickshaw on January 25.
