Though you might be more familiar with Wade MacNeil as the guitarist from hardcore band Alexisonfire, he’s currently riding the coattails of Dallas Green’s City & Colour tour with his own solo folk/punk project, The Black Lungs. 

MacNeil is from St. Catherines, Ontario, which isn’t known as a particularly rough town. Whereas Brixton, South London is quite a rough neighbourhood. And that’s where MacNeil found himself last November during a tour with Alexisonfire.

“We were playing the Brixton Academy in London, which is really a legendary place to play in England,” MacNeil explains. “It was kind of a milestone to be headlining in a place like that in that country. There’s a lot of history in the building.

“It’s in Brixton, which is kind of a West Indies community, and it’s a really, really rough area of town: the first time when we were over there, doing a support tour, I was walking out of a pub with a friend of mine and we saw a guy get thrown through a plate glass bank window, and when the guy stumbled out of the place, completely lacerated to hell, he pretty much got his head kicked in.”

The small-town Ontarian wasn’t used to such sights. ”When you’re coming to place like that for the first time,” he says, “it, well, kind of scared me. You know, there’s no, ah, ‘Brixton’ of St. Catherines.” True enough. Hardcore music is one thing, hardcore neighbourhood beatings are quite another.

He continues: “That being said, [Alexisonfire vocalist George Pettit] and myself are big fans of rocksteady and dancehall, so because we were in Brixton, George was thinking, ‘Why don’t we go to a dancehall bar? I’m sure someone will be DJing, we’ll get a whole crew of us from the show, and we’ll go and dance and have a good time.’ I think George had had a few whiskey drinks at this point and he was feeling relatively invincible. But I was like, ‘I don’t know, man, if we should be walking around this time of night. We could get ourselves into some real trouble!’” 

Pettit was indignant. “’Okay, why don’t you just go downtown to an indie rock club and have fun with all your hipster friends!’”

McNeil caved, albeit reluctantly. “I was like, ‘Okay, take it easy, I just don’t want to get stabbed.’

“So, we ended up walking around with this big, drunken gaggle of people through Brixton trying to find a place at, like, one in the morning. One of the more intoxicated hangers-on walks up and asks this very loudly dressed woman if there’s a dancehall around there. It was kinda obvious to the rest of us, though not to him, that he was definitely talking to a female pimp. She was dressed like Dick Tracy or something, all in yellow and had a huge hat on, and I was like, ‘Of all the people, why would you stop and ask this woman?!’ She had this big crew of people with her and I thought things were going to go really south, but what actually ended up happening is she introduced herself as ‘Queen Bee’ and took us through this alleyway to this great little rocksteady bar, and everyone from the tour, and her crew of—well, hos and drug dealers—ended up dancing the night away at this club in Brixton.

“And so, we came out of it unscathed! I guess George was right on that one: somehow we managed to pull it off. It was a surreal moment and a nice way to cap off the Brixton Academy show. No harm, no foul.”

The Black Lungs appear at Jubilee Auditorium on May 28.