September 2016
264 pages | ISBN 978-1-928088-24-0
**Winner of the Kerry Schooley Award – Hamilton Literary Awards**
Andrew Baulcomb knows the Hamilton music scene intimately. From his early days as a journalist at the Silhouette, McMaster University’s student newspaper, he has blurred the line between being a reporter and a fan. Baulcomb both writes about and immerses himself in music. He’s been a fixture of Hamilton’s sweaty nightclubs and packed concert halls for years. Evenings & Weekends charts the path of the musicians, and Baulcomb himself, through the explosion of a vibrant new scene in one of the toughest and most uncompromising musical hubs in Canada. Featuring dozens of original interviews with bands and performers such as Arkells, Junior Boys, Monster Truck, Terra Lightfoot, Cursed and Young Rival, this is the true story of a city’s musical revolution.
Advance Praise
“Hamilton is overdue for an homage. Canada owes so much to the music, the grit and the resilience of this small but mighty city. Andrew Baulcomb has given such an ode to Hamilton with Evenings & Weekends, but this is a book that needs to be read without any borders in mind. It is sure to become an important historical document for Canadian music history, and for anyone who knows the hustle
it takes to make a dream come to life.” – Liz Worth, author of Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond 1977–1981
“Canada needs more books like Evenings & Weekends, and Hamilton in particular deserves this loving and diligent history that Andrew Baulcomb has assembled. The intensity and insight he brings to a remarkably fertile time in one of our country’s most creative – and consistently underestimated – musical communities regularly took me off the couch and over to my record collection to revisit innumerable forgotten favourites.” – Sam Sutherland, author of Perfect Youth: The Birth of Canadian Punk
Reviews
"A Moment in Musical Time" (Jessica Rose, Hamilton Magazine, 09/29/2016)
"It's clear that Baulcomb exudes passion for the Hamilton's music scene between 2006 and 2011, but when asked what makes him an authority, his answer is simple: 'I lived through all this. I experienced it first hand.'"
"Andrew Baulcomb’s Evenings and Weekends grows into a coming of age tale" (Graham Rockingham, Hamilton Spectator, 09/27/2016)
"It brings life to what otherwise could have been a rather dull chronicle of a key period in the cultural life of Hamilton".
Interviews
Evenings and Weekends in Hamilton's Music Scene: An Interview with Andrew Baulcomb (April Bennett, Maisonneuve, 04/13/2017)
"As I mentioned before, I felt like Hamilton had this reputation as a rock-and-roll town. A hard-drinking, hard-music kind of city. A lunchbucket city with a music scene that reflected that. [...] And this generation felt like the complete opposite of that. It was a lot of great rock and roll, but the DJ scene was fantastic, the nightclub scene was amazing; electronic music, hip hop, folk music, outsider-unclassifiable music—it all felt like it added to the vibrancy of the scene."
Articles
McMaster authors celebrated for having the write stuff (McMaster Daily News, 29/11/2017)
Excerpt
Click here to read the prologue to Evenings & Weekends
Click here to read an excerpt from Evenings & Weekends on 49th Shelf
Videos
Interview with CBC Hamilton
Interview with Y108's The New Noise
About the Author
Andrew Baulcomb is a freelance writer and former reporter based in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. His interviews and music features have appeared in
VICE,
The Hamilton Spectator,
I Heart Hamilton,
Zink Magazine,
Niagara This Week,
VIEW Magazine and several other publications. In 2008, he graduated from McMaster University with a combined honours degree in Cultural Studies & Critical Theory and Art History. For more than a decade, his fascination with Hamilton’s thriving arts scene and shifting cultural identity has informed much of his work.
