Not interested in nostalgia, the Pointed Sticks have made their first album of new material since 1980

Waiting to find out if the recently resurrected Pointed Sticks are the Real Thing? Then proceed straight to Track 3 of Three Lefts Make a Right, the band’s first album of new material since 1980.

“Scrambled Eggs” is three minutes of carbonated power-pop perfection as bracing and instantly memorable as anything you’d care to pick from the outfit’s amazing Perfect Youth album, up until a chorus that plunges the song into a reflective and bittersweet minor key. To put it another way, it’s what you’d expect from a bunch of guys who’ve lost none of their songwriting mojo but gained a lifetime of seasoning.

“That seems to be everyone’s favourite,” Nick Jones tells the Straight, on the line from his home in Comox. The vocalist wrangled “Scrambled Eggs” from a song sketch handed to him by keyboardist Gord Nicholl. “After I showed Gord what I’d done with it, that was the one where we were sitting there in his basement going, ”˜Oh, yeah!’ ”

The other 12 tracks on Three Lefts are no less polished, and not as monomaniacally upbeat as the stuff the band was gobbing out in the late ’70s and early ’80s. “Leave Me Alone” is ponderous and eerie like early Blue Oyster Cult, and Bill Napier-Hemy furnishes the temperate heartsickness of “All Night” with a searing, heroic guitar solo that probably would have gotten him bottled at the Smilin’ Buddha.

Nick Jones sounds off on the things enquiring minds want to know.

On imperfect youth: “We were all prima donnas in our own way. That’s what happens when you’re 20 years old and you start a band as a joke, and the next thing you know, people are signing you to record contracts. That sort of stuff tends to percolate pretty quickly and it got in the way of a lot of things for us. I think our intentions were always good, but we probably bit the rock-star apple a few times.”

On the best of all possible Pointed Sticks: “Basically, the Pointed Sticks that you’re looking at now is the original band—the band from the first single—plus Gord. It’s really pretty much the perfect incarnation of it.”

On the most underrated of Vancouver’s classic punk bands: “The Dishrags, no question about it. The first all-girl punk band, I mean, they ran away from school at 16 to form that band. Nobody has any idea how much courage it took to do that, and their story is remarkable, and it’s untold. Aside from the fact that they put out a couple of really good singles.”

On the other hand, this is Pointed Sticks we’re talking about, and right off the top, Nicholl’s exclamatory Farfisa part in “She’s Not Alone Anymore” dumps the listener into the great roller rink of the mind. Along with roughly two-thirds of Three Lefts—like the Iggy Pop–esque “Wireless”, or the sharp new-wave redux of Napier-Hemy’s “Start Something New”—it would sit real nice in a mix between “Let’s Dance” by Chris Montez and Nick Lowe’s “So It Goes”.

And, as it happens, Nick Lowe is precisely the guy the band wanted to produce their debut album for Stiff Records, when Pointed Sticks charged out of Vancouver’s legendary punk scene and across the Atlantic to new-wave-crazy Britain in 1979. Instead, they ended up with Nigel Gray, the official knob twiddler on the first couple of Police albums.

Sitting in a rowdy East Van pub with drummer Ian Tiles, bassist Tony Bardach literally winces at the memory. “He kept me in the studio for two weeks, by myself pretty much,” he says with a frown, “and then he’d invent these bass parts and get me to play them. It really was kind of sadistic.”

The rest is history. Nobody liked the results, which were canned just as quickly as the band was dropped by the ailing label. Back in Vancouver, the Sticks managed to squeeze out Perfect Youth for Quintessence, and then finally dissolved under a black cloud only three years after introducing themselves with the art-school punk of “What Do You Want Me to Do?”. Almost 30 years later, drummer Tiles can confidently assert that recent developments are no mere nostalgia trip.

“We’ve done this whole resurgence thing correctly, I think,” he says, “with there being a fan demand behind it all. And we want to say to people that it’s a bit overwhelming. Because it is, pardon the pun, out of the blue. Which is what spawned it, funny enough.”

The drummer is referring to the punk-era Dennis Hopper film Out of the Blue, a cult-favourite incest drama shot in Vancouver by the crazed filmmaker and featuring the Sticks in an unforgettable scene at the Viking Hall on Hastings Street. Jones calls it “a great snapshot of Vancouver in ’79 or ’80”. Bardach, meanwhile, remembers the director being “pretty cooked” when the band met at his production office in Kitsilano. “Nick asked him for a script,” he says, chuckling, “and Hopper says, ”˜There’s no script, man, it’s all in my noggin,’ and he tapped his head.”

According to Tiles, it was Out of the Blue that initially incited interest in Japan, along with the 2005 Sudden Death Records reissue of Perfect Youth and the compilation Waiting for the Real Thing. And so—after much skepticism, not least on the part of Jones—the five-piece found itself on-stage in Kyoto in 2006. They practised three times beforehand. “Which is about our limit,” Jones notes with a laugh.

The singer recalls the shows in Japan being a total, disorienting rush. “It was just so hard to believe that 300 Japanese kids who weren’t even born when we broke up were going ballistic and singing all the words to songs that we’d written 30 years ago.”

Tiles was blown away by the sheer depth of the fan worship that greeted them. Assuming a pretty credible Japanese accent, he describes thanking the barely-out-of-his-teens sound technician in Kyoto, who nodded and replied, “Yes, Bob Rock mix!”

A triumphant, hometown two-fister at Richard’s and gigs in New York, Toronto, and Austin followed for the incredulous Sticks. At this point, Jones explains, a growing mood in the band suggested that it was time to either shit or get off the pot.

“We had a meeting at Tony’s house, out in East Van,” he says. “He had this big, long dining-room table and it felt like a boardroom meeting. And we sat around the table and talked about it, and the one thing that interested us the very least would be to pop up once every six months and play the same songs we wrote 30 years ago. That would get old so fast, and in fact, it was getting old by the time we got to Toronto and New York.”

Which brings us, two years later, to the Northern Electric–released Three Lefts—an album of all-new material eked out by five guys with busy lives, inside a new industry paradigm that apparently suits them a lot better than the old one.

“Really,” Bardach states, “the biggest thing for us with this record is that it was made in the atmosphere that the first record should have been made in. We don’t have any pressure now, so it doesn’t matter. We just do what we want, we’re all together, nobody is telling us how to do it, and we defer to consensus within ourselves.”

His point is driven home by the obvious warmth between Bardach and his drummer, as they sit there reminiscing and cracking each other up. For Jones, embracing the perfect midlife might be the most validating thing of all about the Sticks’ unexpected second chapter.

“If nothing else, that’s the very best thing that came out of this whole thing,” he says. “Five guys realizing that they were still friends after all these years, and realizing that they could still do something together that’s really special.”

Pointed Sticks play an all-ages afternoon show and a licensed evening show at the Rio Theatre on Saturday (December 19).