Peter van Helvoort’s fingers were sore. With each slide down the strings, another layer of skin was worn away. He had been holed up in his basement for three days trying to learn 27 songs on bass.
“I don’t have musicians’ hands,” the Acton native said. “I have pretty small, short hands. When you haven’t been playing bass, eight or nine hours (a day) is rough. My hands were raw.”
In less than 48 hours he would be on stage with The Glorious Sons for the first time playing in front of an arena full of thousands of fans.
The band had played a show outside of Detroit the previous Saturday night and awoke the next morning to the news that the brother of bassist Chris Huot had died.
Van Helvoort was working as a guitar tech for the band at the time, having met them when his band, Teenage Kicks, opened for them on a western Canadian tour in 2014. With four days off before the next show in Vancouver, he had driven home to Hamilton. That night, he got a call. The band didn’t want to cancel its upcoming shows, but they needed someone to fill in.
Van Helvoort accepted and following his marathon bass sessions, he flew to Vancouver.
“I played all day the day of the show,” he said. “We had a 10-minute soundcheck. I learned Amigo (the first song of the set) during the soundcheck and then we played the show.”
The nearly two-hour, 22-song set at the PNE Coliseum was twice as long as any show he’d ever played.
“I wasn’t scared of the people, I wasn’t scared of the pressure,” said van Helvoort, his own toughest critic. “I was scared of making a mistake. Walking off stage was probably the first time I smiled all night, because I’d made it through.”
The Glorious Sons would play three more shows before arriving in Calgary and finding out the tour was being cancelled due to COVID-19.
It’s been four years since van Helvoort’s trial by fire. The Glorious Sons wrapped up a 57-date North American tour in February in support of their album Glory, which is nominated for a Juno Award for rock album of the year.
It was the first Glorious Sons album van Helvoort had the opportunity to contribute to and play on. But after years of fronting his own band and watching The Glorious Sons’ career from the outside, he’s still adjusting to his role.
“I still talk about it a little in the third person,” he said. “It’s weird, I’ve never been in anyone else’s band in this way. I feel I’m more proud of them than I am myself.”
Van Helvoort credits Glorious Sons’ singer Brett Emmons for helping reignite the spark to create music. Van Helvoort and his brother Jeff played in various bands together growing up. Teenage Kicks – and its predecessors – honed its craft playing the McGibbon Hotel and Ares Restaurant in Georgetown, eventually graduating to the Toronto bar scene.
After self-producing their own singles and EP, they achieved what few bands do, getting signed to a record deal. They went to California to record with a well-known producer, but after a more than a month, the results were disappointing.
“The performances were really good, we were playing really well together. We meshed as a band so well,” van Helvoort said. “But we could not find anyone who could mix it with any success.”
The decision was made to re-record the album, and by the time the album, Spoils of Youth, came out in April 2014, the band was already falling apart. By the end of the year they had split up.
Van Helvoort stayed involved in music by producing an album for The Flatliners, and then was the band’s tour manager, but found it difficult on the heels of his own band breaking up.
“I didn’t really like working for them. They were some of my best friends and they were the nicest people,” he said. “I thought if I can’t work for these guys, I can’t work for anyone.”
Van Helvoort got a job at Shopify and was pretty much resigned to the fact that his musical career was over. He stopped writing songs, he stopped singing, he stopped playing guitar.
But the job, and the loss of the one thing that had become a near obsessive pursuit, weighed heavy on him. Something needed to change, so he took a leave of absence.
Two days later, Brett and Jay Emmons from The Glorious Sons called asking if he’d go on tour with them as a guitar tech.
“I was in such a corner when they called, I needed to do something different,” van Helvoort said. “The first show I ever did (with them) was (Ottawa) Bluesfest, I walked out on to the edge of the stage to tune a guitar and there were 15,000 people, and I was like, ‘OK, this is bigger than me.’”
Travelling with the band, waking up in a new city every day and seeing Emmons writing on the bus inspired van Helvoort to begin working on his own songs. With a little nudging from Emmons, van Helvoort would record them during the pandemic. The album Jubilant Blue started as a solo project but eventually became Darling Congress after collaborating with former Teenage Kicks guitarist Keegan Powell.
During COVID, van Helvoort worked odd jobs in television, recorded the Darling Congress album, and despite having no guarantees he’d ever play with the band again, learned the rest of The Glorious Sons catalogue, 55 songs in all.
He had just accepted a television job two hours before he got the call asking if he would play bass when the band resumed touring in 2021. His third show back was opening for the Rolling Stones at So-Fi Stadium in Los Angeles, the first of many memorable experiences.
“The Rolling Stones gig, that was wild. Red Rocks. Massey Hall. Even Bala,” van Helvoort said. “Because we never toured much (in Teenage Kicks), a lot of it is exciting. I’m a student of music history, so I love all that kind of stuff. That never gets old to me.”
While The Glorious Sons allows van Helvoort to enjoy these unique experiences, his inability to sit still for very long still allows him to pursue his own music.
The day after playing to a sold-out arena in Kingston on New Year’s Eve to cap four straight months on the road might seem like an ideal time to take a breather. Instead, van Helvoort was heading home to record new Teenage Kicks songs.
“When I sit idle, I get depressed,” he said. “I’m not good at having free time. I like to work, to be doing stuff.”
He recently did a nine-show acoustic tour across Ontario in February and March and after The Glorious Sons wrap up a two-week tour through the U.S., he’ll be doing some shows with Teenage Kicks, the band he said would never get back together.
“To play for 5,000 or 6,000 people in St. Catharines and then play for 40 people in Brantford a few weeks later, is kind of a unique situation. It shows the weight of the van Helvoort name vs. the Emmons name,” he says with a laugh. “It’s cool. It keeps you, I don’t want to say balanced, but you’re definitely doing it for the music.”
