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Rockin’ Out With the Cliks

You know you’re a rock star when someone asks you to sign their breasts after a show.

“It’s a true sign of success,” said Lucas Silveira, founding member and lead singer of the queer band the Cliks. He quickly added that it just makes him happy that people are so excited about the band, which is known for its high-intensity live performances.

Another sign of success? They’ve been invited to join the True Colors tour, which benefits the Human Rights Campaign. Hosted by Margaret Cho, the tour features Cyndi Lauper, the Gossip, Debbie Harry, Rufus Wainwright and the Dresden Dolls in addition to the Cliks. In addition, lesbian listeners may recognize their song “Complicated,” which was featured last season on The L Word.

Although the Cliks started out as an all-woman band, guitarist-vocalist Silveira has since transitioned from female to male. But they are still all-queer. Bassist Jen Benton and guitarist Nina Martinez said they get involved with people regardless of gender, and drummer Morgan Doctor said she identifies as queer or bisexual, adding, “I leave it pretty open, kind of like I am.”

The band has an androgynous sex appeal that doesn’t seem to be directed at any particular gender. “When you give off that kind of energy, and you’re open to the world in that way, the world also opens itself up to you,” Martinez said. “And fans become more open to being attracted to everything that queer is about.”

Chief among Cliks fans is Margaret Cho, who has credited the Toronto-based band with bringing back her “embarrassing fangirl days” and has said that “no one else can inspire such crushed-out admiration and full-on rock star screaming.”

When Cho first sent the band fan mail, Silveira couldn’t believe it was really the Margaret Cho writing to them. Now Cho is producing a “Beatlemania-style” music video for their song “Eyes in the Back of My Head” that will include footage from the band’s recent gig in Los Angeles.

The Cliks are often compared to the Pretenders – particularly given Silveira’s passionate singing and songwriting – and the White Stripes. Silveira, who loves both of those bands and is flattered by the comparison, said he thinks the Cliks have a sound that falls somewhere between the Strokes and the Killers.

In April the band released their second album, Snakehouse, which the Boston Globe describes as “rock with primal, stylish ferocity.” MTV.com notes the band’s “defiant intensity,” and IN Magazine highlights their “improbable transformation of Justin Timberlake’s ‘Cry Me a River’ into a seething rock anthem.” The words “sweet” and “ballsy” tend to appear simultaneously in the album’s reviews.

It was released on Warner Music in Canada and Tommy Boy/Silver Label, an LGBT-focused imprint, in the United States. Tommy Boy lays claim to having launched the careers of Queen Latifah, RuPaul, Naughty by Nature and Coolio, among others.

Silveira said he is grateful to be signed to a label geared specifically toward queer audiences. “For them [queerness] is a nonissue,” he said of Silver Label. “And they understand the market and how to focus on one audience in order to take us to the mainstream.”

He added: “I feel like I have a horseshoe up my ass. We have the best of both worlds, really.” Silveira noted that Warner is being educated by Silver Label, and that the two entities are working together.

The Cliks’ self-titled debut was independently released in 2004, featuring Silveira and a drummer and a bassist who are no longer with the band. The band’s lineup has also changed since the release of Snakehouse. Though Silveira and Doctor remain, Benton replaced bassist Jordan B. Wright in February, and Martinez was added this past October after first sitting in as a temporary second guitarist.

Silveira said the band now has a bigger, fuller sound. A self-taught musician who plays bass, drums and keyboards in addition to guitar, he had a heavy hand in how the other musicians approached their parts in the band’s early days. But he said he now trusts his band members’ interpretations of the music, which he thinks often surpass his own. “And just the fact that there’s somebody there independently creating a little part to fill out the song that I’ve written is awesome,” he said.

Back when two of the band’s original members quit, Silveira found himself grappling with multiple misfortunes: He was going through a difficult breakup, his father had a stroke, his grandmother passed away, and his friend was diagnosed with a cancer recurrence. As if this weren’t enough to handle, at the same time Silveira was deciding to transition.

“Music is what saved me from going into the absolute pit of despair,” Silveira said. “I decided I needed to focus on something that I love and something that has always been there for me and something that I’d never given up on.”

He’s certainly a tough one. Consider his mid-set asthma attack at South by Southwest in March. Suddenly he was barely able to breathe and had to stop the performance, but a festival volunteer found him an inhaler, and moments later he was back busting his lungs singing.

“I’ve always been a fighter,” Silveira said. “If the world’s going to tell me that I can’t do something, I will try 10 times harder to make it happen.” Born in Toronto, he and his family moved to a small island in the Azores when he was 4. Six years later, they moved back to a Toronto suburb.

Silveira said he doesn’t mind getting transgender-related questions and loves that people want to understand it. “The more I talk to people about being trans, the more I understand myself,” he explained.

“It’s important to be visible, but at the end of the day, if the music doesn’t stand up, the fact that I’m transgendered is not going to matter,” he said. He is confident that his music stands on its own.

The people who gravitate toward the Cliks are a diverse bunch, according to the band members, who make a point of interacting with fans after their shows. “You look out in the crowd and you see a straight guy rocking out with his girlfriend, lesbian couples holding hands or kissing, and then little homo man singing along and dancing,” Martinez said.

A Toronto native, Martinez described herself as a music school dropout who explored music on her own terms. She started playing gigs with the Cliks within a couple of weeks of joining the band.

Benton also started touring within two weeks of joining. The set list at her first gigs consisted of track numbers rather than song titles because she didn’t know those yet, but she had already learned to play the band’s entire new album. She grew up in Waterdown, a small town outside of Toronto, and studied jazz and classical studies in college.

Doctor, who grew up in Los Angeles, is also classically trained. She minored in music at the University of California, San Diego, then moved to Toronto eight years ago and studied jazz. She began doing session work in a diverse array of genres and played with the Toronto Tabla Ensemble. She has a solo recording project she described as “down-tempo, ambient,” and also performs solo on a drum kit she made that includes tabla, djembe, junjun, snare, keyboard, a computer and two looping pedals.

Over the next few months, the Cliks will be touring throughout the U.S. and Canada on their own and as part of the True Colors tour, and all of the band members said they could hardly wait for the True Colors dates.

Silveira wasn’t sure if he’d manage to keep his cool when he meets Cyndi Lauper and Debbie Harry. Doctor said she’s excited to meet the other musicians and to play in front of such large audiences. “And,” she added, “it’s for a good cause, so it feels good to be doing something that’s worthwhile.”

Check out our blog for outtakes from our interview with the Cliks’ Lucas Silveira. For more music and tour information, visit the Cliks’ MySpace page or their official site.

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