Brendan Canning on the return of Broken Social Scene

“You’re sitting having a beer, and all of a sudden, the memories flood back. 'Hey, remember that time we were in Peterborough? Or Stoke-on-Trent?'”

Today’s a turning point for Broken Social Scene. On the one hand, it marks the end of the long road back; they’re in Manchester to play their first full headline show, anywhere, since 2011. On the other, this’ll be the first gig of many. After having apparently called it quits six years ago, they’ve reconvened in fits and starts, with the odd TV appearance here and the occasional festival slot there. It’s not until now that they’ve found themselves with a reason to be on the road consistently: in July, they’ll release Hug of Thunder, their first full-length since 2010’s Forgiveness Rock Record.

They wrapped up touring for that last album in November of 2011, in Rio de Janeiro. They tweeted shortly before the show that it’d be their last ever. In truth, few took them at their word; after all, fluidity has always been the operative word when it’s come to the Toronto outfit, who are of course less a band than they are a collective. Wikipedia lists 26 present members, many of whom are indie rock royalty in their own right – Leslie Feist, for example, or Jimmy Shaw and Emily Haines of Metric. Torquil Campbell of Stars is in there, too. The touring line-up, understandably, has fluctuated wildly, but it’s always been based around the central duo of Brendan Canning and Kevin Drew, who’ve taken the lion’s share of the songwriting credits over the years.

Even with all the time that’s passed, and as laughable as this comparison would normally seem, Manchester doesn’t feel a million miles away from Rio today. It’s a balmy 26 degrees out, and sunlight streams through the floor-to-ceiling glass frontage at Albert’s Schloss, the yuppie-friendly German bar that occupies the ground floor of tonight’s venue. The atmosphere, though, is subdued. It’s less than 24 hours since the city’s arena – a mile down the road, at the other end of Deansgate – was rocked by a suicide bomb. For Broken Social Scene, there’s a considerable degree of uncomfortable irony that these should be the circumstances in which they finally return full-time; Drew’s on the record as saying that the group decided to reform after the 2015 attack on the Bataclan in Paris.

“We felt that, for sure,” says Canning over coffee in the bar. “Charles [Spearin] and Kevin, especially. We know Eagles of Death Metal a little bit, and it just cut a little deeper, because we’d shared a stage with that band. To then come here, and you have the bombing last night – it seems terribly...” He trails off. “This is the reason we’re getting back together, and then a similar incident happens so close right as we’re starting up again. It casts a certain shadow, but there was never really any talk of cancelling. People have to come to work here tonight. Fuck, life goes on. We got text messages from home, everybody saying it must be crazy emotional over here. I guess nobody’s immune to tragedy.”

The band – this iteration of it, anyway – arrived in town last night after a torturous journey from Heathrow, although still in plenty of time to while the evening away on the sun terrace at nearby Rain Bar. The individual members of the group kept plenty busy during their hiatus – Drew made a solo album and Canning two, for instance – but it was the frequency of finding themselves in those kinds of situations, just shooting the shit over a few beers, that ensured they never felt like they’d spent too long away from each other.

“It’s less a collection of people than it is a collection of friendships,” Canning relates. “Everybody knows what’s going on in each other’s lives, even if that’s not as much the case as it was ten years ago. When you’ve survived all the industry bullshit – squabbling over where we should tour, or how often, or whether or not you should licence a song to Hummer – then there’s a certain resilience to the relationships within the band. Plus, it’s not a big deal that the line-up’s fluid – that’s how music should be. Look at the old jazz guys like Horace Silver, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Art Blakey – how many different groups they all played with. Some of the collaborations on this record came about because Jason Collett happened to be at a card game, or John Crossingham was in town at the right time to add a guitar lick.”

That spirit of co-operation is palpable on Hug of Thunder; it feels like much more of a group effort than Forgiveness Rock Record, an album that met with a mixed response and suggestions from critics that perhaps Canning and Drew were wielding a little too much control over proceedings. Thunder’s reach for talent is a wide one – Feist is back to provide a stirring turn on the title track, while Haines takes the lead on Protest Song.

All 15 original members have chipped in, and their individual tastes are well-represented without them ever really stepping on each others’ toes: we get soaring anthems alongside psychedelic wigouts, and they prove strangely happy bedfellows. Even tonight’s line-up hints at a renewed harmony within the group – Haines and Shaw are back in the cut for this European jaunt for the first time in forever.

“We had a lot of cooks in the kitchen, and everybody was hard at it,” explains Canning. “It wasn’t like You Forgot It in People, where it was a fresh experience for all of us and we were just looking to push down some walls. Some songs took forever to come together, some songs were really spontaneous, and some came out of late night sessions smoking weed, where it just felt like time to put vocals down at one in the morning. Not that we have the same appetite for that as we used to. You Forgot It in People was a fucking haze!”

Plus, the band unanimously agreed that if they were going to make a go of this comeback – if they were going to really justify it – they were duty bound to put new material out. They’re in a different place now, 18 years down the line from when they first formed; Canning remembers having sneered at older bands on the reunion circuit back in the day, only to have found himself staring down the same barrel before Hug of Thunder started to come together. “Fuck, we just haven’t done enough to rest on our laurels! There was no Anderson .Paak when we were starting out, you know? It still feels like we’ve got to step up and earn our place.”

He does, though, have a more sympathetic view of longstanding bands who no longer resemble their old selves anymore. “I remember what I thought about Deep Purple when I was fifteen, having been through all these different singers and band members, and that’s not how I feel any more. Honestly, being in a band is a miracle, and if you can continue over years and years and survive different phases and still have people buying tickets for this thing you built, then that’s amazing. You just have to keep pouring yourself into it.”

Broken Social Scene’s best material has always had a timeless quality to it, and they know it, too; it’s the recognition of that fact that keeps them pushing to make it similarly true of their future output. “I have a friend back home, a guy called Kent Monkman who’s done really well in the fine art world,” says Canning. “Last summer, I remember him saying to me, 'whatever you’ve got going, just make it classic.' I think we’ve got a few classics on this record, and I think we’ve still got the knowledge to write songs that make people feel a certain way.”

He’s cut off by the sound of sirens screeching past the window. On the next table, Drew, Shaw and Andrew Whiteman are discussing how best to address last night’s tragedy at the show. Drew tells me he’s hoping to keep the mood upbeat, but there’s a touch of unease in the crowd later that night ahead of the group taking the stage. When they do, Drew keeps his earlier word: he thanks the crowd for making it out, introduces one of the city’s favourite sons in Johnny Marr, and leads one of the band’s most illustrious ever casts into a spine-tingling rendition of Anthems For a Seventeen Year Old Girl.

Old and new songs alike soar, if not in celebratory fashion then at least in a spirit that suggests defiant positivity. During the encore, Haines is front and centre on a gorgeous, stripped-back version of Backyards, on which the extended lullaby of a last chorus involves the line "It’s a hard parade, just be courageous" on a loop. You realise what Canning meant when he talked about the classics. It wasn’t self-satisfaction – just the quiet recognition of the fact that Broken Social Scene are capable of making people feel better. They picked a good time to come out of hibernation.