Armed with eyeliner and a batch of great tunes, Toronto’s glam-pop hero gets set to conquer the world.
1. You can’t get away with stage banter at Radio City Music Hall
When John O’Regan, a.k.a. Diamond Rings, started writing new material in the summer of 2008, he didn’t think anyone other than his friends would ever know or care. Now, the 25-year-old glam-pop star is something of a local hero, despite the fact that he only moved here from Oshawa three years ago. While opening for Robyn during the North American leg of her Body Talk tour, he learned there are things he can get away with only in his (adopted) hometown. “People who go to a Robyn show want to see a show,” he says. “It’s not like playing to your friends on Queen West where you can talk about your day and make some kind of inside joke. If you do that at Radio City Music Hall, you just get blank stares.” Another thing he learned: “I’m never going to do a show in high heels, that’s for sure. Robyn’s got massive platform work boots that she wears most nights. I don’t know how she does it without rolling an ankle.”
2. McDonald’s can make for a decent dressing room
In his time as lead vocalist for Guelph post-punk band The D’Urbervilles (now known as Matters), O’Regan’s look usually revolved around a hoodie and a toque. He turned heads when he traded the indie uniform for Bowie-esque rainbow makeup and multi-coloured tights. “Style isn’t an area I’ve ever skimped on,” O’Regan notes, although he recently lucked out when M.A.C. Cosmetics offered to sponsor him just before he left for the Robyn tour. “I’ve done makeup in all manner of environments, from outside in a park to the rearview mirror of a van in the middle of February to dirty washroom after dirty washroom—even the promoter’s office in the venue. Occasionally, if there’s nothing nearby, I’ll go to the washroom of a McDonald’s. So it’s nice that I can at least get a decent dressing room and I’m not doing it in the back of a van with a flashlight,” he says. Lately, O’Regan has made an effort to toughen up his hyper-glitzy style, toning down the influence of ’90s girl group TLC and drawing more on street-smart hip-hop artists like Run DMC and Public Enemy. “There’s a tendency on some people’s part to think that what I’m doing is offering myself up as a sexualized figure, which was never my intention. I’ll be wandering around after a show and have guys grab my ass. For the first time I realized what it’s like to be a woman at a dance club.”
3. There’s a whole world west of Bathurst
Diamond Rings’ latest music video, “It’s Not My Party,” showcases O’Regan’s favourite part of Toronto, the section along the lakeshore up to Roncesvalles. “We went as far as the Hen House and then stopped,” he says, confessing that he doesn’t often stray east of the Dundas and Dufferin bar. “I remember being in high school and walking west of Bathurst for the first time and totally having my mind blown,” he says. “I never really imagined Toronto was anything other than Blue Jays games and class trips to The Phantom of the Opera.” In the video for “It’s Not My Party,” O’Regan wanders the dark streets of the west end in the dead of winter, clad in a skimpy dress and heels. “I was really worried because when we were planning it, we all knew it was gonna be a really gruelling shoot. It was gonna be a long day, it was gonna be late, it was gonna be freezing. And I was gonna be totally fucked up on drugs.”
4. He’s still a hermit
Diamond Rings’ 2010 debut album, Special Affections, is set to be released worldwide on June 21 via Astralwerks, a New York–based offshoot of EMI. O’Regan never thought his solo project would take him this far. “It’s possible to have a record you made on your roommate’s computer in GarageBand get picked up and sent around the world by the same label that puts out Kylie Minogue and the Pet Shop Boys,” he enthuses. But O’Regan acknowledges that “there’s a huge gap between learning to play guitar in your room or learning to record a song, and coming out of a giant egg at the MTV awards or whatever. It’s like, how do I get from the basement of my parents’ house to that? That can be really intimidating. If anything I just want to be that bridge between the two [extremes], for now at least. So I’m always working away, still in my room.”
