Earlier in the week, some news and images surfaced that told us that Justin Bieber had gotten a tattoo. As a part of his 16th birthday celebration at the beginning of March, Bieber went to Son of a Gun Tattoo and Barbershop in Toronto with his dad in tow to get an impression of Jonathan Livingston Seagull (a tattoo also possessed by Bieber's dad and his uncle) on his hip. On Tuesday (May 18), MTV News caught up with Son of a Gun co-owner Brian Byrne, who laid out the narrative of the event. It's a great story that inspired us to graft other celebrity tattoos on him.
But the name "Brian Byrne" stuck out and seemed awfully familiar. Then it became clear: Byrne is a rock star himself, having fronted Canadian psychedelic rockers I Mother Earth around the turn of the century. The band first formed in 1991 and had several major hits in Canada, thought their one claim to fame in America was the minor hit "One More Astronaut," which came from their album Scenery and Fish and ended up in the Top 20 on the Billboard Modern Rock Chart in 1996. But Byrne didn't sing on that track; he joined the band following the departure of their original lead singer in 1997.
You can hear Byrne's rugged, expressive voice on two I Mother Earth Albums: 1999's Blue, Green, Orange and 2003's awesomely proggy The Quicksilver Meat Dream. While the group had initially dabbled in psychedelia and jam aesthetics, the Byrne version of I Mother Earth dove deeper into prog, metal, industrial sounds and electronic instrumentation. The Quicksilver Meat Dream is especially impressive, especially for the hard-charging "Choke."
The band broke up in 2003, and Byrne has put out two solo albums since then (2006's Tuesdays, Thursdays and If It Rains and 2007's Tailor Made). But he has himself a new slice of notoriety as the guy who owns the place where Canada's newest pop sensation got his first taste of ink. If you love Justin Bieber and you love tattoos, you owe it to yourself to seek out some I Mother Earth.
