Rock Plaza Central is a seven-piece Toronto-based racket inspired by carnival sideshows and dustbowl ballads, playing with the confused jubilation of a blind-drunk Salvation Army band.

In 2003, Chris Eaton, author of The Inactivist and The Grammar Architect (Insomniac Press), booked a show at Toronto’s fabled Sneaky Dee’s. Without anything but his guitar and some songs ideas, he asked members of the other bands on the bill to join him on stage with old friend Donald Murray and drummer Blake Howard, whom Chris had met recently but had never rehearsed with. Without even knowing each other’s names, something clicked, for both them and the audience. Two weeks later, they were in the studio.

The results of that session was The World Was Hell To Us. Recorded in two days in August 2003 at Andy Magoffin’s House of Miracles studio in London, the record is mostly first takes and completely unrehearsed. Several songs were written on the studio floor and recorded immediately. And Magoffin’s quirky and delicate production values were a perfect match for the band’s spontaneity.

Rock Plaza Central’s live shows, once described as charmingly beautiful train wrecks, are now more like sticking your hand in the mud and pulling out diamonds, taking Eaton’s disarmingly honest songs and building them into big, warm, many-layered anthems. RPC has built their reputation playing shows with such friends as the Great Lake Swimmers, Final Fantasy, Mark Sasso (of Elliott Brood), Sunparlour Players, Jon-Rae Fletcher, Jane Siberry and the Barmitzvah Brothers.