One night in June 2012, Matty Matheson finished his shift as head chef at Toronto restaurant Parts & Labour, walked home and had a heart attack. He was only 29, yet somehow this most vital of organs giving out on him didn’t come as much of a surprise. He was coming off the end of a three-day bender, but really it was closer to 13 years of hoovering uppers, downers and psychedelics with all the gusto of the last man standing at an all-you-can-snort buffet. It was no coincidence that his favorite song to party to was Hüsker Dü’s “Dead Set On Destruction”. He loved that song so much that he planned to steal the name for a dive bar he wanted to open. While recuperating in his hospital bed at Toronto’s St. Joseph’s Health Centre, Matheson received a note from a friend, Alexisonfire’s Wade MacNeil. “Hopefully now you won’t be opening up that bar, Dead Set On Destruction,” MacNeil wrote. “And you can start being dead set on life.”
The Collected Works of Kevin EG Perry 