By just about anyone’s standards, Nardwuar the Human Serviette had a most extraordinary year. As if throwing out the first pitch at a Chicago Cubs game at Wrigley Field in June wasn’t enough—to say nothing of having Nike release a Nardwuar-themed sneaker collaboration in early December—the man born John Ruskin bid adieu to 2025 by receiving one of Canada’s highest civilian honors.
On December 31, Nardwuar was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada. This means that he is entitled to put the letters “C.M.” after his name, should he choose to do so. More importantly, it is formal recognition of his status as not just a Canadian cultural ambassador, but a global pop-culture figure of real significance. When speaking to Paste, Nardwuar admits that he doesn’t know who nominated him for Order of Canada membership, or how he ultimately got selected. “I can’t even explain myself, so I can’t imagine how people would explain me to the committee,” he says.
In truth, explaining Nardwuar is no easy task. His unlikely ascendance from local college-radio gadfly to revered celebrity interviewer is seemingly at odds with the fact that he comes across, at first glance, as strikingly weird, with his hyper-caffeinated demeanor and a personal style that raises pattern-clashing to an art form. You can’t not notice the guy, to say the least. Vancouver-based broadcaster and author Grant Lawrence has known Nardwuar since childhood. Lawrence recalls that his first impression of the young John Ruskin was that he was “a zany kid.”
“He had shaggy black hair, he was kind of small, and he was high-energy; a high-pitched voice, the whole deal,” Lawrence says. “Basically everything that he is now. But unfortunately at that time, he was—like I was—bullied a little bit for his quirkiness.”
Not that Nardwuar was a complete social outcast by any means; far from it. He might have been an oddball in many respects, but he was also—perhaps surprisingly—something of a jock. Or, at any rate, at least an active member of the Hillside Secondary School track-and-field team. “What I remember about John was that he tried,” recalls Bill McKitrick, who taught at Hillside from 1973 to 1988 and coached the track team. “He was there and he was running and he had a good attitude in the sense that he knew his ability, his skill level.” If that makes it sound like Nardwuar’s skill level was rather low, that’s because, frankly, it was. He was never going to be a track star, to say the least. But what he did have going for him was a dogged refusal—an inability, even—to give up. In a cross-country race, for example, he would keep going while the runners around him dropped out one by one.
“People like Mr. McKitrick encouraged me to keep going, to keep running,” Nardwuar remembers. “I wasn’t the best runner. I would come like, 50th out of 100. Not bad. I would be in the middle of the pack. But everybody started to drop out, so I would be 20th out of 25, but suddenly I would be 20th out of 20, and then 10th out of 10. Yes, that many people dropped out. So I kind of knew, when the race began, that if I didn’t drop out, I would come last. That kind of makes me think that if we re-ran the race nowadays, maybe not everybody would show up, and I might win! So, just keep in there and keep going. But if everybody showed up, they’d kick my ass.”
Nardwuar’s status as a student athlete, of sorts, is presumably what earned him sufficient social capital to get him elected student council president—well, that and the gift of gab. Aside from his school-beautification efforts—like the Ben Rogers to Nardwuar’s Tom Sawyer, Lawrence remembers being recruited to paint a trashcan—his biggest project was arranging schooltime concerts featuring live music. On September 26, 1985, for example, Hillside played host to Vancouver punk legend Art Bergmann and his band Poisoned.
Never one to miss an opportunity, an endearingly frantic Nardwuar also peppered Bergmann and Poisoned keyboardist Tom Upex with questions, and the seed of a career was planted. Nardwuar asked classmate Glen Winter to get it all on video—which, in hindsight, feels like an important clue to the secret of the Human Serviette’s success. After all, this was 1985; the creation of YouTube was some two decades in the future. Why, then, bother recording something for an audience that doesn’t exist yet?
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According to Lawrence, Nardwuar picked up the habit of obsessively documenting and archiving, well, everything, from his mom, Olga Ruskin. She taught him, Lawrence says, “to be an archivist, that history matters, and that you never know when this stuff will be relevant, so save everything.” And what’s remarkable about Nardwuar’s career: that his first-ever interview has become relevant to his fame today.
Nardwuar says that when he accepted his appointment to the Order of Canada, he did so in honor of his mother. Olga, who passed away in 2010, was a newspaper reporter, broadcaster, and historian. “She had a local cable access TV show called Our Pioneers and Neighbours,” Nardwuar says, noting that his mother had a genuine curiosity about people in the community, and she would bring them onto the show, much to her son’s bewilderment at the time. “I was like, ‘Why are you talking to the next-door neighbor? Why don’t you talk to somebody bigger, somebody famous?’ She was like, ‘Your next-door neighbor has just as interesting a story as a celebrity. It’s up to you to draw that out.’ And that’s what she taught me.”
Long-time Vancouver music journalist Mike Usinger vividly recalls interviewing Nardwuar and his mom together at Nard’s favorite hangout, the Tomahawk Restaurant, for a 2004 Georgia Straight cover story. “He said that his mom taught him that the job of the interviewer is to make the interview interesting for the interviewee,” Usinger says, “and that is the gold standard.”
Most of the people Nardwuar interviews these days are indeed celebrities, but he still takes Olga’s lessons to heart. Some might say that making things interesting for the interviewee is Nardwuar’s stock-in-trade.
In fact, the real secret to Nardwuar’s success is his uncannily exhaustive research, which invariably makes his interviewees’ jaws drop. Spend even just a few minutes browsing through the videos on Nardwuar’s YouTube channel and you’ll see a seemingly endless parade of surprised and delighted interview subjects, from Pharrell Williams (“This is one of the most impressive interviews I’ve experienced in my life, seriously”) to Sabrina Carpenter (“I want to know how you know things”) to David Cross (“Man, you do some thorough, in-depth, unnecessary research”).
He wins over even the most skeptical subjects by pulling out facts from their past that sometimes even they have forgotten. He also has a knack of digging up objects—records, books, posters—that are of special significance to his interviewees, inevitably prompting some variation on “How the hell did you know about this?” This is a query that Nardwuar invariably deflects with (for example): “You’re Lil Uzi Vert, we have to know!” Usinger admits that, to this day, he doesn’t understand how Nardwuar does the research, “so I’m going to assume, maybe, he somehow contacts friends of people and asks them questions about them.”
Nardwuar is careful not to reveal his precise methods for dredging up the most obscure details. “All the information is out there,” he insists. “It’s just that most people are too lazy to try to find it.” In Usinger’s view, Nardwuar’s unorthodox approach to his subjects also gives him an advantage over other—read: lazier—journalists. This was true back when most of the planet had no idea who he was, when his persona proved startlingly offbeat enough to shake interviewees out of their complacency even before he awed them with the depth of his research.
“Most interviewers are kind of bad at interviewing celebrities,” Usinger opines. “You know: ‘How did you get your band name?’, ‘Do you have any funny tour stories?’, ‘What’s on your rider?’ So musicians kind of get burnt out and they don’t want to be doing interviews—but at the same time, I guess they get to go on autopilot because they know what the questions are going to be. Nardwuar would show up, and it was immediately like, ‘Holy shit, I actually can’t be on autopilot; I’m going to have to think here for a second.’ I think that really caught some people off-guard.”
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Mind you, in the early days, catching people off-guard didn’t always work out in his favor. Alice Cooper nearly gave up altogether about 30 seconds into a 1994 telephone interview, and the likes of Sonic Youth, Beck, Blur, Skid Row, and Courtney Love seemingly took great pleasure in abusing Nardwuar in various ways. Usinger vividly recalls the first time he encountered the Human Serviette at a music-industry schmooze in 1991, when he spied “a lunatic in a tuque” chasing legendary rock producer Kim Fowley around with a microphone and a camera.
“I didn’t know who he was at that point, and I was like, ‘Man, whoever that guy is, he’s certainly persistent, and even moreso, he’s certainly annoying,’” Usinger remembers. “Kim Fowley was doing his best to get away from him, and he was pursuing him around the schmooze, peppering him with questions.” Fittingly, as the footage of that night shows, Nardwuar ended up being unceremoniously booted from the event.
That does not happen anymore. Long gone are the days when Nardwuar fought in the trenches of guerrilla journalism, often laying in wait to ambush reluctant subjects. Nowadays, A-listers and their representatives are practically lining up for a chance to have their very own viral Nardwuar moment. “If you look at the trajectory, it’s always been ‘Nardwuar vs.’—Narwuar vs. Beck, Nardwuar vs. Iggy Pop, Nardwuar vs. Blur, Nardwuar vs. Sonic Youth, et cetera,” Usinger says. “And back then, it was Nardwuar vs., because you never knew how it was going to play out. But now we know how it’s gonna play out. People are gonna love him. There’s no one doing those interviews who doesn’t arrive prepared to be amazed and prepared to love him.”
Lawrence concurs, noting that “there were times when not a single publicist would take his phone call. There wouldn’t be a single publicist that would return his email. And now they’re banging down his door. Everybody wants a piece of Nardwuar now. Everybody. Like, ‘Please, please interview my artist.’” Nardwuar is only too happy to continue blowing the minds of contemporary rappers and pop stars, but he has arguably loftier ambitions. He has his sights set on interviewing as many rock and roll legends as he can while they still walk among us. Paul McCartney tops his wish list, followed closely by Neil Young.
Last year he thought he might be one step closer to meeting the latter when he interviewed Elizabeth May, the leader of the Green Party of Canada. May noticed that Nardwuar’s customary sign-off—“Keep on rockin’ in the free world”—is lifted directly from the lyrics of one of Young’s songs. “She said, ‘You know, I occasionally have lunch with Neil Young and Daryl Hannah,’” Nardwuar recalls. “I was like, “Could you please ask Neil if he’ll do an interview with me?’ So she emailed Neil Young, and Neil Young emailed back and said no. And no reason was given, she said. But she actually asked on my behalf. So that was amazing, to actually get an answer from him—not from his manager, but right from him. And he said no. And the Paul McCartney people said no.”
For most of us, that would be the end of those hopes, but as Coach McKitrick could attest, Nardwuar has never been one to drop out of a race—even if the finish line has been packed up and everyone else has already gone home. “I’m still gonna keep trying,” he says, repeating it like a vow. “I’m still gonna keep trying.”
John Lucas is a freelance journalist and copywriter based in Vancouver, BC. He also sings and plays guitar in the Starling Effect.
