Not too many years ago Ben Darvill was playing to arenas full of people. Now you can find him blowing his harmonica on the streetcorner for change.

No, the former Crash Test Dummies member hasn't suffered a financial crash. Quite the opposite -- he's savouring the financial and musical freedom he earned through years of incessant work with the Winnipeg folk-pop hitmakers.

"I've been busking a bunch lately," says the 34-year-old Darvill from his flat in London, England, his home for the last five years. "The cash is actually OK. But I'm really not doing it for the cash, I'm just doing it for the practice.

"I put my harp through an amp and I have a growly microphone. I do a bit of human beatbox while I play and I sing in a little child's voice. It's pretty wacky."

But it plays big in Soho, he says.

"They give me good love because I'm different. I'm not just some old geezer on a saxophone. I've even got a few gigs through it. I played a weird cabaret night -- I opened, and then some other musical acts played and then a woman laid an egg. I kid you not."

Surreal cabaret nights aside, Darvill has been keeping an intentionally low musical profile for the past year -- ever since his daughter Olivia was born.

"I've been writing and practising, but really I'm a full-time dad," he says. "So that means no touring."

Not even with the Dummies. The rest of the band reconvened to back Brad Roberts on the road to promote the album I Don't Care If You Don't Mind. But Darvill, who didn't play on the disc, took a rain check.

"I think even if I didn't have my baby girl I wouldn't have gone on the tour," he says. "It's really not that exciting for me anymore. I feel like the spotlight has moved on. I'd rather keep busy with my own tunes. I just have to find a way to do that without going on the road for 10 months at a time.

"What I need, I think, is a shop front where there's lots of passersby and I sit there with my kid and play songs, and they all come in and buy my records."

While he works out the kinks in that plan, Darvill will leave his Lennonesque, self-imposed seclusion this week to visit relatives and play one-off gigs in Vancouver and here in his old stomping grounds. It'll be his first trip home in a year.

"I want to see my family and friends and this is a good way to combine business with pleasure."

Indeed -- Darvill plans to enlist old pals like Murray Pulver and Gilles Fournier to back him up on a set of tunes from his 1999 solo albums Son Of Dave and B. Darvill's Wild West Show, along with some solo country numbers he's writing for the occasion.

No one, we assume, plans to lay an egg.