Just over twelve years ago during from what I remember was a rather grey and cold autumn and winter while I was still living in London, I decided I was going to take up a little research project. Having been living in the UK for just over five years at that point after moving away from Vancouver (Canada), perhaps I was feeling a bit homesick. I was indeed having a great time in my new home city at the time, but there were elements of Canadian culture that were absent over here on this side of the Atlantic — especially as far as music and other popular culture from The Great White North. It was also a period of a number of years where I was ingesting a lot of new music — both new and old — from obscurities in the underground.
Perhaps this idea for doing such a project was because I skipped out on the whole university thesis process that a lot of folks do in their early twenties, with myself opting to go to technical school instead for graphic arts in printing (a decision that worked out well for me in the end). Who knows.
This project was do a series of mixes that featured Canadian music that was happening in a period from the late 1970s until the mid 1980s — a period when the seeds of post-punk were explored and underground musicians were starting to do interesting things with electronics — such as synthesizers, etc — when those instruments became more affordable for non-professional musicians.
I did a lot of research on that one, asking friends with encyclopedic knowledge of the genres that were covered in this little project as well as digging around in the back waters of the internet — blogs, music sites — with the aim of finding out some Canadian artists that met my criteria that I didn’t know existed, or just had heard about them in passing in the years before. It was fun digging around and finding out about artists I knew little about or indeed nothing about from my home country, as well as revisiting artists I liked from that time period.
The results were a two-part mix that was released under the name Canadian Tuxedo that included a little essay I wrote about the mixes on how they came about, with some tidbits of Canadian culture in there, including a few retro idents from Canada’s own music channel MuchMusic (which launched a year after the far more popular MTV) and other Canadian media soundbites. These two mixes are linkable below:


There was a lot of stuff on here that was relatively new to me, including post-punk groups from the time including Breeding Ground and Kinetic Ideals, as well as under-the-radar synth artists like Ohama and Lou Champagne System. Another group I got more familiar with during this project was the Toronto-based electronic duo Ceramic Hello. For whatever reason at the time I didn’t include them on this mix but in hindsight were pretty important and in my mind should have been included. In fact, there were a lot of artists I know about now that would have worked in this mix.
Ceramic Hello was comprised of Roger Humphreys and Brett Wickens — two musicians from Toronto. Humphreys was a classically trained musician and Wickens previously played in an early incarnation of Toronto new-wave band Spoons (track from their first album below), who after the departure of Wickens would gain some fame — at least in Canada — starting in the early to mid 1980s. There’s a clip of Spoons from around the mid-1980s being interviewed the aforementioned MuchMusic channel.
Wickens was at the same time starting a career as a graphic designer — a career that he would ultimately move to in full — and designed the cover for the one and only album Ceramic Hello released titled The Absence Of A Canary (1981). The cover art is somewhat iconic as I remember seeing it many years ago before I even knew about the music through various Canadian media, and so much so I’ve crossed paths with people in my musical adventures who had those iconic eyes as a tattoo or a massive back patch on a jacket.
When I finally heard their music I was captivated. The duo were obviously cued up with movements in synthesizer music happening in the UK at the time, with the tonality, sparse minimalism and alien sounding textures of what artists like John Foxx, The Human League and artists on the Mute Records roster were cooking up at the time.
The track “Footsteps In The Fog” I heard in the beginning hours of a club night around this time I was doing the Canadian music research project. It sounded amazing through an empty, dark club enshrouded in fog — full of longing and ennui. It’s very sparce, a simple slow-moving analogue drum pattern in which a lush string synth floats over the top along with a plaintive vocal melody. I have no idea what equipment the duo were using at the time but I’ve always pegged that string synth as coming from a Roland RS09 string/organ synth. I’m probably leaning on that choice as I used to own one of those synths back in the Radio Berlin days and am very familiar with its sound, including its unique phasing quality. I believe this synth was used quite heavily on the album Seventeen Seconds (1980) by The Cure.
The composition itself is build around chord progressions one might associate with a mournful piece of classical music rather that anything from the pop/rock canon. This might be the hand of classically-trained member Roger Humphreys at work.
Since discovering this track I’ve heard it in clubs on occasion — usually in the early or late hours — ever since and it still feels electric when that drum pattern and synth line get pumped through a rather sizeable PA.
Again, like the previous entry here for Second Layer‘s “Black Flowers”, this track by Ceramic Hello became one of those tracks that suited more gray days when one is alone, or perhaps walking through an icy, cold landscape with no-one else around. The whole vibe of the song works for that imagery so well.
Needless to say but The Absence Of The Canary didn’t really punch a hole in the roof to popularity, likely given its dark weirdness and European-leaning aesthetics that weren’t really a widespread thing that was popular in Canada at the time — although likely picked up by Canadian musicians and fans who took up an interest in the rising synth-pop movement happening in Europe. Probably a Vancouver-based band like Skinny Puppy — with their unique, aggressive mix of synth and industrial sounds — would fare better within and outside of Canada a bit later in the 1980s.
Apparently Ceramic Hello weren’t too keen on playing live in club circuit, so probably with missing out on growing a fan base in that way and the relative strangeness of their music they then dissolved pretty quickly. As mentioned earlier, Wickens moved more heavily into his graphic design career after their sole album, moving to the UK and working alongside the far more well-known British graphic designer Peter Saville, known for his iconic work with Factory Records (most notably Joy Division and New Order). Wickens during this period had a hand in some iconic album artwork, including some Factory releases and Peter Gabriel‘s So (1986). Moving into the 1990s he moved into more senior positions in graphic design agencies in the US, which I believe is still the line of work he’s doing to this day.
While in the UK there were other Canadians who made the move over around that time that he connected with on occasion for music, one being Martha Ladly who had recently left the popular Toronto-based new wave band Martha And The Muffins, whose most well-known track “Echo Beach” has definitely picked up some traction again in the past ten years, being a dancefloor favourite at European synth/wave festivals. In fact, it’s popular enough that a few friends of mine from Berlin launched a little summer festival every year called Echo Beach, tapping into the track’s jangly sunny vibes.
I don’t know what Wickens and Ladly cooked up together, but Ladly ended up putting in a short stint playing with the Scottish group The Associates — definitely one of my faves — and she can be seen playing synths and keyboards in a number of their music videos and TV performances (see below) around the time of that band’s 1982 release Sulk. It seems Canadians had seeped into the framework of popular, new UK musical framework of the time.
This is the second Canadian entry here (the first being here) — or effectively known as CanCon — and due to the fact that I still consider myself mostly Canadian after almost two decades on the British Isles, we’ll probably see more CanCon entries here down the line.