I’m getting close to a full two decades living over in the UK and yet despite that rather lengthy period of time I still have some attachment to my home country of Canada. I think about this from time to time, as when I generally go home to visit Vancouver these days I feel quite foreign, especially on any visits in these post-Covid times we live in. Perhaps I’m a Canadian that’s no longer Canadian still pretending to be Canadian. Fuck, I don’t know.
Last month I met some friends from Germany who were visiting Scotland in Edinburgh where we all went to go see the Canadian new wave band Men Without Hats, which was actually quite a fun show. The band were fit, full of energy and ultimately seemed to be aware of their novelty — with their one big hit “Safety Dance” being played not twice but thrice — with singer Ivan Doroschuck delivery some snappy, hilarious stage banter between tracks. Drummer Adrian White was wearing a cowboy hat the whole set, to which Doroschuck quipped on stage while introducing the band, “And Mr. Adrian White on drums, who did not get the memo.”
With my almost twenty years of being here, I still get mistaken for being American, likely due to my more “neutral” Canadian accent — or Irish, which I’ve always found a bit fascinating. I suppose the US of A was founded on a lot of Irish immigration. Canadians have infiltrated America secretly over the years, especially with the medium of film and television where much of Canada’s acting and comedy talent goes to take their career to the next level. Many of the cast of the legendary SCTV — including Rick Moranis, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, John Candy and many more coming from younger generations — being more well-known in larger American film productions. This subtle infiltration has not gone unnoticed. The American post-hardcore band Circus Lupus, covered earlier in this section, was named after an SCTV sketch. Hell, there’s an indie record label called Secretly Canadian that likely tips its hat to this very fact.
On a lesser known, more obscure level, I’ve also clocked that in the world of music, a number Canadian musicians in the 1980s were secretly supplying the European dance, disco and Hi-NRG markets with music that made a bit more of a splash in the old country than they ever did in their native Canada — and even less so in the country’s big neighbour to the south. Being from Vancouver, the main electronic exports of the time tended to be a lot darker, with that city spawning groups such as Skinny Puppy, Front Line Assembly, Moev and more — things happening in the eastern cities tended to be a bit more tailored to electronic dance with a distinctly more European flavour. Growing up in that time Canada to me got a lot more media from Europe — by way of being a UK commonwealth country and with that getting a lot more UK bands and television — in a way that provided a lot more differentiation to what America was producing for this type of music at the time.
I started observing these connections quite a while ago, which at one point early in the last decade resulted in myself creating a two-part mix (one and two) that covered happenings in this general style of post-punk/electronic music in Canada between 1978 and 1986.
And that all brings me to this entry, which looks at one of a handful of artists that definitely produced music for a European market. I jokingly refer to these artists as Canatalo (a shit portmanteau of “Canadian” and “italo”). In fact, one of the first acts I was introduced to as italo was through a friend of mine in the late 1990s and that artist was The Immortals and their track “The Ultimate Warlord”. In the years that followed I discovered this was a Canadian production team, also responsible for another project that had a minor hit in the “old country” called “I’m Alive” with their American Fade project. I also discovered that the version of “The Ultimate Warlord” that I was familiar with was in fact a cover of a UK group called The Warlord. Lots going on here. This thread probably warrants its own post at some point in the future.
You’ve also got Montreal groups such as Lime, Rational Youth, Trans-X and the aforementioned Men Without Hats making more of a splash in Europe with their more flambouyant, Kraftwerk-influenced electro sounds. Around this time there was a local TV show called Musi-Video that showcased this Montreal “new wave” scene that is archived on YouTube., which was co-hosted by a pre-fame and pre-MuchMusic Erica Ehm. In Toronto groups like Ceramic Hello (covered here before) were releasing minimal electronic music that would be grouped into the whole minimal wave movement that would pick up in the 2000s. There’s many, many more but here we’re going to look at a Toronto duo called Moral Support that was by comparison a more recent discovery for me, having come across their “hit” called “Strange Day For Dancing” (see clip below) sometime in the 2010s.
It seemed after that discovery I would hear that track pop up in DJ sets at various underground minimal synth/wave festivals I was attending over the past decade in Europe, and then from there I sought out another track of theirs called “Living With Passion”, which was released a number times, first in 1983 on the Canadian disco/pop label Tony Green Organisation (TGO), then in Italy in 1984 on Gong Records, then in 1985 on the Belgian label ARS Records, then on Moral Support’s 1985 LP Insanity (TGO) and then yet again in 1988 an the Austrian label, curiously named Dum Dum Records. The covers of these different versions are displayed above for visual comparison.
Moral Support is a production duo of the exotically named Sandro Durante — a name that brings to mind a latin lover stereotype — and the less exotically named Richard Cranford, hailing from the unlikely location that is the Canadian province of Newfoundland (now Newfoundland and Labrador). There’s not much information on this group, let alone the individual musicians. The only photo that exists is one of the two in the studio, with my hunch being that Durante is the gentleman in the centre wearing the aptly topically shirt printed with musical notes.
The track in question here, “Living With Passion”, is definitely a chugger which a term myself and close friends use for more dance-oriented tracks that cruise in the slow lane, generally around 115 BPM and slower. In fact, the track really dips down, down to 99 BPM, which might be too lethargic for energetic patrons on the dancefloor but when tracks get this slow they have their own magical quality.
Starting off with a slightly exotic tropical feel, the drums and bass line drop in with a slight reggae dancehall feel to the drum pattern, then coming in with an overlaid synth pad that to me reminds me of one of those plastic “groan” sound tubes (see clip below) — an effect created by some sort of phasing device, either as an outboard effect or one built into the synthesizer of choice itself.
Then a voice enters the mix, again my hunch being Durante, that sounds a bit exotic with a bit of a tonque-in-check humourous quality to the lyrics, musing on about the mandane tasks of day-to-day, 9-to-5 routines:
Downtown every morning
Phone calls to return
Looking after every detail
Nothing seems to workLivin’ with passion
Livin’ with passion
As the track progresses the tempo is maintained, but with the kick drum going into double-time to ramp up the energy a bit. Overall, some fun drum programming work — including some nice sounding thudding Linn drum style toms — on this one and the song overall takes you on a bit of a musical journey in terms of chord changes, phrases and changes in instrumentation, including some guitar solo action — tastefully mixed behind the instrumentation — around the 3 minute mark.
While releasing “Living With Passion” and “Stramge Day For Dancing” as key singles from the duo, Moral Support managed to release one LP in 1985 called Insanity which includes these two songs, with the LP versions being a different mix opting to use more guitar work that is absent from the previously released single versions. Perhaps this decision was made either to differentiate from the single versions for completist listeners, or the duo decided to move these tracks into a general rock/pop direction. One can only guess.
I surprising managed to pick up from a UK seller on Discogs for a steal. Overall this album fits in the general new wave and synth pop categories, with some tracks being more lighter pop fare than some of their more italo/Hi-NRG leaning tracks.
Like many artists working in this corner of the electronic undergound around this time, they were somewhat short lived as Moral Support seemed to vanish into thin air after the release of that one LP. However, with some internet sleuthing I engaged in recently during some downtime, I managed to find that Sandro Durante did some solo work later in the decade with a release on his Tandem label consisting for two tracks: “Don’t Go (Breaking My Heart” and “All That Magic” (clip below) that saw his stylistic output float more into questionable adult oriented “pop” territory, opting to try out a more ballad-oriented approach replete with them contemporary digital synths of the time as well as something that sounds like a pan flute. This release probably did not break Durante into the lime light and since then nothing else has seemingly been released by either member of Moral Support.
There’ll probably be some more obscure Canadian stuff here down the line but hopefully this chugger will get your swaying on the dancefloor that’s either a dancefloor or the solitude of your living room.