And here’s another Canadian entry on the tail of a return from a recent visit back to visit my “home city” of Vancouver, Canada. Without planning it, a nice little haul of LPs was acquired and taken back with me over the North Pole and Atlantic Ocean to Scotland. There might be more such entries in the coming weeks as I give each of these LPs a full listen, so in the meantime I figured it’d be a suitable time to touch on a well-known and — at the time — controversial track by the Toronto-based cult band Rough Trade, whose name itself was overshadowed by the popular UK record label of the same name, and had a run starting in the early 1970s until the late 1980s with numerous re-unions over the years since then.
I have been familiar with the band for a long time — since I was a kid in the 80s in fact — having vague memories of seeing the video for “All Touch” from their second album For Those Who Think Young (1981) back on MuchMusic back in the day, with images of singer Carole Pope‘s shock of black hair and her intently delivering her lyrics like bullets through a microphone. It was only many years later — well after I had moved in the UK — that I really started to get acquainted with Rough Trade‘s music by way of doing a research mix project on underground Canadian music that started my massive appreciation for them, not only for the music but also for the boundaries the band pushed so early on in the 1970s and 1980s that made them a landmark “queer” rock band for the underground masses that make them super underrated and somewhat unknown to this day.
Carole Pope met multi-instrumentalist and her long time songwriting partner Kevan Staples in Toronto in the late 1960s, both auditioning for a band that never came to be. That chance meeting however got their partnership going, first through a series of short lived “folk” leaning bands before forming Rough Trade sometime in the first half of the 1970s. From there they shook things up with very risqué performances on what was very run-of-the-mill Canadian variety shows at the time, including incorporating bondage and leather into their performances, as well as staging a musical with the popular John Waters star Divine called Restless Underwear which unfortunately was never documented.
It’s here that one can elaborate on their colourful career and collaborations with other artists, but this page here covers that far better than any attempt I could make:
The band’s first actual studio album, 1980’s Avoid Freud — which was the LP I had picked up in Vancouver — contained the band’s most well-known yet incredibly controversial hit “High School Confidential”, which was a hit for the band, and the first hit that had open lyrics about lesbian lust, as indicted in the first verses that Pope sings in the song:
She’s a cool blonde scheming bitch
She makes my body twitch
Walking down the corridor
You can hear her stilettos click
I want her so much I feel sick
The girl can’t help it
She really can’t help it now
The music of the song is a mid-tempo bluesy stomp, with the root notes of the bass just hitting the quarter notes complete with the casual piano playing of Kevan Staples rolling over the rhythm section, paired up with a smooth sounding Moog lead synthesizer.
There’s other notable tracks on this album as well, including the funky/cabaret vibe of “Lie Back And Let Me Do Everything”, the straight up, high octane proto-punk/glam of the controversial “What’s The Furor About The Führer?” — comparing the Third Reich to modern corporations and the laid back, smooth synth-inflected “Fashion Victim”. There’s a catchiness to their material and always pushing the edge of conventional “taste” in terms of subject matter.
Overall Rough Trade‘s music has a lot of familiarity to it, pulling in elements from glam rock, proto-punk, classic R&B and at some points just well-done rock n’ roll with a more theatrical musical/cabaret approach, moving more into new wave sounds with synthesizer sounds on subsequent albums. Kevan Staples is a great musician that can arrange catchy pop/rock songs somewhat effortlessly. However it’s the presence, signing style and lyrical subject matter of Carole Pope that really takes the band to unprecedented levels of fun and gleeful excess.
Pope’s singing ability is up there with the soulful greats — at least for me anyway — a surly and theatrical voice full of character. Whether it’s her putting a sighing “uh” at the end of each vocal phrase, or tensing up her voice to the point where she quickly shifts out of her powerful, brazen singing voice into what is almost a painful shriek is impressive, along with many identifiable nuances, annunciation and phrasing in her singing style that are easily identifiable to her style and make her — at least to me — stand out by a long shot to other female vocalists working in this general style at the time. Her lyrics push boundaries and are chalk full of amazing, entertaining lines that makes for an inspiring and fun listen. She was after all wanting to touch on many subjects that many people — especially in sleepy ol’ Canada — didn’t really want to talk about and she had a hell of a fun time doing so.
Around the time of the release of Avoid Freud, the band contributed a non-album single “Revenge” — as well as a cameo performance — in the obscure Canadian horror film from 1980 called Deadline (you can watch the full film on YouTube here) where the band are presented as theatrical outer space aliens — almost in a Rocky Horror Picture Show style — instructed to play in front of an unsuspecting audience of drunks by a rather clichéd and comical villian boss who is of some German extraction (see clip below), making for a rather camp and comical scene in what is a film about a horror writer trying to write a screenplay for his next film.
Tim Curry, of the aforementioned Rocky Horror Picture Show and Legend fame, had done his own cover of one of Rough Trade‘s early tracks “Birds Of A Feather”. It’s curious to see how Curry’s camp acting style and vocal delivery of his lines at times seems to pull from Carole Pope‘s vocal and on-stage mannerisms whether it was intended or not.
The band also had numerous TV live appearances, filmed interviews on Canadian television and likely cameos in other films that at this point I’m not aware of. There’s a clip below of the band being interviewed in 1980 on a video slot for Toronto’s CHUM FM radio station, a few years before Canada’s own answer to MTV was launched, MuchMusic.
The band was quite influencial in their own way, with numerous artists taking cue from the band’s exploits, including another popular Canadian artist, Peaches, who did a duet with Carole Pope onstage back in 2007, performing Rough Trade‘s “High School Confidental” on stage to a packed audience.
At the time of writing this, I’ve only found out recently that Kevan Staples sadly passed away this year, with an obituary on the CBC website.
I could wax on further about Rough Trade here, but overall it’s worth checking out some of their music for these relatively unsung heroes of queer rock music.