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In May of 1977 as a young visual artist/experimental musician,
I was invited by fellow Ontario College of Art student David
Millar to start a band with him. The punk/new wave scene had
been going for a few years and its ironic and distainful stance
against the blandness of 1970's mainstream culture was immediately
appealing. Suddenly, everyone around O.C.A. and neighbouring
Queen St. W. seemed to be starting a band or was in one already.
Over the spring and summer of 1977, people drifted in and
out of our rehearsal space, a former stable on St. Patrick
St., (with one tiny window and no heat as we found out the
following winter), trying out on various instruments with
mixed results. David knew a woman who played an Acetone organ
in a band called Oh Those Pants! and so Martha Johnson became
our keyboard player. Martha in turn brought in a friend she
knew from high school, Carl Finkle who played bass. As everyone
else seemed too terrified, Martha started singing some of
the early songs: "Saigon", "Insect Love"
and "Suburban Dream". ("She has quite a good
voice...", I wrote in my journal that September.) When
my brother Tim joined the band as drummer a few weeks later,
the line-up was complete. Now we had to come up with a name
for our first gig at the annual Ontario College of Art Hallowe'en
Party.
A Tentative List of Band Names:
The Anemics, The Appliances, The Case Histories, The Confused
Tourists, The Deadly Nightshades,
The Furious Clones, The Gel Heads, The Kitchenettes (all girl
band?), The Near Misses (all girl band?), Oui Ouis From Paris,
The Turbojets, The Vistas, Xenolith ("A rock fragment
foreign to the igneous mass in which it occurs.")
We wanted an epithet that would distance ourselves from the
cartoon-violent names of the copy-cat punk bands. Someone,
(various people claim this honour), suggested The Muffins
as being diametrically opposite and Martha's name was put
in front. While no one was that enthusiastic about Martha
and the Muffins, we decided to use it as a temporary name
until we could all agree on something better.
It wasn't until February 1978 that another O.C.A. student,
Andy Haas was invited as guest artiste at a gig at The Beverley
in Toronto, playing sax on "Sinking Land" and "Suburban
Dream". Shortly after that, David Millar quit the band
to become our live sound engineer. A friend of mine from high
school, Martha Ladly, was auditioned on guitar to replace
David but was better on keyboards and backing vocals. With
the addition of Andy Haas and Martha Ladly, the band line-up
would remain the same until August 1980.
 
One of the best things about early MatM was its sense of adventure,
musically and otherwise. Our six personalities seemed to collide
in a good way - creating a richly disparate mix which made
Martha and the Muffins sound different from anyone else. Our
influences ranged from pop across to free jazz with everything
in between thrown in. Like many bands in the spirit of the
times, we hadn't formed to "entertain" or to get
a record deal or become famous - it was just the novelty of
doing it. We could wear outrageous clothes, (even a three
piece suit), jump around, make noise, dye our hair and shave
off our eyebrows knowing nothing serious was at stake. We
assumed that we'd probably all be doing something else in
a couple of years.
That started to change rapidly when Andy sent a tape of songs
we had recorded in June 1978 to Glenn O'Brien, the music critic
of Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine in New York City. Glenn
wrote back offering to help us get a gig at Hurrah in New
York. He played it for Robert Fripp, (who liked it too - his
wife, Toyah Wilcox would be the first person to cover "Echo
Beach" on a record), and Dave Fudger from Virgin Records
who was also in New York at the time.
Shortly after playing Hurrah in March 1979, a recording contract
was seemingly dropped into our laps and we signed with Dindisc/Virgin
Records. In August, we were recording our first album, "Metro
Music" at The Manor near Oxford, England. By the time
"Echo Beach" had become an international hit in
1980, we found ourselves enveloped in all the trappings of
pop music fame; endless interviews, gigs and television shows
in Europe and the States, meeting famous people, doing Top
of the Pops, etc.
 
1980 was also the year the original band unravelled. To say
that the six of us reacted differently to the sudden, intense
pressures and demands of the commercial music industry is
an understatement. Without having a manager to mediate between
ourselves and the label, the head of Dindisc stupidly exploited
the growing divisions within the band which only made things
worse. During the recording of our second album, "Trance
and Dance", and afterwards as the opening band for Roxy
Music's U.K. tour, we started to self-destruct. By August
1980, Martha Ladly was out of the band and Carl Finkle quit
in December, after the Canadian tour. For all of our success,
it was one of the unhappiest years of my life.
After much soul-searching, Martha, Andy, Tim and I decided
to keep MatM going. After all, the main writers, the lead
singer and the characteristic Muffins "sound" was
still intact and there was no shortage of ideas for the next
album.
Next 1981-1984 |
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