1977-1980

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.

1981-1984

Two positive things happened. We now had a manager, Gerry Young, whose enthusiasm and protective ferocity lifted our spirits and shielded us from Virgin's meddling in band affairs. Secondly, we found a new bass player, Jocelyne Lanois, (who was so nervous about auditioning with us she didn't show up for our first meeting!) It turned out that Jocelyne had two brothers, Bob and Dan, who had a studio in Hamilton, an hour's drive west of Toronto. After doing some demo tapes there we decided to ask Dan to co-produce our third album.

With Daniel Lanois, we finally found someone who understood, appreciated and encouraged the more experimental/textural/noisy side of the band - qualities that had never been fully realized on "Metro Music" and "Trance and Dance". Virgin reluctantly agreed to let us do the album with Dan, (having no idea who this marvellous person was), but only if we agreed to a cut in the budget. We went along with this as the price for being left alone to do the album our way.

Between May and July of 1981, we recorded the new album at Nimbus 9 in Toronto and Grant Avenue Studio in Hamilton. Far from record company interference, we unleashed all the pent-up emotions of the previous year into the new project. From a personal standpoint, I felt free for the first time to incorporate many of the experimental music techniques that I had used in composing my soundscapes in The Sound Lab as a student at the Ontario College of Art -long tape loops, found sounds, happy accidents and improvision without set goals. The resulting album, "This Is The Ice Age" was a musical breakthrough for us and remains my favourite album overall.

Dan continued to work with us on the follow-up album, "Danseparc", recorded at Grant Avenue Studio during the spring and summer of 1982 with new drummer Nick Kent and the first of three albums to be recorded with Canadian indie label Current Records. With the departure of Andy Haas in late 1981, the band was in danger of losing some of the free form elements that his highly inventive approach to horn playing had brought to the Muffins sound. With this in mind, two talented horn players were brought into the Danseparc sessions, Ron Allen and John Oswald. (John would later gain notoriety for "Plunderphonics", his savagely brilliant deconstructions of popular songs and radio plays.) With "Danseparc" MatM delved even further into the use of found sounds, incorporating television soap opera dialogue, bagpipes, rain forest pygmy and Gregorian chants and other aural scraps and fragments.

With the release of "Danseparc" in 1983, the band embarked on another tour, playing dates in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. The core band was augmented for the tour by Quammie Williams on percussion, sax player Wayne Mills and guitarist Michael Brook. (Michael eventually produced several albums of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and has received wide acclaim for his own recordings and film work.)

The 1983 tour culminated in a performance at The Forum, an outdoor amphitheatre in Toronto's Ontario Place on August 15th in front of 10,000 excited fans. The evening was recorded live by Daniel Lanois on a mobile studio. Not long after, the tapes inexplicably disappeared from the offices of Current Records. Believed to have been lost or stolen, the multitracks remained missing for fifteen years. It wasn't until 1998 when our former manager, Gerry Young, was clearing the house of his recently deceased mother that the tapes were discovered in a bedroom closet. In listening to those tapes again after so many years I realized I had forgotten how thrilling the band's live improvising could be. The near abandon of "This Is The Ice Age" is beautifully chaotic and I hope we can eventually release the Ontario Place concert as a live C.D.

That evening after the show, some of us gathered at Gerry Young's house to celebrate the end of a successful tour when Jocelyne broke down in tears, fearing that this was the last time the band would play together and that Martha and I were going to continue on without her and Nick Kent. Jocelyne's intuitions were right. Martha and I were becoming increasingly frustrated with the responsibilities of leading a band. As songwriters we wanted to escape the confines of a band format, work with new people, try new approaches. Nevertheless, it was a very difficult decision to break up a great band and go it alone. MatM in the best sense was very much like a family. We didn't realize at the time how much we would miss that supportive, nurturing environment.

Martha and I retreated to a farm overlooking the Beaver Valley north of Toronto, demoing several songs and making field recordings of crickets, thunderstorms and short-wave radio noises. Dan Lanois visited and we discussed ideas and approaches for the next album. It was decided that a change of scenery would be inspiring and we decided to record the bed tracks at The Power Station in New York City.

Brian Eno had recommended a drummer who had played on "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts" album, Yogi Horton, who in turn brought in bass player Tinker Barfield. This powerhouse rhythm section brought a whole new sound to many of the songs in ways that we could have never planned or predicted. When Dan brought the Brecker Brothers in to play on "Black Stations/White Stations", they adapted Tinker's bass line for the riveting horn intro. (Only Prince's "When Doves Cry" stopped "Black Stations/White Stations" from reaching #1 on Billboard's Dance Chart in 1984.)

Why the name change to M+M in 1984? When Martha and I decided to disband the Danseparc band, become a duo and concentrate on studio recording, it seemed like an opportune time to shed the weight of the band's past and for me to escape being called "a Muffin". (Why couldn't we have agreed on a cool name like Talking Heads or Voice of the Beehive?) The band name we had intended to use once had in fact, lasted seven years. In retrospect however, changing the name was a foolish thing to have done. I have to take responsibility for this as it was entirely my bad idea. Most fans as it turned out, liked the original name better and many casual listeners never realized "Echo Beach" and "Black Stations/White Stations" were written and sung by the same people.

The success of "Black Stations/White Stations" allowed us to buy a home studio which enabled us to experiment, write and record at leisure. We named it The Web, (this was long before the Internet), because of the daunting number of cobwebs and other detritus that had to be cleared out of the basement where it was to be located. Once set up and spider web-free, we started working on songs for the next album.

Dan's involvement with Peter Gabriel's film soundtrack "Birdy" meant we were going to have to find another producer to collaborate with. After three albums in the role of the Muffins' George Martin, Dan felt we didn't need a co-producer, that we knew what we wanted to do and should produce ourselves. Nevertheless, Martha and I still thought we needed someone who could help translate our ideas in a big studio environment. After checking out a number of producers, we decided that David Lord, based on his production work with Peter Gabriel and in particular, a track called "Wake Up" by XTC, would fit the bill.

1985-1994

"The World Is A Ball" makes me think of weather. We did the rhythm tracks at Le Studio, north of Montreal, surrounded by huge snow drifts. Drummer Yogi Horton and bassist Tinker Barfield had come up from New York, (still wearing their Luther Vandross tour jackets), to do some tracks. Walking with Martha and me down a half-buried lane, they were astounded by the snow. "So this is what Canada is like!" Then on to David Lord's studio in Bath, England where we spent the spring and summer of 1985 doing overdubs and mixing. A lot of rain in a beautiful city.We returned to Toronto in the middle of summer to find it buried under a canopy of trees. It seemed almost tropical.

Perhaps the climate changes as well as the obsessively long recording process influenced the making of "The World Is A Ball", for it seems to me the most schizophrenic album we have ever made. Straightforward pop/funk tunes like "Song In My Head" rubbed shoulder to shoulder with angry diatribes like "Stuck On The Grid" and "Don't Jump The Gun", the latter marrying our love of noise, (angry wasp sounds and underwater shouting from a "sub-igloo"), to David Lord's masterful vocal arrangements.

When RCA balked at releasing "Only You" as a single, (featuring the brilliant rhythm section of David Piltch on bass and Michael Sloski on drums), Martha and I took the matter into our own hands. We shot several hours of black and white Super 8 film footage utilizing projected lyrics and primitive, real-time "special effects" like mounting the camera on a washing machine in spin cycle. With the inspired editing of our friend Bob Kennedy, we made the best video of our careers for only a few thousand dollars. RCA released the song as a single and the video received considerable critical acclaim as well as influencing the look of several subsequent television commercials.

However, by 1987 it was time for another change. It was obvious that RCA, (now BMG) and Current Records weren't giving M+M the promotional support needed to maintain an international career. Martha and I were tired of being in Toronto, frustrated with the growing indifference of our record labels and sick of the music business in general. That spring, we packed up The Web, seven bags of belongings and headed back to Bath. We set the studio up in our bedroom and spent the next two and a half years working on new material and going for really long walks.

The creative process for "Modern Lullaby" would turn out to be even more drawn out than making "The World Is A Ball". Having cut our ties with BMG and Current, alone and without any deadlines, we alternately worked hard, recording, erasing, rerecording and doing multiple versions of the same songs and then we'd drift for days through the dream-like cityscape of Bath and its surrounding countryside. Fortunately, Paul Ridout, a native Bathonian who had done much of the keyboard programming on "The World Is A Ball" was on hand, constantly encouraging us, making suggestions and contributing his many talents to the project. With the addition of violinist Stuart Gordon's evocative playing on "Rainbow Sign" and "Fighting The Monster", "Modern Lullaby" reflected the dreamy, beautiful city it was recorded in.

The making of "Modern Lullaby" went on for two more years after our return to Toronto at the end of 1989, with further contributions from bass player David Piltch and percussion tracks by my brother Tim and drummer Mike Sloski. Since our casual polling of fans over the years had indicated that Martha and the Muffins was the name they preferred, we dropped M+M and revived our original name for its release.

After more than three years of work and thousands of dollars of our own money spent, the release of "Modern Lullaby" in Canada was a total disaster. Intrepid Records, the indie label which released it in 1992, collapsed shortly thereafter, its owner fleeing to England, leaving a roster of ripped-off and angry artists. With no promotion and little interest from the media, "Modern Lullaby" disappeared into a black hole. Most MatM fans never had the chance of finding out it even existed. Since 1980, our releases had normally attracted a fair amount of media attention - reviews, interviews, radio and video airplay, etc. but to our shock, almost nothing of the sort happened this time. Much Music, Canada's only music station and until now, a big supporter of the band, wouldn't playlist the album's three videos, there were no reviews or articles in any major publications. Things had changed. We were stunned.

For Martha and me, the birth of our daughter that same year was a life-changing event, (as new parents will attest!), which helped distract us from what had happened. For the much of the 90's, we did film and television soundtrack work. As recording artists however, there seemed to be little point in making albums that no one heard.

1995-2002

While I was totally disillusioned with the music "business", scraps of musical inspiration continued to creep into my head, whether I wanted them or not. My way of dealing with this was to record the idea on cassette (just in case), shove it in a drawer and then ignore it.

Martha meanwhile, inspired by our daughter, had been slowly writing and recording a collection of original children's songs which we eventually released on our own Muffin Music label as "Songs From The Tree House" in 1995. "Tree House" received positive reviews and won the Juno Award, (Canada's equivalent to the Grammy) for Best Children's Album the following year. After being invited to join the roster of Prologue To The Performing Arts, an arts organization that brings children's performers into schools, festivals and other public venues, Martha has performed for thousands of children across Ontario and beyond.

In late 1996, Martha and I negotiated the sub-licensing rights with BMG Music Canada president Paul Alofs for the albums in the BMG back catalogue. After approaching EMI Music Canada president Deane Cameron for help in obtaining sub-licensing rights to the Virgin-owned albums, Deane offered to release our proposed MatM/M+M compilation. With the additional commitment of EMI's Shan Kelley and Warren Stewart, "Then Again - A Retrospective" was released by EMI Canada and Muffin Music in 1998, ending the ten year struggle to release a comprehensive overview of the seven studio albums to date on C.D. The resulting email from fans around the world, the rise of e-commerce on the Internet, the inspiring websites of other bands, (many of them also neglected or ignored by the major labels), helped convince me that there was value in continuing to make music for an audience we thought had disappeared.

Since the release of "Then Again", the number of requests for the reissuing of "This Is The Ice Age" and "Danseparc" among others has increased, as well as the demand for new material. While there is no interest from our former labels in reissuing past albums, Martha and I have the right to exploit our back catalogues - at our own expense of course. We are continuing to explore ways of making this financially viable.

Over the last few years, Martha and I have been pulling all those cassettes of ignored musical fragments out of the drawer. From those tapes have come ten or more new songs. As songwriters, the best thing for both of us has always been that moment when a song starts coming together. It's great to be writing again and we hope to be able to share these new songs with our listeners soon.

Mark will be updating the continuing MatM story soon...