Canadian Musician 81

It's strange the way things have worked out for Martha and the Muffins. For instance, how did a typical Canadian post-punk band, art-influenced and experimental, end up with a top ten hit single and a solid reputation as a pop group far away from home, in England?

Like many of the things that have happened to this band, it was more by chance than by design that it was formed in the first place.

When Mark Gane and David Millar got together in the spring of 1977 to play a little music and write a few songs, they didn't expect their casual arrangement to turn into a rock group. But they were soon joined by keyboard player Martha Johnson, and by the end of the summer a rhythm section had drifted in - Carl Finkle on bass and Tim Gane on drums. Martha took over as lead vocalist, they went out looking for gigs and played their first at Ontario College of Art on Hallowe'en night.

About six months later (David had dropped out by then to become the group's lighting coordinator) Andy Haas was brought in to play the saxophone and Martha Ladly was recruited to share the vocals and keyboards with Martha Johnson. They spent the next two years playing for college crowds and Toronto punks in crummy bars and watering holes around the city.

All their attempts to get a contract with North American record companies were fruitless, so when an emissary from Virgin Records in England came to Toronto and offered them a deal, they signed on and departed for the land of Mods and Rockers to record their first album, Metro Music, at the Manor.

To the surprise of everyone (except maybe, the enterprising soul at Virgin who first noticed them) "Echo Beach" shot up the British pop charts early in 1980. Since the single was released months before Metro Music, Martha and the Muffins' image as a pop group was firmly entrenched in the minds of British rock fans and critics by the time the rest of the album, with its less commercial sound, came along to clear up the misunderstanding.

In England, where fans are fickle and the reviewers hate just about everything, a band is only as popular as its latest single, and when "Saigon" and "Suburban Dream" were issued, followed by the new album, Trance and Dance - all as different from "Echo Beach" as apples from automobiles - the Muffins were criticized for trying to change an image they had never tried to create in the first place.

"Reviewers (in England) of our second album have accused us of deliberately going from a nice pop sound into something 'oblique and industrial', whatever that means," says Mark, "but in fact, the experimental side of our band has always been there."

Meanwhile "Echo Beach" and Metro Music have gone goid in Canada, and the band's success no longer depends on its standing in the British pop charts. In fact, even though the Muffins' records are made in England and released there first (one of the main problems of being a Canadian group hitched to a British label) they actually prefer the music scene in Canada.

"Over there it's almost impossible to be successful without a hit single," explains Mark. "We've had less media exposure over here, and I think people tend to accept us as what we are. The English tend to see us as a pop band, because "Echo Beach" was the best-known thing we've done."

The term "pop band" implies that a group's music has a certain tightness and veneer that the Muffins, who see themselves more as professional amateurs than accomplished musicians, have no interest in achieving. Even "Echo Beach", hit though it was, didn't sound particularly slick.

"An element of this band has always been dissonance and noise," says Mark. "Not being all that proficient technically, there's a very loose feel to our band." This loose, experimental feeling gives the Muffins the freedom that they like; freedom to improvise, especially when they play live.

"There are certain passages in songs like "Paint By Number Heart" and "Indecision" that as a whole are melodic songs," says Mark, "but from a certain point in those songs, Andy and I will do whatever we want. The rhythm structure will remain steady, but all of a sudden, part of the melodic mode goes into a different form, at least tonically, within a given rhythm structure, then it pulls itsetf back together and goes into the song again."

"As long as the cues are there," explains Martha Johnson, "the rest of us can pick it up fairly easily." Martha Johnson has always been the band's main Martha, doing most of the lead vocals and writing many of the songs. (Mark writes most of the rest). She avoids both of the accepted images for female rockers - sultry seductress or raunchy ball- buster - and on stage projects maturity rather than unbearable cuteness or ersatz butch. And since Martha Ladly split with the band last fall, she is once again the only Martha.

The new Muffin is Jean Wilson, a music teacher who made her debut on the band's just-completed North American tour.

The most promiment elements of the group's sound are the keyboards - Martha Johnson's Ace Tone organ and the Wurlitzer piano now played by Jean - and Andy's Selmer alto sax. For many of the band's English fans, it was Andy's sax solo that was the solid hook that really sold "Echo Beach". He occasionally rents a baritone, and there is quite a bit of it on the new album.

Martha Ladly played a King trombone on a couple of songs before she left for England to try out a solo career. Carl uses a Fender Precision bass, Tim plays Premier drums and Mark alternates between a Gibson Les Paul and a Rickenbacker, though he favours the Les Paul.

Being left-handed, Mark has to contend with one of the trickiest problems in rock and roll; finding left-handed guitars to suit his specifications. ("If anyone out there knows where I can get another old Les Paul, I'd be glad to hear from them," he says.)

"We don't use many effects when we play live," says Mark. "I use an MXR Distortion Booster on my guitar, and we put the keyboards through Roland amps. I usually use a Roland amp, too."

Another advantage of their loose, unpolished sound is the relative speed with which they can record an album. They put Trance and Dance away in one month at the Manor last summer. It was fast, but not cheap. Martha estimates the cost at around 20 thousand pounds.

"It's an expensive studio," says Mark. "Some people say it's one of the best in the world." As on the first album, they used producer Mike Howlett (former bass player of Gong, for all you survivors of early '70s avante- garde) and Richard Manwaring as engineer.

"The way we work in the studio is to put down the bed tracks," explains Martha, "which is bass, drums and guitar, and then the rest comes later. Sometimes we just use bass, drums and guitar, and sometimes we'd put down almost the whole song, keyboards and everything. Andy in particular likes to record with the bed track.

On Suburban Dream, from the first album, he did the solo in the bed track. So if we get a good bed track and he doesn't like his solo, we still keep the bed track and he'll do the solo over again.

"Most of the stuff in the studio that we use is very standard," says Mark. "There's nothing very special about how we record, though on this album I did some things with synthesizer, EMS Synthi A, on the guitar, but nothing else."

As relative novices when it comes to recording, they avoid ringing extra equipment into the studio with them, though while recording Trance and Dance, they did allow themselves the indulgence of trying out what was there.

"We used materials that were in the studio to get the sound at the beginning and end of the title track," says Martha. "We were scratching on some burlap," continues Mark. "It was a really close mic and we put a lot of reverb on it and it just became totally unrecognizable." He makes a whooshing, wind-like sound to demonstrate, accompanied with some ethereal waving of his long, spidery fingers.

"On another song, "Am I On?" we used a combination of my Ace Tone and a Hammond organ," adds Martha. "We put the Hammond through a Leslie speaker and got a very unique sound."

"We ran out of time before we could finish up," says Mark, "but at the end of "Primal Weekend" we were going to put all these plastic beer glasses - the kind they have over in England - in an empty room and step on them, so they were just cracking all over the place. The song dissolves into all this noise, and then there was going to be all this cracking."

All this is about as far away from the sound of "Echo Beach" as Canada is from England, and is pretty presumptuous for a band that not a year ago was appearing on BBC-TV's Top of the Pops, but after all the Muffins are still learning. By the third album (tentatively set to start recording this spring) they should have proved once and for all that they're nobody's one-hit wonder.

The English used to call them pop. Now they don't know what to call them. We just call them Martha and the Muffins.