Toronto, the actor and wit Peter Ustinov once observed, “is a kind of New York operated by the Swiss”. Considering Ustinov spent quite a bit of time in the city, we should probably read this as an affectionate putdown, but no less true for all that. It may be a multicultural metropolis, but Ontario’s capital has a stolid quality. Had I known about this quip in 1988, when I moved to Toronto having barely been out of Britain, it would have both reassured and worried me. Reassured me because the prospect of a new life in the New World was daunting. Worried me because, as a drinking buddy from Soho’s Intrepid Fox noted as he prepared to move to Milwaukee to work in computers, there seemed the prospect of landing somewhere with “no rock & roll, no fun”.
As things turned out, while my time in Toronto was often discombobulating as an unwise marriage predictably fell apart, it really didn’t lack for music, parties and clubs. Where London had often seemed closed, even impenetrable, Toronto seemed open, as easy to navigate as its grid-plan streets. This was a time when rents were relatively cheap and friends lived in downtown apartments, or in converted warehouse spaces zoned for commercial usage, some of which doubled as after-hours speakeasies to help their tenants make the rent.
The spiritual home of all this cultural activity was downtown around Queen Street West, an area that once provided a refuge for Toronto’s punks before, in a familiar pattern, inexorably gentrifying. In the late 1980s, though, the place maintained traces of a scuzzier and defiant downtown spirit, for all its more exotic denizens were being forced to relocate to adjacent, cheaper neighbourhood.
As punk mutated, the area inevitably became a home from home for goths – or freaks and batcavers as they were known locally. Ivan Lapalme, now a DJ but then “just a kid into the European underground sounds” remembers listening to the likes of The Sisters Of Mercy, The March Violets and The Specimen around this time. This broadly chimes with my memories. Back at home, unbeknown to me, acid house was about to re-engineer the cultural landscape and the long post-punk era was ending, but in Toronto it seemed cool to dress like Ian Astbury – appropriate, considering The Cult singer spent part of his childhood in Hamilton, a steel town west of Toronto. I backcombed. I wore black. I bought a pair of cowboy boots. I hung out with National Velvet, a band that never quite made it beyond Canada.
That’s a sadly familiar tale. Even today, Canadian bands often struggle to get heard outside their home and yet the story of Toronto goth is worth revisiting, if only to remember how a now largely forgotten scene was so vibrant that it leaked into the wider culture. It’s surely no coincidence, for example, that Toronto was the setting for TV police procedural Forever Knight (1992-96), in which the lead detective is an 800-year-old bloodsucker trying to make amends for past sins. Then there’s Nancy Baker’s 1993 vampire novel The Night Inside, in which bloodsucker Ardeth spends time on Queen Street West because, well, where better to hide in plain sight?
Vital Sines – ‘Collage’
(1984, Vitle Sine)
Pre-goth. As elsewhere in the world, Toronto’s goth scene rose out of post-punk and synthpop. The vocals nod to Johnny Lydon and the bassline here could have been pinched from a Simple Minds track, but Vital Sines’ proto-goth ‘Collage’ represents one of those moments where you can hear and, in the best-serious-face accompanying video, see goth emerging. Initially released on the band’s own label, ‘Collage’ reached a wider audience when it was picked up on by CFNY-FM, a Toronto radio station that played alternative music and also often played a vital role in breaking new British bands in North America. While they supported the likes of the Banshees and Shriekback, Vital Sines were never quite able to build on this initial success. ‘Collage’, though, is surely overdue to be featured on the soundtrack to a Netflix drama set in the 1980s.
Skinny Puppy – Smothered Hope
(1984, Nettwerk)
Industrial goth. Yes, Skinny Puppy hailed from Vancouver, but the band passed through Toronto regularly from the middle of the 1980s onwards. During this era, Skinny Puppy’s shock and gore approach to live shows, which left anyone down the front spattered in the (mostly) fake blood that also covered frontman Nivek Ogre, was as goth as could be. It seems wholly appropriate that Alien Sex Fiend attended the band’s first gig, in 1984. Skinny Puppy started life as the side-project of cEvin Key, drummer in new wave act Images In Vogue, but quickly became his primary musical outlet at a time when an anything-might-happen aura surrounded both Key and Ogre. ‘Smothered Hope’ was initially the lead track on Skinny Puppy’s Remission EP, the band’s first vinyl release. With its electronica, pounding percussion and guttural vocals, it’s arguably as good a summation as any of the band’s early years. It’s also fabulous.
National Velvet – ‘Flesh Under Skin’
(1988, Intrepid Records)
Rock goths. National Velvet were strongly identified with Toronto’s goth scene, but their music was commercial and melodic enough to land a deal with Capitol-distributed Intrepid. Singer Maria del Mar’s exuberance and charisma helped considerably, as did the guitar chops of Mark Crossley and, latterly, Tim Welch (who also played in Images In Vogue). Had National Velvet emerged 15 years later, a track such as ‘Flesh Under Skin’, from the band’s eponymous debut, might have been marketed as emo. In our actual timeline, National Velvet recorded a second LP, Courage, with German producer Zeus B Held (John Foxx, Transvision Vamp) in London in 1990. The album was successful, but ultimately not successful enough to sustain the band, which split in the 1990s, as a major label act. In November 2002, bassist Mark Storm was reported missing. His body was subsequently recovered from Lake Ontario, a tragedy that prompted the first of several occasional reunions in the years hence.
Masochistic Religion – ‘The Vampire’
(1997, Truly Diabolic Records)
High goth. There was a strong element of goth as performance art about Masochistic Religion, who started out in the late 1980s. The band, singer and mainstay Mitch Krol told writer Nancy Kilpatrick for The Goth Bible: A Compendium For The Darkly Inclined (2004), represented “a sort of dark S&M theatre done to music”. Shows “were heavy, real and probably illegal”. Which isn’t to say Krol was averse to such dark cabaret showmanship as being carried onstage in a coffin, as occurred at the 1998 Convergence IV goth festival in Toronto. Krol often put such goth preoccupations as death, vampires and religion front and centre, yet there was an admirable restlessness about Masochistic Religion, a love of dynamics for all the music was heavy and brooding. In 2015, Mitch Krol became Candi, “exploring art from a different perspective”.
Rhea’s Obsession – ‘Cun Lacoudhir (The Breaking Ice)’
(1996, Spider Records)
Post-goth. Emerging in the middle of the 1990s when the initial energy of goth had dissipated, Rhea’s Obsession’s take on darkcore began when duo Sue Hutton and Jim Field composed the music for an experimental dance film, Tabulae Anatomacae Sex. Vocalist Hutton brought Celtic and world music influences. Field had a grounding in the hardcore and experimental music scenes. The result is not so far in spirit from Dead Can Dance, music that’s edgy, eerie and often built upon drones. Two tracks from the band’s debut, including ‘Cun Lacoudhir (The Breaking Ice)’, were selected for the soundtrack to La Femme Nikita, a 1997 TV take on Luke Besson’s movie. Latterly, the duo released a second LP, Between Earth And Sky, before going their separate ways.
