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The Action
TV's on the Blink - 12" EP
Montreco - 1977
Michael Panontin
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The Action were Ottawa's first punk band, and quite possibly Canada's first outside Toronto for that matter.
The group actually trace their roots back to the proto-punk days of 1976, when brothers John and Paul Fenton started auditioning people with an idea to play high-energy rock 'n' roll. The Action's early repertoire consisted of songs by bands like the Stones, Nazareth, Thin Lizzy and Status Quo. But that would all change when a friend, who worked in a local record shop, hipped them out to the latest punk rock sounds coming out of England, which took the sleepy government town by surprise to say the least.
"Paul got a tape from a guy we know [with] all this punk stuff," singer Ted Axe recalled for journalist Roch Parisien. "We started incorporating it into our sets, in fact introducing punk to the French hookers and bikers, who didn't know what the hell it was and started throwing shite at us."
But much like their contemporaries Teenage Head, the Action had a work ethic that was miles away from the sort of anyone-can-do-it amateurism of punk. The guys practised from 10 to 5, five days a week and members were docked pay for showing up late. It wasn't long before the group - singer Axe, the Fenton brothers Paul and John on guitar and drums, respectively, and bassist Rick McDonough - caught the attention of 1960s Quebecois teen idol Tony Roman, who had recently established his Montreco label with an eye to cashing in on these new punk sounds.
So the four (with Fenton's 17-year-old brother Michael replacing McDonough on the skins) made their way to Montreal to make their first record. "The session was crazy!" Paul recalled. "Tony invited all the Montreal media to it. We performed 'live' on stage in Tempo Studios."
The gloriously raw punk of 'TV's on the Blink', "a song that Axe wrote the lyrics for after his own broke!", loses none of its primal urgency after all these years. Add to that a revved-up 'Waiting for the Man' that gave Eater a run for its money, the equally manic 'Downtown Boy' with its opening blood-curdling scream and the MC5-influenced 'Do the Strangle' and this was a pretty swell introduction to punk for the Ottawa/Montreal area.
Unfortunately, unlike many punk records at the time, the songs here were released in a gimmicky die-cut 12" cardboard sleeve with a safety pin and the word 'punk rock' scrawled across it, though some records slipped out with an accompanying 12" x 12" black-and-white photo of the band. That of course meant that the record could be filed in with LPs, which the bulk of shoppers were buying in those days.
But it confused the hell out of some deejays.
"Sometimes we'd hear it on the radio," Paul remembered, "and because it looks like it's at thirty-three, they'd play it at thirty-three. And we'd call up the radio station and say, 'Quick, quick, you got it on the wrong speed', and you'd hear them turn it up on the radio."
Alas, things started to implode for the Action in 1979. Songs for a second 12" were in the can, but Montreco's demise put the kibosh on that. Worse still, the band was slated to tour the US with the Ramones - just as sleepy American audiences were waking up to punk and new wave - but visa problems forced the band to stay north of the 49th. "This could have been the big break for the Action," Paul lamented, "but unfortunately New Wave Management didn't do their homework on the necessary visas and we were turned away from about three border crossings attempting to get into the US and finally we had to cancel our tour. That was the last straw."
The Action finally hung up their guitars in 1981, though Paul Fenton has managed to forge a solid career playing blues and roots-based music around the Ottawa valley.
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