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Bunny and the Lakers
Numbers
(independent) - 1979
Michael Panontin
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"The most perfect noise and melody I had ever heard."
That is how Fifth Column's Carolyn Azar once described Bunny and the Lakers' weirdly iconoclastic LP Numbers. Never heard of Bunny and the Lakers? Well, that wouldn't be a surprise, given the fact that the Toronto group allegedly played just one gig before slipping this hopelessly obscure document into the shops in the late seventies.
Essentially the brainchild of Peter Morgan (ne Andrew Sherwood), who handles synths, drums and vocals on the record, Bunny and the Lakers are often lumped into the synthpunk genre. And indeed, a few of the tracks - the coldly clinical 'Cops on Parade' is a prime example - would surely have cut a pretty sharp edge back in those post-'77 days. But those tracks are overshadowed by the sheer experimentalism on display here. No one but the hardiest Throbbing Gristle devotees for instance will be able to get past the initial blast of earsplitting industrial noise that leads off the record.
Morgan credits a couple of well-known Canadians experimenters, electronics pioneer Jeff Plewman, a.k.a. Nash the Slash, and visual artist Vincent Tangredi, for bringing Numbers to fruition. Morgan and Plewman go quite far back. "I met him at Music World on Yonge Street in Toronto in 1973," Morgan told CM. "Nash had only recently departed from his fire-breathing, violin-immmolation days of the band Breathless. He and Patrick Kutney (then head of the classical music department) took me under their wings and educated me about music. And he engineered a couple of tracks: 'Inhalation/Ventilation' and 'S.O.S'."
Morgan refers to Tangredi, whose works have shown at the National Gallery of Canada and the MoMA in New York, as "a mentor and confidant". Tangredi provided Bunny and the Lakers with a space on King Street to record much of the LP. What's more, says Morgan, "he was able to guide some of the sensibilities of the early Lakers' material - I am astonished that I did not thank him on the LP!"
Numbers is a confounding record in many ways, not least for the almost unsettling assortment of music therein. In addition to the aforementioned tracks, there is a jazz-funk workout ('Maid in Sweden'), poorly recorded, sloppily played and sounding more like an outtake from some small-town street festival than the earnest Queen West of the time. Another track, the abrasive 'Sandy', veers more in the direction of no wave. And the intense experimentalism of 'T.B. Farm (Kiss Me Now)' is such a frightening wall of electronic sound that it might have even made Faust or Throbbing Gristle blush.
And as a footnote to the Bunny and the Lakers story, future Fifth Columnist G.B. Jones joined the band for a short stint as a vocalist in 1980 - just after the release of Numbers - before hooking up with Azar for their long and lacerating queercore ride.
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