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The Poles
CN Tower / Prime Time - 7"
Nimbus 9 - 1977
Michael Panontin
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Michaele Jordana Berman's first fifteen minutes of fame came in 1976 after Oceans of Blood, her solo exhibition of hyper-realist paintings depicting the slaughter of whales struck a chord around Toronto. The visual artist had moved to the city from her hometown of Winnipeg, where she graduated from the University of Manitoba School of Art with a BFA in 1969.
In Toronto, with her name now shorn to a sleeker Michaele Jordana, she started pushing more envelopes in the form of multimedia performances with ex-Syrinx saxophonist Doug Pringle. In fact, Pringle's moog-and-tape-loop score to the theatre piece The Rites of Nuliajuk would mark the shy Jordana's first foray in front of the microphone, fronting a five-piece band.
The five crashed Toronto's punk scene soon after, billing themselves as the Poles and releasing 'CN Tower', a record that would, for a few decades at least, link the singer with the 553-metre-high phallus that would become the symbol of Canada's largest city.
The CN Tower was first conceived as far back as 1968 by the Canadian National Railway, who envisaged a super-tall telecommunications tower that would demonstrate the strength of Canadian industry and of course of CN in particular. But this was not just a vanity project. The Toronto skyline was beginning to sprout skyscrapers that were obstructing "point-to-point microwave links", essentially radio and TV signals that used dish antennas installed on the roofs of buildings. As those buildings grew taller and taller, CN decided to construct a purpose-built structure that would tower above all the others and offer unobstructed signals that could be rented to the radio and TV stations.
The tower opened on 26 June 1976 and was a massive success. The international media fawned over what for many years would be dubbed "the world's tallest freestanding structure". Tourists flocked to Toronto to ride its elevator to the observation deck. And perhaps most importantly for CN, the costs of constructing it - CAD $63 million - were recouped after just fifteen years.
The Poles issued their sort-of paean to that famous phallus in 1977, while the city's nascent punk scene was still in its infancy. 'CN Tower' is a fantastic example of early Canadian punk, with Pringle's menacing keyboard and Ricky Swede's gritty guitar girding an amazing vocal performance by Jordana. Lyrically it was even better, cloaking a fictitious gig atop the tower with images of electrical power, Freudian sexuality and a daring death-defying jump that ended with the a quivering Jordana singing those memorable lines, "Whirlin', twirlin' I'm whirlin' down / CN TOWER CN POWER".
These days those lines, the Poles and Jordana herself are all but forgotten. But not the CN Tower, which still attracts many an out-of-towner with its sky-high charms. That would include Jason Pierce and Spiritualized, who performed what was billed as the "highest show ever" (pun intended, I’m guessing) atop the tower in 1997. And let's not forget Owen Pallett, a Torontonian actually, who included his breathtaking 'The CN Tower Belongs to the Dead' on his 2005 debut album Has a Good Home.
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