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Martha and the Muffins
Echo Beach / Teddy the Dink - 7"
Dindisc - 1980
Michael Panontin
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It was 1977 and Ontario College of Art students David Millar and Mark Gane had the idea of putting a band together. The two guitarists recruited singer Martha Johnson, who was already a bit of a fixture on the local scene as a member of Oh Those Pants! and the Doncasters. After adding Johnson's pal Carl Finkle on bass and Mark's brother Tim on drums, all that was needed was a name.
With just two weeks to go before their first gig (at the OCA Halloween party that year), they still had not come up with anything specific. The five of them all came from the well-off suburbs of Toronto and really didn't fit in with the aggressive downtown Toronto punk scene (which aside from the usual posturing actually harboured a real criminal element involving thievery, handgun posession and even violent assault). "We didn't like the sort of posing that a lot of bands were doing at the time with punk imagery," Mark would tell an Australian TV audience, "so we went the exact opposite and picked something that was really wimpy. And Muffin couldn't have been any wimpier."
Back then, 'art bands', as they were dubbed, semi-derisively, had to settle for the scraps while (in)famous local punks like the Viletones and their yobbish antics hogged much of the headlines. The Muffins might have contented themselves with just filling up local bars like The Beverley on nearby Queen Street. But in 1978 Andy Haas joined the group on saxophone and founding member Millar left to be replaced by Martha Ladly on keyboards and additional vocals. Their first piece of wax, the indie seven-inch 'Insect Love', would serve as an impressive first calling card.
But the pages were starting to turn quickly for Martha and the Muffins. Haas managed to get a demo tape into the hands of Interview music critic Glenn O'Brien, who scored them a gig in March of '79 at New York's new wave mecca Hurrah. Not long after that, as guitarist Mark Gane recalls, "a recording contract was seemingly dropped into our laps and we signed with Dindic/Virgin". After a re-recorded 'Insect Love' was issued to get the attention of the UK press - “which it did!” Gane insists - the group released one of the first true gems of the new wave era.
'Echo Beach' is a modernist masterpiece. Recorded at the Manor in Oxford, England, this infectious shard of pop music managed to worm its way all the way to the #10 spot in the UK and to #6 down under. The ode to disaffected office staff was just the third song ever written by Gane, whose job checking wallpaper for printing faults led his mind to wander to one of many quiet beaches that dot the local coastline. ("A silent summer evening / The sky's alive with lights / A building in the distance, surrealistic sight / On Echo Beach waves make the only sound / On Echo Beach there's not a soul around") Though Gane insisted that the place was entirely fictitious, it didn't stop a Canuck radio station at the time from asking listeners to guess the beach's precise location. And much to Ladly's surprise "they came up with about eight different locations throughout Canada and upstate New York".
As Gane has explained (in the liner notes to the 2002 German comp Select Cuts from Echo Beach), "Most of the second verse was inspired by a summer's evening spent at Sunnyside Beach on the shoreline of Lake Ontario in Toronto. While the lake and beach could have been in the middle of nowhere, the city behind became a 'surrealistic sight'...While 'Echo Beach' did not exist for me as an actual location, I used it as a symbol of the place everyone wants to escape to when they're not where they want to be."
A futuristic anthem if ever there was one, 'Echo Beach', from its spacy guitar/organ intro to those dreamy vocals, seemed to hint at a brave new wave world to come. And though that world would get co-opted soon after by MTV's antiseptic repackaging, 1980 and the modern visions it promised, for a short time at least, were perfectly captured in this near-flawless single.
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Martha and the Muffins
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