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Gillian Russell


Gillian Russell - Man in the Street / Going Home - 7

Man in the Street / Going Home - 7"
New Syndrome - 1966


Michael Panontin
They have all pretty much dropped off the musical spectrum, but at one time siblings Gillian, Brian and John Russell were sort of BC's musical first family. The three can trace their history back to the early sixties, when they performed as the Russell Trio, with Gillian singing and the brothers on guitars and backing vocals.

Gillian learned to sing by listening to records as a youngster, though the fact that her father played piano and her mother sang soprano around the house no doubt also helped. "I was thirteen years old when I first performed in front of a live audience with a band...my brothers," she told the Penticton Herald in 2018. "Before that, we would perform for my family and my mom and dad's friends."

She got her big break in 1964 when she was chosen to sing on the CBC's popular Let's Go program, home to the cream of the lower mainland crop including Terry Jacks, Tom Northcott, Susan Pesklevits (a.k.a. Susan Jacks), Howie Vickers, and of course her brother Brian, who strummed guitar for the house band, the Classics. "When I auditioned [for Let's Go] in 1964, I was over the moon when they told me I had been accepted for the series, which lasted five years, and that I was going to be on the very first show," she recalled. "I think I let out a very large scream over the phone, to which I heard great laughter in the background."

The following year Gillian was chosen out of all the singers on the show to travel to Toronto for a slot on the CBC's Show of the Week. There she found herself spellbound alongside such heavy-hitters as Gordon Lightfoot, Ian Tyson and Burton Cummings, and like any small-town girl in the big city, she didn't forget to ask for their autographs.

Back home in BC, she spent a busy 1966 appearing a number of times on The Kenny Colman Show, including one where she crooned a particularly moving rendition of the Beatles' 'Yesterday'. By the end of the year, she had entered the studio to record a couple of tracks for Northcott's fledgling New Syndrome label. The forlorn and positively beguiling 'Man in the Street' featured the slight-voiced Gillian crooning about a "man in the street / out in the rain / walking alone / broken-hearted again", buoyed by one of the eeriest, most incongruous-sounding organs ever set to tape. Penned by a then-unknown Tom Baird (who would go on to produce records for Rare Earth during their early-seventies heyday in Detroit), 'Man in the Street' spent a solid seven weeks up on the CFUN charts, reaching a respectable #26 position in January 1967 and peaking at #2 on the station's All-Canadian Top Ten list.

Of the three, only Brian managed to get his name into the history books, moving to Toronto and issuing singles with his bands Three to One and the Raja before enjoying a steady income as a studio and road musician, most notably with Roger Whitaker. John performed in numerous local bands before passing away in 2004. Gillian stayed on Let's Go until the close of the sixties, wrote the official song for the annual Penticton Peach Festival and these days, according to The Herald, "still plays weddings, seniors homes and funerals".

'Man in the Street' is so phenomenally rare that not one sale has been documented on either Popsike or Discogs, though one ambitious seller is offering up a fairly clean copy for a cool $600 USD. So good luck with this one.
         
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