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Kinetic Ideals
Reason - 12" EP
Mannequin - 1981
Michael Panontin
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As Mikil Rullman remembers it, Mississauga in 1979 was hardly a hotbed of cool.
"Half the students at my high school were bused in from farms and rural concession lines while the other half came from the suburban sprawl that dominates Ontario's landscape to this day," he recalled for CM. "And musical tastes ranged from heavy metal all the way to country and western with no stations in between. I hated the fucking place."
Yet it was out there that one of Canada's finest post-punk groups got their start.
The nucleus - guitarist Jean-Claude Chambers, bassist Alan Murrell and drummer Jonathan Davies - had been knocking about in a band called the Offenders. Rullman, meanwhile, hopped on stage at a local talent show to belt out some Teenage Head with a bunch of metalheads and thrilled the crowd...though, as it turned out, it was as much for a wardrobe malfunction as for his vocal prowess.
"My performance was kind of high energy. And somehow the entire backside of my striped trousers blew out, which caused quite the commotion." The Offenders eventually caught wind of it, and it wasn't long before Rullman was in the audience to check out their show and, in his words, "was blown away by their vitality, humour and fuck-you attitude."
So the four hooked up, dubbed themselves Kinetic Ideals and proceeded to make headway in the clubs around Toronto. At an early Spoons gig in nearby Oakville, the guys befriended keyboardist Brett Wickens and Mannequin Records' chief Paul Abrahams, forming a creative relationship that would last for years. Mannequin issued the group's first single, the gritty 'Life in Shadow', a record that seemed to betray some pretty obvious Howard Devoto/Magazine tendencies. The single garnered positive reviews and sales, and it encouraged the group to keep at it.
Rullman and Davies moved to the big city, setting up shop in a space at King and John just west of downtown Toronto. "We set up a rehearsal room in the abandoned building next door. An extension cord ran power from the flat to the dark, open-to-the-air building and we gained access by clambering from the roof onto a fire escape." The group started gigging all over, playing sold-out, sweaty shows around Ontario and even in New York City.
By 1981, Kinetic Ideals' sound had turned down darker, and funkier, avenues, taking in more diverse influences from the likes of Joy Division and PiL. They entered Montclair Sound in Toronto and recorded four songs - 'Fire', 'Structures', 'Absurdity' and 'Animalistic' - that would become the bulk of a new 12" disc for Mannequin called Reason. (A fifth song from demo recordings made at Orchard Studios, 'No Exit', rounded out the EP.)
Aside from the music, Reason was notable for its cutting-edge cover art, designed by Wickens and Peter Saville at D/R Institut (UK). Rullman is quite rightly proud of that coup. "This fact alone was enough to create notoriety and interest," he notes. "The cover was so minimal that a sticker had to be put on the shrink wrap so people knew what it was they were looking at." The record was picked up by college radio and was a hit in many underground circles, especially amongst the dour, overcoat-clad crowds that frequented the clubs around the province.
Their live shows became the stuff of legend. "We always tried to break the fourth wall and blur the lines between band and audience at our live shows," Rullman boasts. "'Animalistic', in particular, was a show-stopper of chaos with the crowd usually invading the stage." In fact, Kinetic Ideals found themselves on many high-profile bills. After a Toronto gig with the Teardrop Explodes in '82, The Globe and Mail newspaper raved about the group's "dissonant, tribal mess of sound", adding that "if it weren't for the 45-minute gap between [sets], the headline band would have looked even worse". And then there was their riveting performance at a sold-out Gang of Four show in Windsor the following year (where a temporary power outage prompted Jon King and Co. to croon a cool a capella version of the Carpenters' 'Close to You' in honour of the recently deceased Karen Carpenter...but now I digress).
More records followed, namely 1982's 'Angular Sky' 12" and the popular A Personal View EP the year after that, the latter recorded with an Oberheim DMX digital drum machine in lieu of Davies, who had recently quit the band after getting hit by a car in London after a gig - pirated, no less - at the 100 Club.
As the eighties reached their midpoint, Kinetic Ideals went into Manta Sound to record with a new producer who was promising them access to the lucrative US market. But when that never materialized, the guys, understandably dejected, called it a career. Chambers, Murrell and Davies' replacement Patrick Duffy decided to push on without Rullman in a band called First Man Over. Eventually, though, "having learned fuck all from their previous music biz mistakes," as Rullman quips, they met a similar fate after an equally sour relationship with another producer.
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