by JOHNSON CUMMINS

In 1965, most of North America’s young people were still reeling from the two recent Ed Sullivan Show performances by a quartet from Liverpool, who would come to tower over the landscape of popular music for generations. At the same time, a group of artists in London, Ontario were formulating a challenging counterpoint to the moptops’ pop, forging new paths in improvisational music and noise in relative obscurity, where they would happily abstain from music’s conventions—pesky things like training and composition.

By today, a good four decades later, the Nihilist Spasm Band have, however accidentally, become a major influence in avant-garde music, thanks in no small part to the diligence of tape-traders, difficult-listening enthusiasts and collectors of original and unpredictable music worldwide.

After performing their first show, an all-kazoo soundtrack to a silent film, the Nihilist Spasm Band quickly expanded their sound with found objects and homemade instruments that could not be shackled to fixed scales or leashed to common time signatures.

Oddly enough, upon close listen, it’s clear that the NSB constituted not so much a reaction to pop banality but to the surprisingly controlled environment of “free” music.

“We were young artists at the time, and started playing kazoos, and that really got our brains going,” says John Boyle, who handles electric kazoo, electric thumb piano and drums. “We weren’t musicians, but we wanted to play and we all knew we didn’t want to sound like Guy Lombardo.”

Come one, come all, come none at all

Musicians, perhaps not. As artists, the NSB’s founding line-up featured figures who would become prominent in Canadian art—painter John Boyle, sculptor Murray Favro and the late Greg Curnoe all have work in the collection of the National Gallery. Their band was almost entirely unknown, however, until at least the late ’80s, when small releases managed to find their way to the trendsetting noise scene in Japan, transporting the NSB outside London’s safe confines.

In the ’90s, Thurston Moore was handpicking them to open up for Sonic Youth and play high-profile events he curated. By that point, the cat was out of the bag. In 2000, What About Me, a documentary on the band directed by Montrealer Zev Asher, was throwing fuel on the fire, as were feature stories in Time Out and The Village Voice.

“It’s funny,” says Boyle. “We still play our weekly Monday-night shows at a small club in London now, and not many people show up, or people will just leave while we’re playing. Occasionally, people like REM will show up to see us when they’re in town, and then the place will be jam-packed. I guess it’s kind of important for our singer to have an audience, because he can play off of them, but it doesn’t really matter to the rest of us if there is an audience or not. It doesn’t really affect the music at all.”

Abnormal standards

With the exception of Curnoe, who died in an accident in 1992, and bassist Hugh McIntyre, who died of heart failure in 2004, the original line-up is still intact—Boyle and guitarist Favro are joined by Bill Exley on vocal and cooking-pot duties, Art Pratten on plumbing-pipe “brass” and John Clement on bass and drums. Nowadays, whippersnappers Aya Onishi (kazoo, drums) and Tim Glasgow (guitar, bass and drums) fill out the band’s membership.

Holding such a thing together for 40 years is no small feat, but Boyle insists that their recipe for longevity is quite simple. “When we started out, we became friends because we were kind of marginalized. We all shared the same sense of humour, and I guess some form of insanity by normal standards. It has never meant anything for us if people liked the band or not. We never had any delusions of being rock stars, we just really like playing music together.

“I really don’t know why people like us. Maybe it’s because people sense that we go out of our way to reject styles that have already been established. Or maybe, just because we’re a bunch of old guys.”

With AIDS Wolf, CPC Gangbangs and Made in Mexico at the SKOL Gallery benefit at la Sala Rossa on Friday, April 7, 8 p.m., $12

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