by PATRICK LEJTENYI

For the record, the Exploited will not be back in Montreal, or anywhere else in Canada, for at least two years. Total Chaos, maybe never.

Here are the reasons why: Exploited singer Wattie lied to Customs Canada agents at the Lacolle border crossing. He was found out, resulting in a two-year ban. Some members of Total Chaos have criminal records and are thus not allowed into the country at all.

That's why the bands didn't show up to their gig at the Medley the night of Tuesday, Oct. 14. The rest is well-known: eight cars burned, over 30 others smashed to varying degrees, thousands of dollars in damage to nearby stores, eight arrests that night with more to come.

Neither band was happy with the frigid welcome Canada gave them last Tuesday. Their show in Toronto the following evening was cancelled, and on Thursday, Oct. 16, the Exploited flew home to Scotland. Not the way you want to end an otherwise successful, if occasionally troubled, North American tour.

Customs culprit

"If anyone's to blame, it's Customs," says Wattie, his legendary near-indecipherable Scottish accent coming through thick over a cell phone an hour before boarding the plane home. "We're a band, we came over here to play music for the kids. And from what I've been told, bands from abroad don't get into this country. They don't want the kids to see bands from other cultures. I don't know what the problem is withum, eh?"

It's the same all around. Total Chaos blame Customs, Medley coowner Paul Matte blames Customs, and so does Sebastien Hamelin, the local promoter from Burnout Productions. And they're more or less on the same page in their condemnation of the violence that followed the cancellation announcement.

"I can understand their anger," Wattie says. "I think the kids have been waiting to see us for months. I think back to when I was younger, travelling four or five hours to see a band, and to find at the last minute that they're not coming - I can totally understand. But to smash up property, that's not gonna solve anything."

Hamelin is more emphatic. Apopup announcement on their Web site reads, in French, "Burnout Productions is sincerely sorry to see our own scene destroy itself," before announcing an upcoming Misfits- Ripcordz show on Oct. 29. Asked about the riot, Hamelin says it was "straight-up stupid. It doesn't give the punk movement a good image. It'll be harder [for punk bands] to get rooms booked for sure."

Paul Matte can confirm that. He says that even if the Exploited come back in two years, he won't book them at the Medley.

Welcome to Soviet Canuckistan

But coming through the white noise of inane media analysis of punk music and its listeners are questions about bands coming in from the States and Europe. It's something that puzzles and pisses off Total Chaos singer Rob Chaos.

He says his band was barred from Canada thanks to their criminal records dating back 10 or 15 years, the result of only minor infractions. "It should be against the law to pry into someone's past and dig up something they'd done 15 years ago," he says from Cleveland. "I think Canadian Immigration is ridiculous. Canada's not the Soviet Union, it's just Canada. It should be like a part of the U.S. There shouldn't be these ridiculous laws."

Wattie concurs. "We've travelled a long time, and a long distance, to get to Canada, and for that to happen…," he says, adding that no one in the Exploited has a criminal record. "Everyone in the band was so annoyed and disappointed. They couldn't understand it. Why the fuss? Why are we having a hard time getting into Canada? The whole band's feeling is like, what's their fucking problem?"

Their problem is with lying, evidently in an attempt to get across the border hassle-free and avoid potential paperwork problems. Apologizing after the fact apparently doesn't help matters. "We told them we were on a road trip," Wattie says, "and they kept saying, ‘You're in a band,' and we'd say no. Then they showed us a picture of us on onstage and said, ‘Is that you?' And that was me, okay. So we were caught lying, and it just escalated. I apologized, I said, ‘I'm sorry for lying to you, I'm in a band, and we just want to come and play.' And they still wouldn't let us in."

Both Wattie and Chaos think that Customs may have been expecting them. A month before, they used similar methods to cross the border to play in Vancouver, and think that Customs was looking to nail them this time around.

"They knew we were coming, like it was a big deal to 'em, eh?" says Wattie. "Like it was a big fuckin' drug shipment or something. It was totally over the top, totally unnecessary. It was really frustrating."

Immigration Canada, which handles entry into Canada of non-Canadians, denies they had prior information, saying that nobody contacted them about the show and that it was their research during the interview that revealed Wattie's true identity and Total Chaos's criminal past. A spokesman says the charges against some members of Total Chaos were serious enough that, had they been committed in Canada, could have resulted in up to 10 years imprisonment. Once they decided to deny entry, no amount of pleading on the part of the bands, the promoter or the venue would change their minds.

Shit, meet fan

By the time the bad news broke, Matte and Hamelin knew the night wasn't going to end pretty. By 7:15 Tuesday evening, they were thinking the worst.

"When I spoke to Customs, I said I hoped the reasons they weren't letting the bands in were serious because the consequences could be a serious problem," Matte says. "I warned them that there would be trouble in Montreal if they didn't come, and they said that they didn't care, they had a job to do."

Hamelin, watching the mounting tension on the street from inside the Medley, says he was "getting kinda stressed" when the band hadn't shown up at the border by 4 p.m. He does say, however, that the paperwork, which was handled by the Toronto promoter, was in order.

But the border problem irks Matte, especially seeing how some other artists are let into the country over others. "They let 50 Cent come into the country, and he played the Bell Centre," he says, referring to the rapper's lengthy record for drug charges and his suspected role in an ongoing, murderous feud in the New York area. Exceptions like his can be made but require additional paperwork and money.

Wattie suspects his look and attitude might have something to do with his border hassles. "People seem to think it's okay to pull me aside and give me a hard time," he says. "But I just laugh at it. It's just wasting their time. They should pick on someone else. But it's the way I look. I probably look like a hooligan."

In the end, there were only losers: the bar, the bands, the store owners whose shops were vandalized, the drivers whose cars were torched, and of course the 800 or so kids who had turned up to see the show (although Admissions is offering refunds). On their Web site, Total Chaos says they're sorry for the cancellation, and Wattie says, "I'd like to apologize to 'em for not being there, but we really, really tried to get in."