Part 3 Zellots
back in London
C=Chris DeVeber: guitar
J=Jane Colligan:bass H=Heather
Haley:vocal G=Greg Moore:drums CN=Conny Nowe
WW=What Wave
WW: So you came back (London ON) here about 1980
then?
C: 1980, that sounds about right.
WW: So you reformed the band and how did you get
Cathy (Destun, vocalist)?
C: We just asked her. She was from the theatre
people. And she hung around with Tom McCamus who is a pretty well known actor
now and a bunch of other people. And we just really liked the way she looked,
and she was just so cool. We didn’t even hear her sing before we asked her. ‘Do
you wanna sing in our band’ and she said’ sure I’ll try’ and it just went on
from there and then we got Greg (Moore on drums). It was Greg first,
then Greg left, then we got Craig (McGauley). Greg was just on loan from
The Stoves (
Greg Moore: I
joined the Zellots in 1980 after Craig McGauley was their drummer. I had been
in a band called the Stoves prior to that. I played with the Zellots until we
disbanded.
WW: Greg, what was it like being the only guy in the
band?
G: I didn't really think of myself as the only guy in
an all girl band. Jane, Chris and Cathy played and sang as good as, or
better than other bands I was in that were all male. I guess I thought that
maybe more doors would open for us having the three women in the band, but once
we played I think the gender thing was not a factor anymore.
J: We just played like mad from the minute we got
back. Get some people in the band, learn some new songs…
C: We had a lot more experience…you were saying a lot
of people didn’t get in bands before punk, because you had to be so perfect
before you hit the stage. That’s really true, because more bands split up in
the basement before they ever get on stage. If they could just get up there and
play one date, even when they’ve only got 4 songs, it does something, it
cements you and you’re even more protective from breaking up.
WW: Why don’t we talk about some of the bands that
you opened for in
C: Oh, that’s the best story. Craig Deans
(booked bands in London ON with partner Dave Felner RIP) was our manager and worked
at Records On Wheels (part of a chain of record stores and the London store
that was probably the first to sell punk/new wave records in town), as the
manager there. Craig was in charge of the import section there, so he was great
from the point of view in that he had all of the bands from
J: We were playing it! They were going ‘That’s one of
our songs!’
C: They didn’t even have an album (in
J: It was insane, one of those quirky things!
C: So they asked us and we got to meet them and talk
to them. They were complete gentlemen, they really were. And really nice. The
drummer, he said if you guys ever get to England, he had a studio, and said
I’ll produce you and help you get on a tour and I think it was John Ashton, the
guitar player gave us one of the albums and signed it for me, on the back of it
for me, and in those days I never had my own amplifier and that caused all
kinds of problems, every time we played and he signed it ‘I hope you get an
amplifier soon’…LOL. And it’s somewhere, it’s a great keepsake.
WW: What about Joe King Carrasco?
J: Oh, I forgot about that one, that would have been
at Fryfogles (legendary showcase club that Muddy Waters and many others played
and was located where the Downtown Public Library presently is)? As time went
by we got into Fryfogles, which was huge. Eventually the local bands were
headlining at Fry’s.
C: Well, I can hardly remember, but I’ve got a vague
memory that it was really fun.
J: You have to realize there was a lot of alcohol
being imbibed and it was a long time ago. Like first you learn how to play
sitting down, then you learn to play standing up, then you learn to play so
drunk that you don’t even remember the gig. And you were good, because people
tell you you were really good. And there’s 3 stages and I think Joe King
Carrasco might have been in that third stage.
WW: What about Bauhaus, did you open for Bauhaus at
the Polish Hall?
J: You know Bauhaus meant a lot to Cathy because she
was artsy…
C: Ya, Cathy and Craig Deans too. We invited them
back to our band house (after the gig), we had a band house where we all lived
on
J: That was very close to the end of the Zellots too
cause that band house was kind of our last stage. I’m not saying living
together broke us up, cause it didn’t and we lived together quite well.
C: This was also their first tour, and the road
manager was actually one of the higher ups at Beggars Banquet Records and he
accompanied them as the road manager. And he was super nice. And anyways they
called us from
J: We did get out of town, we played
C: It was in this completely black area, when we went
in to find it, it was so eerie cause you don’t see this in Canada. You go into
this one area, and you didn’t see any white people for miles and miles. But we
were treated so well, everyone was so cool to us. There were more than a few
bands that night and it was one of the best gigs! That was a good one. And we
also played in Detroit at another venue that Iggy Pop used to play at all of
the time, I can’t remember the name of the bar (Greg remembers it as being
Bookies), but I remember the dressing room, I hadn’t seen anything so
disgusting in all of my life. It was really bad and I think there was a toilet
in the same room and a broken mirror in the sink and the toilet was backed up,
it was just awful and there was nowhere to hangout while we were waiting
between. So we went to a chicken place down the street to eat. And we came back
and we had to play earlier cause one band had been held up, literally held up
at gun point…LOL…so they were late or not coming or something. It was a cool
bar and a cool experience…
WW: Did you open for Simple Minds?
C: We opened for Simple Minds at Mingles
(former disco converted to a rock club) and we caught the sound man, or whoever
was doing the monitor mix for us, feeding back at us cause we were going over
too well. So he started, and the audience couldn’t tell, cause it was mostly on
stage all through our set…
J: Maybe it wasn’t on purpose…
C: No, somebody saw him doing it…all it takes is to
just feed the volume back a little bit…
J: What a dirty business…LOL.. We opened up for a
whole bunch, Chris Spedding, John Cale…
WW: Let’s talk about Chris Spedding first.
C: At the old Noodle Factory, the Piccadilly 5-0,
that was the night The Payolas played too. I’m pretty sure The Payolas were the
last band, and he played the second set.
He was really nice
and again, Jane and Cathy were really big fans of his. Cathy was trying to get
his attention to ask him about, cause I had an original Les Paul and to ask
him. If anybody would know about that guitar it would be him, so she showed it
to him and he said ‘I’ll show it to my roadie (Ed….met the roadie recently and
it’s true) and he could tell you what the guy ate for breakfast the day he made
it’. So he was nice.
WW: John Cale (at Fryfogles July 2/1981)?
C: John Cale for instance was willing to take us on
tour to
J: But we didn’t even have amps and how were we gonna
do it?
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C: You know, care packages would come to our house (the
band house) from our parents and we’d just be…makes eating noises.
J: And we were always so worried and trying not to
cross that line, because we were women, that there would be some kind of
misappropriated interest that did not have anything to do with our music…ya, we
did run into it and we were very wary of it but…
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C: But John Cale offered to take us on tour and we
didn’t have money to go, that was one heart break. Another time was Bauhaus
cause the road manager, the guy from Beggars Banquet said if you ever come to
J: Hal was from the country rock genre…
C: He was a great soundman though and he got this guy
down to see the band and he was crazy. He got this contract written up and we
were, a little bit naïve and pretty young and at the end of the contract, he
had stuff in there like if you don’t get
signed within a year, here was his deal where he would send us to England and
set us up for one month only, one month only, right and then we’d be on our own and after a year,
if we hadn’t been signed to a certain kind of major label for $50000 or more
and all of these stipulations and if that all didn’t happen then he’d be
allowed to come in legally and do anything he wanted with the band, tell us
what to wear, how to work, what music to make…
J: And we’d already had one bad contract experience
way back, in 79 or 80 when we first came back, we signed with Peter Brennan
(Jeans’N Classics founder, arranger, guitarist), who is a wonderful person and
he was in a band called Newcastle Brown. He was a wonderful person, a good
business person too and we had signed a contract with him cause he really
believed in the band. And it was kind of like that (above mentioned contract),
and we ended up breaking the contract with him and it was not a good experience.
Then there were 2 other guys we signed with for a contract for management with
and they had told us, they had us scheduled to go to
C: Undiscovered as we were, we were really against
selling our souls to get famous. Now in retrospect, this guy who would have
gotten us to
J: Hindsight is 20/20…
C: But we were really averse to signing that
contract. He left and was never heard of again, so we never got to
C: It had to be near the end of the band when we went
to Springfield Sound (located south east of London ON and co-founded by
London media personality and archivist/author Jim Chapman) and we recorded an
album there. The lost tapes and that was when it was one of those cases where
being female is definitely not a benefit. Sound man Hal had a friend that
worked at Springfield Sound
J: Which was a big studio back then!
C: But I can’t remember this guy’s name, but he’s the
one that has the master tapes. It was just sad, because we almost lived in the
studio. The guy who was generous enough to take us in there and do it all for
free, and he was a super cool guy, I can’t even remember his first name. But,
he got a crush on Cathy, he really, really, really, liked Cathy and it was
really evident and he had fallen in love with her or something and somewhere
towards the end, she had to tell him that she didn’t have the same feelings for
him and guess what, he took the tape and he said if you want it, you have to
give me $500 which might as well have been $5 million at the time. And we never
heard back and then the studio folded so we have no idea what happened to that.
I think that recording was just the 4 of us.
WW: Then there’s some recording you did at EMAC
(
C: Yes, that was early. His (Rob Nation)
studio had only been open for awhile, so it says volumes for him because it’s a
pretty good recording. (6 songs)
J: Rob Nation was wonderful and his engineer, Joe
Vaughn too!
WW: And are those songs the same ones that are on the
Japanese CD (see below)?
Pic of one shot at the bigtime
C: No, actually they are remastered by Peter Moore
(Toronto based producer of Cowboy Junkies and many others and Grammy winner,
passed away in 2023), There’s 2 songs, Blades and Social Elite, he remastered
them. But they sound almost identical. If you listen to them right after
another to hear the difference and there is a great difference.
J: That Japanese CD is called ‘You Only Get One Shot
At The Big Time’ (on Wizzard In Vinyl), how appropriate!
WW: And you also recorded some other stuff with Peter
Moore?
C: He did some recording. At one point he was
recording everybody in
J: He invented the binaural head (it looked like a styrofoam
manikin head with the microphones where the ears should have been).
C: If you put headphones on, on any of those
recordings, you can hear people behind you and beside you and you’d swear
someone just lit a cigarette behind you.
J: He was so ahead of his time.
C: He really was and he wanted to help us a lot back
then and since. There was a period he went through for years, where we hadn’t
been in bands for years, where he was working with Chris Spedding in
He recorded a lot of the bands back then, live recordings.
And right now, he has become so busy in
So we’re waiting for him right now, to get his stuff out of
the archives, because there is a record company, Rave Up Records
(Italian punk record label who did an album for local band 63 Monroe) and he
definitely wants to record the band. Definitely wants to put us on vinyl. But
I’m worried, because what happens if Peter takes so long, you never know with
these kinds of things because we’ve had opportunities slip by, slip through our
fingers because of the timing. Maybe in a month the thing folds or something.
So I’m a little anxious that Peter will come through for us. He would be
perfect if he wasn’t so busy, cause number one he has all of the archives and
number two he specializes in restoring old tapes, it’s one of the things his
studio does and number 3 he is a brilliant producer and engineer so if he could
take it and do it, it would be ideal, but I don’t know it that will happen.
J: But the band ended up being like an 8 piece, we
ended up getting Lisa Patterson (on sax). She joined us informally; she was in
Edna and Edna (local duo). And John Francom (sax) lived in my house, him and
Gilbert Smith (guitar)…John and Gilbert (both were in Sheep Look Up as was Lisa
Patterson) were phenomenal, but unfortunately at that time, we didn’t have the
benefit of recording. Cause when you’re playing, you need that counter point
where you go somewhere, anywhere and record and listen back to what everybody
is doing and if it falls short of your dreams…
C: Some great songs were written during that period,
and we don’t have anything to show for it.
J: Ya, we had this song called The Game, I think we
only played it live once at the Embassy with John Francom, Lisa, Gilbert,
nobody recorded it. There weren’t any cell phones back then with recording and
I only have it in my mind. We were going somewhere that was intricate musically
so, you know futuristic, everybody was going in and out, I tuned my bass down
to an open D on the E string and I start the song off and whip it back up to an
E, it was an amazing song and it almost had that feel, like The Doors, This is
The End, it had that kind of blackness to it. Or Joy Division, combined with
Gang Of Four, it was phenomenal and we played a lot in rehearsal, but we only
got to play it out once with those people.
WW: To bring it full circle, another band you played
with was Certain General with Marcy Saddy at Doug and Rose’s wedding (in
London at the Cedar Lounge August 17 1981), later Rose joined Chris and Jane in
Ukase, another London based band).
J: Wasn’t Certain General Marcy’s next band
(Ed….B-Girls were her next combo after Heaven 17)…she went to NYC and she was
in Certain General and we started with her and ended with her.
WW: When did you guys break up, any idea?
J: It was 5 years! Five years! From beginning to end!
I’ve always said to myself, the best 5 years of my life.
G: The Zellots broke up sometime
in 1982 (as I recall) because of the usual internal band problems. We had
chased that illusive carrot for so long that I think we lost focus on what we
were about. Mostly I think we were beat up from the promises of record
contracts and tours that never surfaced.
During our few years of writing and performing, there were many great shows. I
enjoyed all of it, thinking to myself this is the band that is going to really
do something. We had many highs and a few lows, but unfortunately that didn't
happen.
To this day I still think the Zellots was the best band I played in. The music
was very innovative for those days of punk and new wave. The Canadian music
scene, then, wasn't as recognized as it has been in the past 15-20 years. A lot
of British bands like the Psychedelic Furs, Simple Minds and the like were the
so called templates for what was the music of the 80's. I think if you didn't
fit into that mold record companies didn't know what to do with you. Unlike
today with all the computer technologies you relied on a record deal to gain
larger audiences and some sort of success. It's impossible to turn the clock of
the past ahead to today, but if you could the Zellots would have a great career
with all that is afforded today.
C:: I feel the Zellots broke up because we had so many close brushes with success, only to be let down and disappointed every time, so it was like a roller coaster emotionally. We all had so much of ourselves invested in the band and we sacrificed a lot to keep our vision of the music intact. We were so broke the whole time that it added more stress to the day to day struggle.
The industry back then was still largely corporate
and the independent movement hadn't really taken yet. Without
internet band sites like myspace, facebook, reverbnation, etc and youtube,
we were at the mercy of the A&R people of the big labels, and they were
hard to connect with. Some of them wanted to do something with us but didn't
know how we fit into the criteria they used to sign artists then. The
underground scene hadn't really registered with them yet.
We needed more support and management. Even though
Craig Deans (our manager), did the best he could by getting us great
opening gigs for people like John Cale, we really needed financial
help and really big breaks like with the Psychedelic Furs, Bauhaus,
and John Cale couldn't be followed up on simply for lack of cash. If
we had the money to get to
In the end we just lost heart.. we tried to keep
afloat in the last months we were together. We added John Francom (Sheep
Look Up) on sax and keys, and Gilbert Smith (Crash 80s, Sheep Look Up)
on rhythm guitar, wrote new material, and planned a tour to go out west.
But we were losing our spirit, and when Jane quit just before the out west
tour, the band simply folded. I thought we were going to get to
Since this writing, the Zellots London version
reunited for one show. It was the opening for the art show entitled: Graphic
Underground: London 1977-1990 which was a display of the underground art,
posters and zines of that era. The physical display was at Forest City
Gallery in the fall of 2012 and was very well attended. The actual concert
took place at Call The Office on October 27/2012 and featured not only
the Zellots, but NFG, The Enemas and Uranus, all contemporaries of the
Zellots. The Zellots lineup for the show was the longest running version, that
being: Cathy Destun, Chris DeVeber, Jane Colligan and Greg Moore. Huge Thanx to
Brian Lambert for curating the exhibit, setting up the concert and then
releasing the book Graphic Underground: London 1977-1990.
Discogs has a complete discography of the
zellots: https://www.discogs.com/artist/6376299-Zellots?superFilter=Releases&subFilter=Singles+%26+EPs
Huge Thanx to all that helped in getting the Zellots
story out there; Chris DeVeber (RIP), Jane Colligan, Greg Moore, Heather Haley,
Conny Nowe, Craig McGauley and Marcy Saddy.
All pictures What Wave Archives
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