The Zellots Part 1 London beginnings…
What follows is an interview with a band called the Zellots.
They formed in 1978 in Vancouver, broke up, and then two of the members
reformed the band in their hometown of London Ontario. When they first got
together in Vancouver, the Zellots were one of the few all female punk bands on
the scene.
We’ll start the story in
This interview originally appeared in Mongrel Zine in
2 parts, first part in MZ #10 May 2011, second part in MZ #11 April 2013. The
interview has been updated slightly as more information about the band and the
time period has been revealed and we were able to interview a few other former
Zellots. MZ was a print zine based in
Vancouver that covered the then current garage, punk and artrock music scene as
well as many other interesting subjects. Later, the zine came with a CD
compilation that featured many of the bands written about in the zine, and a
short lived record label.
Since the original interview appeared, Supreme Echo
released a flexi of 3 tracks recorded in 1979 in Vancouver. Although a bit
rough sounding due to recording conditions, the genius behind the songwriting
and melody is quite obvious and a joy to the ears after all the years!
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Also since the original interview appeared, Chris DeVeber passed away. We’re going to dedicate this interview to her.
C=Chris DeVeber: guitar J=Jane Colligan:bass H=Heather Haley:vocal G=Greg Moore:drums CN=Conny Nowe WW=What Wave
All pics from What Wave Archives
What Wave: Let’s start at the beginning, with Heaven
17 (this was a band prior to the forming of the Zellots and was based in London
ON, the year is 1977).
Chris: It kinda went like this. I quit school, high
school and then we (Chris:guitar and Jane Colligan:bass) went to Toronto to
learn how to play and how to make it in the music business. And we actually did
end up learning how to play pretty well.
Jane: You (Chris) went first (to Toronto) and then I
joined you. Oh, those were good days. Well it started with Marcy Saddy (future
drummer for the B-Girls, Little Egypt, The Finks, Magic Binmen,Certain General
in NYC and more), she was looking for people to be in her band and this was at
the very beginning of The Demics (first London Ontario punk band). I don’t know
how she knew that we played, but she got in contact with us.
C: And I’ll never forget Marcy coming over to my
house and Jane came over and we went up to the 3rd floor bedroom and
she played us punk rock music and it was the first time we’d really been
introduced. At the time we were into The Rolling Stones, Eddie and The Hot Rods
and rock and roll stuff, Pretty Things.
J: See, I had managed a record store here in London
when I was 18 called Flipside Records it was in Westown Plaza Mall. It was
owned by a big record label, that was their chain of record stores and I had a
great import section, not just classical but stuff like Pretty Things, Silk
Torpedo. So that’s sorta where we were at. And then we heard the Sex Pistols!
C: Marcy brought over The Sex Pistols, oh my god!
J: And played us a whole bunch of songs, and the two
we liked the best were Pretty Vacant and….what was the other one? The ones with
the good chunky guitar and bass lines. She changed our mindset totally about
music. Before that, we didn’t know much about punk rock and just heard other
people say it was just an excuse for people who can’t really play their
instruments.
C: There was no airplay for that sorta stuff at the
time. (Ed….mid 1978 CIXX were the first station in this area to play punk/new
wave music over the airwaves)
J: That’s all we heard about (how bad punk was).
C: And of course that gets your interest right away.
So she played that for us and a bunch of other stuff and we said ‘sure we’d do
it’. Then we started practicing.
J: And then we went to one of those parties (at Mike Niederman’s loft, which is where the Demics rehearsed) and saw the Demics (this would have been their first show, December 23rd 1977) play, I’ll never forget that.
C: Of course we were telling them (The Demics) that
‘we play, we play and we have 3 songs’. This was Mike Niederman’s (considered
the grandfather of punk in London ON) loft and they used to have the parties
before anybody even played in a bar.
And she (Marcy) lived in this really cool place. She was in
this Fanshawe (London Ontario college) art program at the time, and she lived
in this sort of industrial complex. Not really a warehouse, but a complex and
she had a section of it. It was kind of big actually and it was really cool and
we got Billy Clark on guitar and the first singer was Mike Hollinger right?
J: And Mike Hollinger was in the art thing too.
Doesn’t everything musical start at art school. Didn’t the Stones come out of
an art school? It’s always at art school.
WW: So you actually played out then as a 5 piece?
C: Ya, our very first show. It was a pretty short-lived
band, because our very first show, we finally got it together and had enough
songs. We played at an art gallery. Forest City Art Gallery and it was
through Mike Niederman and of course we went down to the Blue Boot (this was later
renamed The Cedar Lounge and where the punk/new wave/whatever bands
played in London) and ordered a tray of draught and drank as many as we could
before we went up there because we were so nervous. It was a big show, a
happening. I remember we were so nervous, because we saw lineups all the way
down the street, and it was our very first time ever…
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J: We only had to play 3 songs…
C: No, we had more than that, we had about 5 by that
point. We had ‘You Really Got Me’ by The Kinks,…
J: ‘Baby Baby’ by The Vibrators. ‘Boots’ (These Boots
Were Made For Walking), we were doing ‘Boots’ by then? We might have had
Vampire Love, one original. Well, we
didn’t even have a name, but Keith Whittaker (Demics singer) named us
the Heaven 17 and we thought it was the coolest name.
WW: So you guys opened for the Demics for your first show
at Forest City Gallery?
J: Our first gig. It was because of Keith Whittaker,
as much as he was a bugger at the time, he was a mentor, promoter, virile scene
god, he really was.
C: He ended up being pretty nice. But the thing about
that gig that really upset us and kind of helped break the band up too,
remember? Is this guy, right after we played and were just getting off stage,
it was just jam packed full of people and there was all this confusion. And
this guy just pins me right up against the wall and gets in my face and goes
‘how old were you when The Kinks were out?’ or something like that. He was a
reporter for the Fanshawe (College that Marcy was attending) paper. And he was
just so insinuating…
J: He wasn’t at first, at first he was hitting on her
(Chris), and when he got spurned, he got ugly and when he got ugly he spewed
out the worst review. He praised the Demics.
C: Didn’t you come to my rescue and you told him
what’s what?
J: I did, I told him to leave her alone and..…
C: And when Jane’s mad, she’s really good at it and
she made him feel like an absolute jerk, which is what he was and then he went
home and wrote the worst possible article. A quote from it was, and I’ll never
forget it, ‘the most unbelievable
mindless sniveling hosebags who could only mash out 3 chords’…LOL
J: Glitter
queen Christine…LOL
C: Glitter
queen Christine is what he called me, could only mash out the 3 chords she
knows…LOL…
J: Well so did The Kinks…so what? At the end of the article, he said that this
whole thing (punk) is doomed, before it even got started and it’s still going
strong to this day and it’s incredible. His moniker was Basil Bailey in the
paper…weren’t Jimmy Demic (Demics drummer) and somebody else going to try and
hunt him down? It was great, feel the
fire, bring it on!!
C: Well the funny thing is, it was supposed to be an
article about the Demics and all that writing about us, took up a lot more (space)
than what he wrote about the Demics. He was that pissed off or whatever.
J: It was good for us, it inspired us to stay with
it.
C: It sorta did, it also upset some of the band
members because we were so new and raw and we did break up a little while after
that. Mike Hollinger the singer, he actually quit because of the article. He
went to Fanshawe and he was embarrassed by the article and we got Mike Carauna (now
an actor) after that. He was great! Didn’t Michael Carauna play with us when we
did that huge party, remember I rented that beautiful place, that old factory
and we were rehearsing up there. It wasn’t very long that I had it. I got
evicted right after I had the party. I
think that was when Michael Caruana played with us.
J: It was great how he was just willing to take a
stab though. Like, ‘ya, I’ll sing for you, or ya, I’ll play bass for you’.
People were just not afraid to take a chance. That was what was so bad about
the 70’s, you had to be able to whip off these Van Halen solos and Zeppelin and
that stopped a lot of people from becoming musicians or starting a band. And
then punk came along and you could do this. It was energy, it wasn’t about the
fact that you were almost a jazz aficionado; you didn’t have to do that anymore.
C: When we were in bands in the punk rock thing, it
was a lot more divided. People used to get beat up for being punks. Remember
where Mingles (London Ontario disco bar just around the corner from the Cedar
Lounge and it later became a rock club) was, there used to be a disco come out,
they would be coming out the same time as the people coming out of the Blue
Boot (London Ontario punk club that was renamed The Cedar Lounge) and was it
Tom Hilborn (an exhibiting visual artist who recently passed), got his teeth
knocked out. He was one of the most gentle, sweetest people I have ever known
and he got his teeth knocked out, just for coming out of the punk bar and being
a punk. By disco guys that were probably sexually frustrated at the end of the
night and had to go and beat somebody’s head in.
J: I never thought of disco guys as being
tremendously physical, but I guess. And you know there weren’t really a lot of
drugs around at that particular time, not like now.
C: You didn’t hear much about anything stronger or
different. It was usually beer, Gold Keg (long gone fave brand of the punks) beer
and beans were around.
J: We did some beans and we drank beer, that’s what
you did.
WW: Now did you play out any more than that?
J: We played at a house party in a 100 year old house
at the corner of Egerton and…close to Vauxhall St and we were supposed to get
paid $50 and a case of beer and we got some beer and that was about it. There
was a lot of that kind of stuff. But it was really hard to get into the bars
because there was only 1 bar, The Cedar Lounge and that was it.
C: At that point I don’t even think they were having
punk bands yet.
J: And then the Demics started to play at the York (London
hotel that the Nihilist Spasm band had a weekly gig at and later known as Call
The Office) and that was a little bit later on cause we played at the York with
the Demics as the Zellots.
C: The
J: One time this guy drove right in the back door on
his motorcycle and then one time the waiter urinated on the table because he
was so drunk…LOL…
C: LOL…and you could find Keith Whittaker (Demics
vocalist) down there on any given day usually with his cohorts.
J: You’d walk in there at 1 in the afternoon, that’s
what really got the scene going, you’d get out of your house, or mom and dad’s
house and go downtown and go in those bars and you’d always see somebody, some
of your mates. We didn’t call them that then, but looking back, they’d be there
and it was all going down up here (pointing to head) in everybody’s mind, it
was stewing.
All pics from What Wave Archives. Interviews done by Dave O'Halloran
Continued in Part 2 Vancouver
https://radiowhatwave.blogspot.com/2025/01/the-zellots-part-2.html
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