Beyond The Guess Who: Artifical Joy Club- "Sick And Beautiful"

80's Canadian pop duo goes grunge.

Welcome to Beyond The Guess Who. Each week I cover a lesser-known Canadian artist. This week: Artificial Joy Club, an alternative rock band that started as 80’s pop duo One To One.

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By 1992, One To One had scored ten Canadian RPM chart hits, two of which (“Angel In My Pocket” and "Peace of Mind (Love Goes On)" had snuck onto the lower reaches of the Billboard Hot 100 at #92 and #95, respectively.

The duo (Louise Reny and Leslie Howe) had been going through something of a shift in musical styles. Their earlier hits had roots in dance rock. By 1992, they’d become One 2 One and switched to adult album alternative. I posted "Peace of Mind (Love Goes On)" in my One To One article, but for those reading this as a standalone piece, here it is:

I mentioned liking this in the One To One piece. Anyway, the duo had two more minor Canadian hits and then they went back to the drawing board.

Howe had been working as a producer, most notably on Alanis Morrisette’s earlier dance pop material. I mention this because the direction he took with Reny was along a similar path to what Alanis was cooking up.

The duo joined up with three more musicians (guitarist Michael Goyette, bassist Tim Dupont and drummer Andrew Lamarche) to form Sal’s Birdland. From what I can gather, mostly from Lemarche’s blog, Reny also performed as “Sal”, hence the new name.

A debut album, So Very Happy was released in 1994. I found a video for their track “That’s The Way”. It’s one of those YouTube clips that could not be embedded, so here’s a link. I like this track a lot. It’s catchy 90’s rock/pop and musically, it’s a successor to their previous One 2 One singles from 1992.

Reny and Howe had other plans, though. They decided they wanted to dive into the mosh pit head first and went harder.

Sal’s Birdland signed with Interscope and changed their name to Artificial Joy Club. They released an album, 1997’s MELT and a single, “Sick And Beautiful”. They also did a pretty sizable amount of press as discovered on Lemarche’s previously mentioned blog (which has an archive of the band’s 1990s website information).

I’m not sure if it was widely known at the time that Artificial Joy Club were One To One or not, but this profile with Louise Reny (going by Sal at the time) for 90’s Canadian free publication FFWD Weekly (Whatever happened to FFWD anyway?) goes as far as to describe Artificial Joy Club as sounding “like an agro update of the ’80s Cancon pop sensation, One to One”.

“Sick And Beautiful” was a hit on RPM peaking at #35. It also peaked at #17 on the Billboard Modern Rock charts.

A video was released featuring a grunged-up Reny and Howe.

And here they are on French television:

The song isn’t awful. Personally, I prefer their earlier stuff and what I’d heard of Sal’s Birdland. I can see why it was a hit. The single came out just as bands like Garbage and Interscope labelmates No Doubt were gaining popularity. “Sick And Beautiful” reminds me a fair amount of the former.

A decent amount of touring followed across North America and it looks like into 1998 some European shows. They also landed a really high-profile tour playing in sixteen cities on the second stage bill at that year’s Lollapalooza.

At least one more single, “Spaceman” followed and again a video was released. There was no shortage of songs titled “Spaceman” in the 90’s, Babylon Zoo and Bif Naked also had unrelated songs with that title.

Unlike the other songs called “Spaceman”, this track is a slower, more adult album alternative-leaning ballad. It’s the sort of thing they’d been doing ok at the last six years or so under different guises and while it may not have landed them Lollapalooza like “Sick And Beautiful” did, it might have been a better lead single choice.

There was a video made. It looks like enough thought was put into the clip that Interscope still had faith in the band. That said, an outer space themed music video would have been better than the cheesy three-minute movie of the week that was released. The video opens with a car crash, we see Reny in the shadows and then the camera zooms in to reveal Reny was also the driver in the crash. She walks along a street singing in slow motion (as did everyone else in the late 90’s). Things are being undone around her and then we see her reverse drinking in a bar at the end which is what leads up to said car crash.

Unfortunately, the single didn’t seem to make much of a dent and after one more tour listed under the band’s 1998 activities, they went silent. From what I can find, they broke up a year later.

I’m not exactly sure what happened to Reny, Howe, and the rest of the band after this. As mentioned, drummer Andrew Lamarche has maintained an online presence. Discogs doesn’t turn up much for the rest. Still, fourteen years under different guises, two minor Billboard entries and a slot on Lollapalooza is something a lot of artists would dream of. I’d say they had a pretty good run.

Next Week: Beyond The Guess Who answers the question “What do a Hungarian-born pop singer turned D-grade movie producer, an R&B singer, ABBA, and Hugh Hefner all have in common?”