Beyond The Guess Who: Rough Trade- "All Touch"

Groundbreaking Canadian band who weren't afraid to push the envelope.

Welcome to Beyond The Guess Who. In each edition, I cover a lesser-known or overlooked Canadian musical artist. This week: Rough Trade. As usual, be sure to like, comment, or hit the subscribe button. Thank You!

7” single sleeve for “All Touch” by Rough Trade. Scan is my own.

One thing I like about Canada is the amount of musicians who are LGBTQIA+ trailblazers. Take for instance, Peaches. For the last 25 years, she’s regularly challenged gender norms and brought sex postivity into some pretty fantastic music.

Before Peaches, though, there was Carole Pope.

For the uninitiated, I will fill you in. “High School Confidential” is one of the most obvertly gay songs to ever come out of Canada. At the time it came out in 1980, it was probably also one of the filthiest. It’s pretty chaste compared to a lot of the music being released now.

7” Single sleeve for “Highschool Confidential”. Scan is my own.

Still, in 1980, it was virtually non-existent for such an explicitly Lesbian song to be released by a major label by an out artist. Not to mention become a huge hit in Canada. Pope even originated the crotch grab later made famous by Michael Jackson and Madonna when she performed the track at the 1980 Juno Awards. Tipper Gore would have spontaneously combusted had this caught on across the border.

I don’t have footage of the Juno performance, but here’s the original video:

For those who haven’t heard Rough Trade, here’s a brief rundown before I jump ahead a bit.

The band was mostly focused on Carole Pope and Kevan Staples, though their was a revolving door lineup of other members. Pope and Staples basically invented the enigmatic lead singer/quiet brooding musical partner double act that became more prevalent during the 1980’s with Erasure and Pet Shop Boys.

Rough Trade’s origins stretch all the way back to 1968. Carole Pope was born in Manchester, United Kingdom. Sources cite either 1946 or 1950 as her year of birth. Pope talking about famous Canadian drag performer Craig Russell attending high school with her as well as mentioning being a teen in 1962 in this 1980 interview with the sorely missed The New Music makes me suspect the former rather than the latter.

Both her parents came from show business backgrounds. Her father was a circus stiltwalker and her mother performed in British music halls. When pope was five her family relocated to Canada, first settling in Montreal and later on Scarborough, Ontario.

It was in Scarborough that Pope met Kevan Staples at a band audition. The pair began performing together as O, changing their name to The Bullwhip Brothers the following year.

At some point around 1974, the band became Rough Trade. They scraped by for a few years, occasionally appearing on television (this iteration featured singer Jo-Ann Brooks singing alongside Pope) and also putting together the stage show Restless Underwear which featured the legendary Divine. Tim Curry also recorded their track “Birds Of A Feather”

After a few years, Rough Trade signed to the CBS distributed True North Records. Their second album, 1980’s Avoid Freud followed. (Their first had been 1976’s 1976 Rough Trade Live! Direct to Disc). As mentioned, the highly controversial “High School Confidential” gained the band a hit and they set about recording a follow-up.

As mentioned last week in my Dusty Springfield post, around this time Pope began a relationship with the iconic singer that lasted eighteen months.

Pope met Dusty Springfield in 1981 at a concert Springfield was performing at in New York. Springfield moved to Toronto briefly to live with Pope. Rough Trade also contributed two songs to her criminally underrated 1982 album White Heat. The best of these was “I Am Curious”.

In return, Springfield contributed backing vocals to the bands next album, 1981’s For Those Who Think Young.

The album was a top ten hit in Canada, bolstered by “All Touch” which is an absolute gem of a track. It was also their only chart entry on the Hot 100.

Rather than being released on a CBS-distributed label, “All Touch” was licensed out to Neil Bogart’s Boardwalk label. The label was riding high on the success of artists such as Joan Jett and Night Ranger. Unfortunately, they were also going through issues at the time that led to the label’s closure. “All Touch” didn’t get any further than #58 as a result. 45cat lists a promo copy of “High School Confidential” as a projected follow-up. Since this was a good couple of years since the track was a hit in Canada and the band had already moved onto their fourth album, 1982’s Shaking The Foundations, it remains to be seen if it would have caught on over there. It probably would have landed a spot on The Filthy Fifteen at most.

Rough Trade deserved better than being famous for being infamous so I’m glad it didn’t happen.

Interestingly, as I mentioned last week, Dusty Springfield had label issues of her own that also prevented her underrated 1982 album White Heat from reaching a wider audience. I’m curious to know what would have happened had Rough Trade given “All Touch” to Dusty for her album.

Two more singles were released from the album: “Blood Lust” and the tile track.

“Blood Lust” isn’t my favourite. “For Those Who Think Young” is much better, but I’m not sure it would have caught on elsewhere. I’m a huge fan of another Canadian artist, Lisa Dalbello, and this reminds me a lot of the stuff she was releasing around the same time. Both artists did well in their home country and in the occasional pocket of Europe but were little more than cult artists elsewhere.

Shaking The Foundations was another Top Ten hit in Canada. It spawned one more hit for the group with “Crimes Of Passion”.

It reminds me of a cross between Kim Carnes’ early 80s hits like “Voyeur” and Grace Jones early 80’s singles. In other words, a winning formula.

And that’s about it for Rough Trade’s big hits, but they did keep going for about another five years.

Rough Trade were big enough in Canada to land a Pepsi commercial. Unfortunately, the commercial didn’t air for very long and I can’t find a copy online. The ad was pulled because it featured people dressed similarly to Canadian musician Nash The Slash without his permission.

In the UK, Shaking The Foundations added “All Touch” to the track listing and it was released as a single. Unfortunately it didn’t make any impact over there.

Two more albums, 1983’s Weapons and 1984’s O Tempora! O Mores! met with diminishing returns in Canada.

I didn’t hear “Weapons” until researching for this piece but I liked it.

I should add that Dalbello, who I mentioned previously, was actually one of the session musicians on Rough Trade’s last album. I can hear her influence on the single “Rescue Me”. Her backing vocals are pretty prominent here and blend in well with Pope’s.

Another singer that had been working with for some time was Nona Hendryx. After her time in LaBelle ended, Hendryx had notched up an interesting solo career including a stint with the famous No Wave label Ze Records. Pope and Staples wrote a pair of tracks for Hendryx’s 1983 album Nona. One of the tracks, Transformation, was released as a single. Hendryx, like Pope is an outspoken member of the LGBTQIA+ community. She is also in a long-term relationship with English talent manager Vicki Wickham who also famously managed Dusty Springfield. (Which would be my guess as to how Hendryx and Pope also crossed paths).

Pope had been toying with a solo career for some time. In 1983, she teamed up with The Payola$ (Lead singer Paul Hyde was another British Ex-Pat, interestingly) on the duet “Never Said I Love You”. I didn’t realize I knew this one until going in via Canadian Classic Hits radio but didn’t know who it was by.

In 1987, Pope appeared with the Canadian Opera Company in a November, 1987 production of R. Murray Schafer’s Patria. In 1988, Pope released a solo album, the lead single off it was a cover of The Flirtation’s 1968 banger “Nothing But A Heartache”. I’m a big fan of the orginal, but hadn’t been aware that Pope had recorded it before working on this piece. Pope’s version isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever heard, but it’s exactly what I expected it to sound like with big 80’s production values. Pope has a great voice for this sort of thing but I prefer hearing her do originals instead.

After a 1986 tour, Rought Trade officially split up two years later. The band regularly got back together for live performances. Most recently, in 2022, a musical based on the band, Rough Trade- The Musical (They must have stayed up all night coming up with that title) debuted in New York City.

Pope has remained active in music. She write an autobiography called Diva which i remember being widely available in Canada at the time. Kind of wish I’d bought a copy but I was a prudish closet case then and wouldn’t have appreciated it as much as I would now. She’s also performed with Peaches which made me extremely happy when researching this piece.

I’m going to close this edition of Beyond The Guess Who off with two videos. The first is Carole Pope and Peaches performing “High School Confidential” during a 2007 Montreal concert.

The second is Pope performing an acoustic version of “All Touch” in 2021 for a Juno Songwriters Circle. Even now, Pope remains an interesting performer who is willing to push the envelope.