Carole Pope / Rough Trade

Today's act created the first ever lesbian hit single. Carole Pope has a good solo career in the 21st century, but her most successful years were those with the band Rough Trade, an act whose nucleus consisted of Pope and multi-instrumentalist Kevan Staples, with various other musicians revolving around them.

Carole Pope was born on August 6, 1946, in Manchester, England, UK. She was raised in Scarborough, Toronto, Canada, where her family emigrated when she was a child. She attended Cedarbrae High School with female impersonator Craig Russell and Klaus Kassbaum, future bass player for Steppenwolf. Her sister is television writer/producer Elaine Pope.

Pope met her longtime musical partner, Kevan Staples at a band audition in Scarborough. In 1968, they began performing together as a duo in Yorkville, which was Toronto's live music and arts district at the time. In 1970, they adopted the name O, changing it to The Bullwhip Brothers the following year, performing as a largely acoustic duo at Toronto art festivals and at private events. 

In 1973 they called themselves Rough Trade and added percussionist Chris Faulkner, then bassist Bob Jennings, followed by drummer Donny McDougal. As would happen frequently going forward, the players supporting Pope and Staples were subject to sometimes wholesale change, and by 1974 the Pope/Staples duo was joined by Hap Roderman, Jane Cessine, Sharon Smith and Marv Kanarek. The band, through their theatrical combination of rock, R&B and raw sexuality (Pope often performed in bondage attire), became a popular draw on Toronto's live music scene through their regular shows at Grossman's.

They were the first rock band to record a direct to disc album with 1976's Rough Trade Live, which despite the title was actually a studio recording. Each side was performed live (without an audience) all the way through and cut directly to the mastering disc for greater audio fidelity. By this time, the band's line-up was Pope, Staples, Jo-Ann Brooks (vocals, percussion), Rick Gratton (drums), Michael Fonfara (keyboards, arranger), and Peter Hodgson (bass). As would be the case throughout the band's entire career, the vast majority of the album's songs were written by Pope and Staples.

Birds of a Feather was the album's opener:

The song was covered in 1978 by Dr. Frank-N-Furter himself, Tim Curry.

This was followed by Take Me:

This is a live version of both Take Me and Birds of a Feather

This is Butch:

... And this is Surrender (Give Up), the album's closing track:

On December 19, 1977, the band presented a newly created live musical called Restless Underwear which co-starred Divine alongside the band (who by this time had added an additional backup singer, Luci Martin-Keyes). The show, which played at Toronto's prestigious Massey Hall, was noted for its outrageous (for the time) sexual satire. However, aside from Pope and Staples the rest of the band quit after Restless Underwear had completed its one-show run, in a dispute over payment.

In 1979 Rough Trade contributed the song Shakedown to the soundtrack of the controversial film Cruising. It was their first single, albeit not commercially successful.

Numerous personnel changes later and in 1980 the band settled into a stable five-person line-up of Carole Pope (vocals), Kevan Staples (guitars, keyboards, etc.), David McMorrow (keyboards), Terry Wilkins (bass) and Bucky Berger (drums).

This new iteration of Rough Trade landed a record contract with True North Records in mid-1980, and recorded the group's second album, Avoid Freud, which was released in October 1980. The official first single was the deliberately controversial What's the Furor About the Fuhrer?, but radio stations flipped the single over and the B-side Fashion Victim became a top 40 hit in Canada, peaking at #25.

This is What's the Furor About the Fuhrer?:

... And this is Fashion Victim:

The album's most famous single, however, is High School Confidential. The song's narrator is a student observing a sexy female classmate, a "cool blonde scheming bitch" whose activities suggest that she may be having sexual relations with adult men, including the high school principal. The narrator compares the classmate to 1950s sex symbols Mamie Van Doren, Anita Ekberg, and Dagmar, and reveals her own unrequited lust for her: in one of the most famous lyrics from the song, Pope sings "She makes me cream my jeans when she comes my way".

The lyrics never explicitly state the narrator's own sex, so they may be read either as Pope speaking from a male perspective or as a reference to lesbianism. In a 2000 interview with Eye Weekly, Pope confirmed that while she intended the lyric from her own perspective as a lesbian, the ambiguity was intentional: "The general public didn't get that I was gay – if you were gay you did – and when I wrote love songs, I wanted them to be interpreted however."

At the time of its release, it was one of the most sexually explicit songs ever to reach the Canadian pop charts, and despite the sexual ambiguity, the first with such strong lesbian overtones. Although controversial, the song was a Top 20 hit, peaking at #12 nationwide. Here it is:

k.d. lang was apparently inspired by seeing the band perform the number on the televised Juno Awards presentation that year, "seeing [Carole] set a tone for me that I could be out, no question".

In 2000, Pope recorded a new version of High School Confidential for the television series Queer as Folk, with the lyrics altered to reflect a gay male perspective: "He's a cool blond scheming trick... He's a combination Tom Cruise-Zack O'Toole". (Zack O'Toole was a fictional porn star in QAF, played by Matthew G. Taylor.) The song appears during Justin's pole act. It's a chance to remember that ground-breaking show:

This video is even better:

Lie Back, Let Me Do Everything wasn't a timid song either. This is a recent live version:

For Those Who Think Young, appearing on the album cover as (for those who think young) and originally to be entitled for those who think jung, (Jung being a natural progression from Freud) was released in 1981 and contained Rough Trade's biggest international hit: All Touch opens this album with a wallop right to the libido, a powerful statement that this Canadian band strove for. Helping with the singing in a number of songs from this album is Dusty Springfield, who was in a relationship with Pope at the time.

All Touch peaked at #12 in Canada, at #40 in Australia, and at #58 in the US. Here it is:

Prisoner Of My Skin was another worthy song from this album:

... So was The Sacred & The Profane (the B-side to the US release of All Touch):

Blood Lust was also a single, but it didn't chart:

Shaking the Foundations was released in 1982 and became a hit in Canada in 1983, spending 21 weeks on the charts and peaking at #9. The album's only single, Crimes of Passion, peaked at #18. Part of the song deals with male homosexuality:

"Johnny and Eddie lay in bed, their limbs entwined,
The air full of the sickly sweet smell of amyl.
Their tanned bodies bathed in sweat,
They looked like two young gods,
Writhing in the throes of ecstasy."

This is a live version from 1985 of the album's title track:

This is a recent (2016) live version of I Want to Live:

The album closes with another good song, Beg for It, consistent with Carole's BDSM image:

Weapons (1983) was their first album since their debut that did not chart in Canada. Nona Hendryx sings on a couple of songs. The title track was the album's first single but it too did not chart. The weapons referred in the title are "my lips, my breasts, my body":

If You Want It is another good song from this album:

Softcore was one of the album's standouts, with raw lyrics concerning Carole's breakup with Dusty Springfield:

The great Dusty Springfield did an amazing cover version of the song, redirecting the lyrics at Pope:

The album ends with a sarcastic look backward with a combination Revolution 9/A Day in the Life crescendo that mocks the Paisley Generation. The song is geo-blocked for me, but perhaps you can listen to it:

Pope and Staples co-wrote the 1983 single Transformation, recorded by Nona Hendryx.

Pope also appeared as a guest vocalist on the Payola$ single Never Said I Loved You, which was a top ten hit in Canada in 1983.

Rough Trade's follow-up album was called O Tempora! O Mores! (1984). The opening track and lead single was called Sexual Outlaw:

Sexual Outlaw peaked at #92 in Canada. The follow-up single, On The Line, peaked at #91. These would be the last records to chart for Rough Trade. Here's On The Line:

Symbolic is a ballsy, fast rocker that kick-starts like a motorcycle and has fantastic drumming:

The highlight of the album is probably Rescue Me. Featuring a cold start where Carole cries "I want you now", this song has similarities to One Thing Leads to Another by The Fixx. Great lyrics such as "You remember, we scorched the bedsheets" and funky horns make this one a winner that should have been a hit single.

Lisa Dalbello does backup vocals on Tied Up, in which the verses are slower but Carole really lets loose on the chorus and sounds wicked.

In Low Blow, we descend into heavy-metal territory as Carole drags us down into her dungeon. This is probably as dark and dangerous as Rough Trade ever sounded.

Rough Trade returned to a stable five-person line-up in 1985 for performance purposes. This line-up would record a handful of new tracks for the 1985 greatest hits compilation Birds of a Feather. Their final full-scale tour, "Deep Six in '86", took place in 1986, although they performed a few local concert dates in Toronto in 1987 and 1988.

After the final breakup in 1988, Rough Trade subsequently performed several reunion shows, with varying personnel supporting Pope and Staples. The first reunion show was in Toronto in December 1994; a handful of one-off shows later took place at various times through the late 1990s and into the next decade, mostly in Toronto. In 2001, Rough Trade undertook a mini-tour of several venues in eastern Canada.

Since the break-up, Staples has busied himself as a composer for film, television, and theatre, and still lives in Toronto. Pope's solo career has been lower-profile than her time with the band. She issued a debut solo single in 1988 (Nothing But A Heartache/I'm Not Blind) but did not issue a follow-up release for several years afterward. In 1991, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue opportunities in soundtrack work and acting. Here are both sides of her single in one video:

Pope issued an EP called Radiate in 1995. Love Strikes Hard was the EP's first track:

In 1997, Carole provided the voice for the schoolteacher in the animated version of Pippi Longstocking. In 1999, playwright Bryden MacDonald staged Shaking the Foundations, a musical revue based on Pope's music with Rough Trade, at Toronto's Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. Pope also released an EP called The Silencer. Here's the title track, where Pope got to unleash her inner Shirley Bassey Bond Girl:

In 2000, Random House published Pope's autobiography, Anti-Diva. The book included Pope's first public acknowledgment that she had been in a relationship with Dusty Springfield in the early 1980s. That year she and Staples contributed a track (Softcore) to the Dusty Springfield tribute album, Homage to an Icon.

In 2004, two decades after the release of her previous album, Pope returned to Los Angeles and released her debut full-length solo album, Transcend. This is the title track:

With All Touch/No Contact, Pope was revisiting her biggest hit with Rough Trade:

Shadows was the penultimate track of the album:

... While the album closed with Americana:

In 2007 she released the single Johnny Marr. It was included in the 2007 reissue of Transcend.

In 2011 Pope released her second solo album, called Landfall. Rufus Wainwright was among her collaborators. Shining Path was a worthy first single:

Tell Me was the second track on the album, as well as the single's B-side:

This is a live version of God=Love:

This is a live version of Did I Mention:

This is the album's impressive title track:

She then released a few singles. In 2013, there was Francis Bacon; Alain Johannes created a Smiths-like glam-rock track for Carole's ode to Dusty Springfield.

Lesbians in the Forest, which was inspired by performing at the Michigan Womyn’s Festival, was also a single in 2013. For this song, she collaborated with Peaches and Tim Welch.

Vagina Wolf, another Shirley Bassey moment for Carole, was a single in 2014:

The above three singles were compiled in an EP called Music for Lesbians. Also included in the EP was a duet between Pope and Sara T Russell of the Lee Hazlewood/Nancy Sinatra classic Some Velvet Morning:

Finally, a couple of weeks ago, she released a new single called This Is Not A Test. You can listen to it here.

Carole Pope invites us to view her music with our tongues firmly in cheek. When told by a reporter that "A lot of people took Rough Trade very seriously," she answers, "Well, that’s their problem. (laughs) I mean, we had a serious side, but there’s a wealth of humorous material in human sexuality. And that’s never going to go away. Never!"

Carole has earned three Juno Awards, a Genie Award, and four Gold and two Platinum records. She is an icon of transgressive music, who never hesitates to risk it all. And most of all, she doesn't take herself too seriously, which is always a plus in my book. I hope that you've enjoyed the presentation!