Martha and the Muffins

I wasn’t expecting to be talking to Martha and the Muffins in 2010. Like just about everyone else in the western world I was enchanted by their huge hit from 1980 Echo Beach and I was aware that they had continued to be an important recording act in various parts of the world although never again reaching the commercial heights of that iconic song.

They went on to record seven albums and in Canada and elsewhere became a highly respected and credible art-pop band considered in the same ilk as the likes of Roxy Music. In other parts of the world they remained known for one song only and were considered a one-hit wonder.

The band effectively has been the nucleus of Martha Johnson and Mark Gane for the best part of the last twenty five years. Partners both in life and music Johnson and Gane continue to live in Toronto, Canada where they have a family. Earlier this year they released an album called Delicate which came 18 years after their last record. Delicate is an exceptionally good record and it manages to simultaneously sound contemporary and yet recognisably Martha and the Muffins, combining pop guitars and melodies with washes of synthesised keyboards and intelligent and thoughtful lyrics around themes of urban alienation and social dislocation. It’s certainly not the work of a duo who should be seen as a transient pop act!

But what bought them to my attention again was an email providing a link to the 30th Anniversary re-recording of Echo Beach. Curiosity led to me clicking on the link where I was transported back in time to that almost perfect electro pop hit. Except in 2010 they have recast it as a moody, evocative and brilliantly rendered piece of music. It’s a dark and almost chilling recording that manages to provide several whole new layers of meaning to that memorable lyric.

Just to show that they have lost none of the pop sensibility the new Echo Beach is joined by a shimmering new electro pop song called Big Day, which believe it or not is a potential chart topper waiting to happen. All it needs is a movie or tv show to adopt it as a theme and Martha and the Muffins could become “two-hit wonders” thirty years apart. Who would have thought?

Questions had to be asked.

HHMM: Congratulations on the new version of Echo Beach, the 30th Anniversary version. It’s very different to the original and I suppose it’s safe to say there wouldn’t have been any point in doing it if it weren’t very different to the original.

MJ: That’s true. We didn’t want to just do what we’d done before. Several people have covered the song and so we thought it was time that we gave it a try. We played that version at a show we did here in Toronto in February and it went over so well and people loved it. They liked the quietness of it and it took them back to what they were doing thirty years ago and how the song touched them back then. It has a lot of nostalgia to it.

HHMM: There’s a very haunting mood to the song. To me, it makes the place Echo Beach feel like some sort of foreboding ghost town rather than a place of frivolity and escape.

MG : I agree. There is a darkness to it. I think that there is thirty years of living beyond the original, You cant help but have lived through certain things that give a different perspective to it.

HHMM: Maybe I’m interpreting it too much but I guess that’s what songs are for right? But I’m interpreting this version of the song as suggesting that Echo Beach never really existed and that it was a figment of the singer’s imagination. Is that a fair interpretation?

MJ : I think that’s what Mark intended.

MG : Well it always was a place of the imagination. People have asked over the years where the real Echo Beach but when I first wrote the song I had no specific place in mind. Over the long period people have emailed to tell me there was an Echo Beach here or there, but it was always a figment of my imagination. In a sense it still is but now it’s an imaginary place from a fifty year old perspective rather than a twenty year old perspective.

HHMM: I had this vision of the singer being a crazy old woman in a mental institution mumbling incessantly about this place named Echo Beach that she used to go to and everyone looking at her thinking “but there is no place named Echo Beach”.

MJ: (laughs) I like that. Maybe we could turn that into a video or something.

HHMM: By recording this new version it emphasises the adage that a great song is a great song and there’s any number of ways to perform it.

MG: Echo Beach was a very early song of mine but it’s still fascinating to hear how people react to it. Even your reaction to the new version is really cool because we wouldn’t have necessarily seen it that way. But there is a constant interaction between songwriter and performer and listener which is something that both Martha and I have enjoyed.

HHMM: And as you said, that relationship does keep evolving. I wouldn’t have had the interpretation I did thirty years ago. I’m bringing thirty years of life experience to it as well.

MG: Exactly, It’s that evolution of age as well that adds certain richness to it as well.

MJ: I think the version we have done now suits the time and space where we are at and the previous version suited where we were at in the 1980’s.

HHMM: The perception of Martha and the Muffins is really interesting. In some parts of the world and with some people you would clearly be perceived as a one hit wonder. In other places and with other people you are perceived as a Canadian equivalent of Talking Heads or Roxy Music or The Fall. Are those extremes of perception something that you are aware of?

MG : Oh for sure. The whole one hit wonder tag is all geographical. It all depends what part of the world you are talking about.  In Canada we’ve had something like five or eight charted songs and a bunch of those reached top ten. In the States we had a number two dance hit with Black Station,White Station. So there is a definite division between those people who through no fault of their own only know us for Echo Beach and those people who are devoted fans who know every album we ever did and probably know more about us than we know ourselves. It is a weird kind of thing and a lot of it has to do with circumstances that are out of a bands control. If you get released in one territory and not another or have a hit in one territory and not another then that’s what happens. We never started the band to have hits anyway, so judging us as a one hit wonder band in the light of the eight albums we’ve done, three of which we’re produced with Daniel Lanois, is a gross mis-interpretation of what this band is all about. But I understand why that has happened in some places. It also suggests that you are only successful as a band if you have hits. You can think of a band like King Crimson who only had one hit in 1968 but they’ve been going 40 plus years. No-one would think of bringing the term ‘one hit wonder’ up with Robert Fripp! So it’s all a relative thing.

HHMM: The eighteen year gap between the last two albums almost served to have music come the full circle and to me listening to Delicate now, it sounds very contemporary. Is that something you subscribe to?

MG: Particularly from a Canadian point of view, with this current crop of bands, I feel like I’m in their neighborhood or that they are in our neighborhood, or that we are all in the same neighborhood whereas in the late 70s and 80’s we did not relate to any other well known bands in Canada other than what was going on in punk and new wave locally in Toronto. They were being ignored and a lot of those bands deserved to make records and they never got the chance. And even in the 90’s it was still basically either rock oriented or earnest folk singer oriented. Then a few years ago bands started to emerge that sounded really cool and were doing innovative things and were following their own path. Arcade Fire is a great example. And it must be a wonderful thing to be an indie band and not have some record company saying “but we don’t hear another…whatever their equivalent of Echo Beach is”. They can do whatever they want and that’s a wonderful development and in some respects the internet has made that possible.

HHMM: I love the textures on the new album both musically and vocally. Do you feel like you’ve been able to take up where you left off in those respects?

MJ : I don’t know. I’m glad to hear that you find it contemporary. When you have an 18 year gap its hard to know. I thought it was a contemporary sounding record but it’s hard to be objective.

MG: I’d say that in a sense if you have a strong artistic purpose or “vision”…although I don’t want to say “vision” and sound too grandiose. But I think if you stick true to your sensibilities you almost operate outside of fashion. Obviously there have been certain times in our 30plus year career when we were fashionable but more important are the artistic sensibilities that make you who you are. I mean you look at Canadian artists like Joni Mitchell or Neil Young and they’ve always done a very wide variety of music, but its always them. Sometimes they are cooler than other times but they carry forward that personal vision and they use whatever is at hand, at whatever period they are doing an album in. I think that’s what we are about too. It’s very nice to hear you say that its contemporary and its good that it is but I think you can hear still hear an iconic sound, even though its not what we were doing in the 90’s and 80’s.