by Mike Doherty
“I’ve got drugs in my pocket, and I don’t know what to do with them.” With slightly naughty lyrics such as these, sung in a working-class London accent, The Monks titillated young Canadian rock fans — and upset parents and radio programmers — in 1979. For a couple of years, the bad boys of English rock were startlingly popular here … but nowhere else.
As guitarist John Ford prepares to visit Toronto for a Monks tribute concert this week — where he’ll be awarded a double-platinum album for his old band’s debut, Bad Habits — a few questions arise. Who were these mysterious men? Why were they adored in Canada and ignored in the U.K.? And how did they inspire a star-studded cast of Canadian rockers to cover Bad Habits in its entirety?
“I have a million friends who are closet Monks fans who’ve come out over the years,” says Toronto singer and songwriter Thomas D’Arcy, who masterminded the cover album. Best known for his work with the band Small Sins, he found kindred spirits in members (and ex-members) of Sloan, The New Pornographers, The Doughboys, Change of Heart and other bands; all were big enough Monks fans to contribute their talents gratis.
D’Arcy was born in the year Bad Habits was released and first heard the album as a teen. Over the course of his 30-odd cross-Canada tours, he says, the record has “always ended up in the van. Tapes, then CDs, then on the iPod — it always made every technological transition, and no matter what band we were in, or how s—ty our speakers were, that record always translates.” But The Monks themselves remained obscure, even to their fans: Bad Habits includes no liner notes or promo shots — just a cover photo of a model in a nun’s outfit hitching up her skirt.
There was a good reason for the band members not to foreground their image: Three out of the four were, in fact, former members of the progressive, psychedelic folk-rock band The Strawbs. As Ford recalls, over the phone from his Long Island home, the punk movement “was a breath of fresh air after the self-indulgence of progressive rock that I was part of.”
He and Strawbs drummer Richard Hudson wrote a punky song called Nice Legs, Shame About the Face (based on what Ford’s wife at the time would say when she suspected he was ogling women behind his dark glasses) and offered it to a young band whose management turned it down. But their own rough demo, with Hudson banging on a flight case, made its way to a French label that wanted to release it as is. The art department misheard Hudson and Ford’s chosen name for the project, The Mugs (slang for “the faces”), and The Monks were born.
When the single hit the Top 20 in the U.K., the band appeared on TV, and apart from singer Terry Cassidy — who was enlisted, at first, to mime Ford’s vocals — they donned monks’ robes, keeping their identities somewhat secret. They hastily recorded Bad Habits to capitalize on their hit, but as D’Arcy notes, “people found out that they were The Strawbs in England, and that basically made them come across as impostors. Punk rock was all about credibility.”
By May 1981, the Monks had sold 150,000 copies of their debut record in Canada, and set out on a three-week tour that stopped, among other places, at Massey Hall in Toronto.
On the BBC show Jukebox Jury, former Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon (who had inspired the Monks song Johnny B. Rotten) dismissed one of their singles as “patronizing rubbish” that simply rehashed what the Pistols had already done. (Ford notes, in mitigation, “We saw him afterwards in the green room, with the sandwiches and cups of tea, and he was fine.”) Bad Habits was never even released in the United States, but EMI Canada execs fell in love with it.
Change of Heart frontman Ian Blurton, who sings the song No Shame on the tribute album, recalls that at high school parties in west Toronto, the album was “pretty much a staple. This was a more laid-back version [of punk]. I don’t want to sound disparaging, but I guess it was more commercial.” Citing “bad taste,” some radio stations refused to play the song Drugs in My Pocket (even though Hudson at the time told the Toronto Star it was “an anti-drug song”), but it hit No. 4 on Toronto’s CHUM-FM.
By May of 1981, the band had sold 150,000 copies of Bad Habits in Canada, and apparently half of those in Ontario; never having toured anywhere else, they set out to play three weeks across the province.
“It was like The Beatles!” Ford marvels. The Monks were greeted by fans at the airport, and they played venues both respectable (Toronto’s Massey Hall) and dubious. Ford recalls one gig at a Hamilton hockey rink: “There was a trend for so-called ‘punks’ in the audience to spit on the stage. Our bass player used to encourage this by spitting back. … Our singer, whilst trying to dodge all this, threw out M&Ms to the crowd whenever we performed Drugs in My Pocket. So our show could get pretty chaotic. Coupled with the fact that we may have ended a little early that night, we were immediately ushered away from the stage by our security and brought up to the commentator’s box. Sure enough, pockets of fights broke out all over the place. We were given pucks as souvenirs.”
The Monks’ second album, the New Wave-like Suspended Animation, was released only in Canada; it went gold, but the band members, caught up in other projects in the U.K., never returned. Nevertheless, over the decades, something about them lingered. For Sloan’s Chris Murphy, Bad Habits “stands up more than a lot of the actual punk records that were supposed to have been so groundbreaking.” On the tribute album, Murphy sings the catchy Love in Stereo, which he says is “completely up my alley. It’s kind of crafty; it’s a bit goofy, but good. It has a sense of humour about itself.”
According to D’Arcy, the songs on Bad Habits have “something the rest of punk rock didn’t have, that you needed to be an outsider to give: chord progressions that are slightly interesting, bridges — just that tiny bit of caring about songwriting.” Beyond the tongue-in-cheek crudeness, “they’re really intelligently written pop songs.”
D’Arcy’s tribute album is brimming with energy and personality, and it’s also obsessively detailed in its reconstruction; he even went so far as to shave his legs, don a nun’s outfit and recreate the original’s cover photo. He enlisted Ford himself to belt out the song Out of Work Musician (somewhat ironically — he remains busy with a solo career), and on Thursday night, at Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern, D’Arcy, Ford, Blurton and others will play the album from cover to cover. Ford remains amazed by his continued Canadian popularity and recognition. And perhaps there’s even a new generation of fans waiting in the wings.
Says Murphy, “What was once punk, like The Ramones, sounds like kids’ music now, it’s so tame. My kids” — his sons are four and two — “really like The Monks.”
Even Drugs in My Pocket?
“Hey, I’m not playing them that one!”
--taken from: National Post
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