One of the most promising bands to come out of the Toronto music scene in the mid-80's, Brighton Rock had the talent and the songs to succeed. Unfortunately the curse of WEA Records Canadian Division struck, and the band we're unable to convert the success they had in their homeland to worldwide acceptance. Thankfully, after a decade of inaction they've decided to give us some more music. I spoke to frontman Gerry McGhee to find out what they're up to…

How are things going with the live album?

"Good! We're just finishing up the mix right now. We've had a bit of a delay because the wife of the guy who was engineering it got sick, so that put us on hold for a couple of weeks, but we should be done by the end of this week. Then we've just got to get it mastered and we're ready to go."

There had been rumors of a reformation for quite a while, so why did you decide to do it now?

"It was kind of a weird thing. What happened was that about a year ago one of my nephews was killed. I was just sitting around one day thinking about how I could make some good come out of it, there's an organization over here called the Children's Wish Foundation which give terminally ill children trips to Disneyland or meet their favorite football player, that kind of thing. I thought that if we put together a show over here we could probably raise a whack of money for them, so I got in touch with the other guys and said I wanted to do a show in memory of my nephew and would they do it? They said they would and the band kinda got back together again as a result of that."

I remember Brian Vollmer of Helix telling me about the show.

"Yeah, I called Brian, I called Andy Curran and Carl Dixon from Coney Hatch, and a bunch of guys that I knew, I told them I was doing this show and they all came over and it was great. We raised a lot of money."

So, what had you been doing for the last 10 years?

"Working! Getting a real job! (laughs). I run a company called Isotope. Basically I buy from all the major record labels as well as a bunch of major studios and export products around the world, it's solely just an export company. It was about 6 or 7 years ago a friend of mine wanted me to contact the labels about selling stuff to Europe, it's a lot easier to do now than it was then, so I set up this company and that's what we do. It's proved to be quite successful which is great because it enables me to still dabble in music which has kept me in the loop that way, so it's worked out good. But apart from that I haven't been doing a hell of a lot music-wise. After I left BR I went to L.A. for a while but after I packed that in from there I just basically said 'I'm done, finished, over, what's next?'"

So what about the rest of the guys, what have they been doing?

"They've been busier than I have. I know Mark (Cavarzan - drums) has been playing in Von Groove and a couple of other bands, he probably plays 3 or 4 nights a week. John (Rogers - Keys/Guitar) does his thing with Phil Naro and plays about 6 gigs a week, but they're really the only ones who've remained active. As for Stevie (Skreebs - bass) and Greg (Fraser - Guitar), Greg's got a new band called Fraze Gang that he's been working on an album for, I think they're just getting ready to finish that up as well. They're just all doing the same thing, doing day jobs and just gigging when they can, writing records and going in and out of the studio. We've just all gone out and done our own thing, a majority of us now have families and with everything else we just kinda drifted apart from that point."

Did the reunion gigs go well? Was it obvious that you should carry on and do some new stuff?

"We got together and it was the first time we'd got together with Johnny in 11 years, we were all sitting in the same room and, yeah, right from the first note! I hadn't sung in at least 6 years and it was like, 'Fuck! This still feels the same and this is a ton of fun.' It just kind of fell together and from that we started talking about how everybody felt about playing this kind of stuff. Everybody was into it and the show that we did we sold out, it was just a great response from the people. Then we did a couple more shows last year and another couple of festivals and with every one it just seemed to get better. Maybe it was because we weren't under any pressure because it was our livelihood, it was basically just let's do it because we used to have a laugh together playing neat songs. It came across great and people who saw the shows appreciated it. We were worried because we didn't want to come back and be a has-been version of what we were, more than anything else. It's 11 or 12 years down the road, we don't look the same or feel the same, but lets see if we can still sound the same and have a good time doing it. And we did, we were lucky with it. We were worried because we didn't want to be five fat guys being in Brighton Rock."

When we met Johnny and Mark when they were over here, the one thing that struck me about them is that they DO still look the same.

"Well, Stevie and Mark could just jump into their 'Love Machine' tour clothing and go, but the rest of us are carrying a little bit more baggage than we used to have, but those guys are pretty much identical to what they were when they finished the last tour."

Are there any new songs on the Live album or is it just a Greatest Hits affair?

"It's just a Greatest Hits thing. We didn't know if we would put some extra stuff on it, we talked about it but with time restraints it was so difficult to get everyone together in the same place to write, or even for rehearsals and stuff. With 5 different lives and 5 different time schedules we really didn't have the time to sit down together. We have some songs left over from the previous albums and we didn't even get the time to rehearse those, it was all we could do to agree on our own then get together and run through stuff a couple of times before the show. So, no, there's nothing new on it."

So have you written anything individually?

"No, what we've done is we've pulled out a bunch of stuff that we used to have and we always felt really good about, so we've re-hashed that. Ideas have gone back and forth and tapes have gone back and forth, we haven't started to polish it but we've made, sort of, an itinerary of what we're going to go through and we hope to finish this stuff over the next month and a half."

It's now 11 years since 'Love Machine' so how do you think anything new you write will differ? Will there be other influences in there?

"No, I can't see it being a lot different from what we've done before. Maybe it'll get a bit heavier, we're a bit older and maybe a bit more aggressive, but 'Love Machine' to me was the perfect way to go out. I didn't have a problem when I said 'That's it!' and walked away. It was the record we wanted to make. Unfortunately Johnny wasn't involved in it, he was involved at the beginning when we were writing it but we had differences and he didn't get to see it through. That, to me, left it kind of incomplete. Johnny has always been Mr. Rock'n'Roll, there's no falseness about it, he's a rock'n'roll guy and he's great fun, and he's always had that attitude that people get their press people to make up for them. But that was the record we wanted to make, it was an in your face guitar record. We got rid of a lot of the keyboards and we thought he'd want to do stuff that was in that same vein. Whatever happened with the label and the management after that we thought that record was a great success, we could walk away from the business because we'd said everything we wanted to say."

I played the 3 albums back-to-back yesterday, and even though 'Young, Wild & Free' is still my favourite song-wise, I think 'Love Machine' has aged better than the first two.

"You know, if that first album had been done under the same kind of conditions that we did 'Love Machine', because the songs on that album are some of our favourites, it would have been a great record. The problem with that album was that we had so much outside pressure, there was so much talking about what it was going to be like that it was almost over-produced. I think if Michael Wagener had had the chance to do what HE wanted to do, and told the management and the label to screw off, that would have been a great record. And we had a lot of time to write that record, basically we'd spent all our lives writing it, and the original ideas just seemed to get so covered up. The same happened with 'Take A Deep Breath', there were some great songs but everything seemed like it had candy-floss on top of it. They tried to take off the edge, and 'Don't scream like that Gerry, it's offensive to the ears!', and it wasn't so much the producers of the records it was the management and the label people. When we removed all these things on 'Love Machine' we just went in and made the record that WE wanted to make. It was done really quick, live off the floor and away we go."

Why did you split up after that?

"It became really evident to us on that tour that the label was basically doing nothing. We were basically fucked and there was nothing we could do. One of the worst things you can do, we've found anyway, is to sign to a Canadian division, you've got to sign somewhere else or you're screwed. You look at any Canadian artists that have ever been successful, you know, Rush, Joni Mitchell, Alanis Morrisette, Neil Young, all signed with the US divisions. Canadians are too passive, they won't go to bat for you, and they don't have enough belief in the people in their own country and it's reflected in the people they sign. You end up with the Platinum Blonde's, Max Webster's, Brighton Rock's, and Tragically Hip's of the world, big here but can't get arrested anywhere else in the world. Where we differed is we'd had success in Europe, we were WEA biggest selling rock band, we were bigger than Honeymoon Suite and Blue Rodeo but they'd spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on those guys and spent fucking nothing on us. It got to the point where all this was happening, I got a call from Motley Crue who were getting ready to change singers - they wanted the guy from The Scream and The Scream wanted me to go down for an audition. It seemed to me that the only way I was going to have a shot was to do it from L.A. So basically I said 'I'm outta here, I'm going to L.A. to try something there, I'm pissed off with it all.' I said to the guys 'Do you want me to help you find a new singer?' and they said 'No, if you're done then we're done too.' Mark ended up moving down with me for a little while, so I went down and did that for 6 months. I had a cool band that I had a lot of faith in, it was a new band, then our guitar player got sick and he was the focal point of the band. I just woke up one morning and thought 'Fuck this, my kids are about to start school. I've got a home back in Canada.' I was just too old to play the game. I'd been on the road since I was 16 and I was now 32 and I didn't want to do this anymore. That's just the way it all kinda fell apart."

When was that? 1992-93?

"Yeah, 92-93. We finished the 'Love Machine' tour in '92, that's when I went down to L.A. and everybody just kind of dispersed. After 'Love Machine' came out we had no management and no booking agent, everything just fell on us and we did it ourselves. It pissed a lot of people off because we were showing that we could do it and we didn't need these guys. They didn't want us to do it because we were making them look like fools in front of their own bands. When we got rid of those elements we started to make a lot of money, we were thinking 'Why didn't we do this years ago?'. Everybody was tired of all the bullshit and we felt like we didn't have anything more to say, 'Love Machine' said it all."

Now you have a deal with Z Records. Was that through Phil Naro?

"I guess Phil had spoken to Mark (Alger), then Mark phoned me and asked me if I was interested. So I called the rest of the guys and explained it and said 'Do you want to start with a live record?' and they said yeah! We didn't have to get attorneys involved, which is the way we like to do things now. I know Mark and Johnny had met Mark and felt good about what he'd done for Phil and for Von Groove, and that's what you want to deal with, a direct line of communication with no bullshit, so we decided to go for it."

You played some low-key club gigs over here back in '89 and there were plans to bring you back. Why didn't that happen?

"One of the reasons was that we found out we had a shit label over there! (laughs). We did those gigs and we felt phenomenal about them. The sales that we'd generated in the UK and all over Europe were really promising. We were sitting back in the Marquee on a Tuesday night, we had this record company guy back there and he was humming and hawing. We said 'So you've seen the band live, what did you think?' and he said 'Yeah, it was good', so we said 'Was there a problem with it, does the Marquee usually sell out on a Tuesday night?'. He said 'No, never, but the music's kinda dated like Bon Jovi and Def Leppard.' We started laughing because these guys were selling 10 million records and this fucking idiot was telling us our music was dated, and we knew we were screwed. We tried to put a tour together because we'd had plenty of dates offered to us. Our plan had always been Canada…Europe…America, that's the way we were going to route it, and because Canada had always been more open to European music just because of the influences, bands like Genesis, Floyd, Iron Maiden, all those guys broke here before they ever broke in the States. We were going to use that reverse-wise so we phoned them up, we said we've organised a tour and sold out every show, we're going to go through England and Scotland and then through Europe, and they refused to give us any tour support at all. That's why when 'Love Machine' came around we couldn't even get them to release it, and we sold 20,000 records in the UK of 'Take A Deep Breath'. It didn't make any sense. Most of those guys I think are out of work right now. I deal with them all the time now and the problem was they should have been out of work 10 years ago."

I hear exactly the same things about Helix and Coney Hatch and Honeymoon Suite.

"That's right! There's always been the talent here, everyone who's ever signed to a US label has proved that. The problem is that in record companies there are too many suits and no music people. The A&R guy was in the studio and some of the things we were asked to do during 'Love Machine' would make your head spin, like asking if a two-inch tape would fit on a two-inch machine. These guys had absolutely no musical knowledge at all, they were radio programmers that somehow lucked into an A&R position. One guy came in with a tape of songs he thought we should consider for the next Brighton record, he was just flexing his muscles because he'd just been promoted to A&R, and they were folk songs. I said 'Are you fucking nuts? Have you ever seen the band, have you ever heard the band? Part of the deal I signed with the label for the last album had a clause to say that this guy would have absolutely nothing to do with Brighton Rock. He may have signed Harem Scarem but we made sure he didn't even hear the record until it was finished. After the 2nd album we went to Warner and asked to be released - they promised us the world to stay with them, so we stayed with them and they didn't deliver on one thing. It was going to be a priority and they were going to do this and that, but when the album came out they dropped the ball. They killed it within two weeks."

Do you still have any of the old stage clothes?

"(Laughs) Actually none of that would ever fit on me, I think I'm about 25 pounds heavier than I ever was on a Brighton Rock tour, so no cake for me this time, I'll have to stick to salad."

Have Johnny and Mark told you what to expect at Z-Rock?

"Yeah, we're really pumped about it. Mark says we're going to be in the pub quite a bit. (laughs). Yeah, we're looking forward to it, it should be good fun."