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Martha and The Muffins
biography
Martha
and the Muffins emerged from the early punk/new wave/art pop scene in 1977
which was centered around various clubs along Toronto's Queen Street
West and the Ontario College of Art, where several
members of the band were students. With their eclectic mix of musical influences,
(ranging from free-form jazz, experimental music,
Motown, Roxy Music and The Beatles),
MatM quickly attracted a strong local following which continued to grow
as the band became exposed to a wider audience.
After Glenn
O'Brien, music critic at Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine
in New York City played a cassette of Muffins songs to an A&R rep for Virgin
Records UK and Robert Fripp of King Crimson,
the band was signed by Virgin Records and recorded their first album, Metro
Music at The Manor near Oxford, England in 1979.
With the
top ten success of the single Echo Beach around the world
in 1980, MatM toured extensively in Britain, Europe and
North America, returning to The Manor to record their second album Trance
and Dance and opening for Roxy Music on its U.K.
tour.
" In early
1981, new bass player Jocelyne Lanois
introduced her brothers Daniel and Bob Lanois to the band, leading to a
rewarding artistic collaboration with co-producer Daniel Lanois
beginning with the third MatM album This Is The Ice Age
and contining for two more albums, Danseparc (1983) and
Mystery Walk (1984).
In 1983,
lead vocalist Martha Johnson and guitarist Mark Gane pared the band down
to a duo and changed the name to M+M. Combining texture
and art funk in Black Stations/White Stations, (from M+M's
Mystery Walk album, featuring the Brecker Brothers
on horns), the dance single reached #2 in Billboard's Dance Chart
in autumn 1984.
After setting
up their own home studio, The Web, Mark and Martha began
recording The World Is A Ball, enlisting producer David
Lord, (Peter Gabriel, XTC, Echo and the Bunnymen) as co-producer
and continuing to record at his studio in Bath, England in the spring/summer
of 1985. After The World Is A Ball was
released in 1986, the video for the single Only
You, directed and shot by Mark and Martha on a shoestring budget
on black-and-white Super 8 film, won Best Music Video Production
at the 1987 Yorkton Short Film and Video Festival, influencing
the look of many television commercials and receiving critical acclaim.
Martha
and Mark moved to Bath, England in early
1987, setting up their studio and beginning to work on
their seventh album Modern Lullaby, a hybrid of funk/pop/country
and experimental influences. Eventually released under the original name
Martha and the Muffins, Modern Lullaby briefly appeared
in 1992 before the Canadian Indie label that released it went bankrupt.
Martha
and Mark spent much of the '90's scoring music for various
television and film projects as well as Michael Gibson's well received feature-length
film Defy Gravity. The birth of Martha and Mark's daughter
in 1992, inspired Martha to write and record an album of original children's
music, Songs From The Tree House which won the 1996
Juno Award for Best Children's Album. Since its release, she has
performed for thousands of children in school and public venues across Ontario
and beyond.
In 1998,
with the help of EMI Canada's Deanne Cameron, Shan Kelley
and Warren Stewart, Mark and Martha released Then Again - A Retrospective,
the first compilation CD to include representative tracks from all seven
of the Martha and the Muffins/M+M albums released to date, digitally remastered
and including a bonus track Resurrection. This was followed
by the CD reissue of MatM's first album Metro Music, in
2003. This Is The Ice Age, which fans
have been requesting for years, is scheduled to be reissued in April 2005.
Encouraged by continued demands for reissues of the back catalogue and for new material, Martha and Mark
are currently writing and recording material for a new Martha and the Muffins album as well as several
individual projects. In addition, they hope to continue to reissue the remaining albums on CD.
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