Model, dancer, singer, entertainer, Bloody Betty is Vancouver’s sleazy punk rock renaissance woman who over the past few years has been behind some of the cities most outrageous events! Since the founding of her performance group, Bloody Betty & the Deadly Sins, she has managed to invent her own sub genre of burlesque, the much messier and more disturbing – Gorelesque! On the west coast, she has garnered a reputation for pushing the envelope and gleefully smashing taboos. Her shows walk a line of inappropriateness, due to her nonchalance toward using gratuitous violence and nudity in her performances. I’ve collaborated with Betty on a number of projects and I can attest that the girls got quite a set of balls on her… and that’s what I like to see in a woman! (Hmm, That sentence didn’t quite come out right… 🙂 ) Betty and her troupe seek to shock and titillate, using some pretty stunning visuals, make up and special f/x, it’s definitely fun fringe entertainment for those with less mainstream sensibilities.
The No. 5 Orange, by contrast, is part of the old school tradition of Vancouver Strip clubs. It is one of the few clubs still standing after the glory days of the late 80’s when Motley Crue immortalized our “peeler” scene with their “Girls Girls Girls” video and Bon Jovi was inspired to name his album “Slippery When Wet” after a tattoo he saw on one of our dancers. At the peak in the mid 80’s Vancouver boasted around 30 bars with exotic dancing… today only 5 remain. There are innumerable reasons for the disappearance of Vancouver’s strip clubs, from simple mismanagement and the rising costs of real estate to the pre-Olympics crack down on the shady organized crime element that surrounded the industry, but the true death knell seems to have been that they simply went out of fashion as moral attitudes shifted. Ironically, one of the factors for their decline was the rise in popularity of burlesque striptease artists who are perceived as more empowered and less exploited than the exotic dancers who came before them.
On Tuesday February 17th, these two cultures collide! Bloody Betty‘s Anti-Valentines Day edition of Tales From The Strip invades one of the last bastions of traditional sleaze… the No. 5 Orange! It will be interesting to see how the “over the top” performances of burlesque stars, Lola Danielle Frost, Nicky Nine Doors and Bloody Betty go down with the No. 5 Oranges’ regular patrons, not to mention the dancers that usually work there! Don’t miss this spectacle of blood and full nudity! The girls are going into the heart of sleaze as performance art provocateurs to put some hip back into strip!
In the early 2000’s I was living in Los Angeles working on my debut album for major label, Dreamworks records. I had been signed shortly after basing myself out of L.A. and one of the catalysts for that was undoubtedly, KROQ which had played my demo, this quickly helped the growing buzz surrounding my band Soul Kid #1 and by the time of my seventh show, I had contract offers from Interscope, Warner Brothers and Dreamworks. Before 2005, Radio was still a powerful medium and it played a huge part in influencing the music industry. Going back to the days of Elvis Presley, who started on a small independent (Sun Records) and found his first support locally on regional radio before moving on to larger things. This model had remained in place for years and because of it, overnight, I went from recording in my living room to recording at Ocean Way!
One day at the studio my Dreamworks A & R man, asked me if I’d heard of a band called “Crystal Pistol” who came from my hometown, Vancouver. The A & R mentioned that the label was thinking of checking them out! Crystal Pistol of course, were a local super group made up of MIK IRELAND (vocals), PINTO (lead guitar), BRIAN BRESSET (guitar and back up vocals), DAVID TROUTMAN (drums) and GREG LAIKIN (bass and back up vocals). And now that I look back, It was quite a feat for them to generate enough noise based out of Vancouver to attract the attention of a American major label!! For a Canadian band to even get on the radar of the US music biz, is a huge accomplishment. Crystal Pistol must have been doing something right! But realistically, they faced some hurdles, A & R guys are lazy and tend to invest their money close to home. The music industry gravy train usually ended in Seattle and traditionally nobody was too interested in journeying the extra couple miles across the border in search of talent to exploit… unless of course the band was blowing up with a regional hit, and that could only happen with airplay! One particularly significant obstacle stood in the way of that. My hometown region was controlled by the un-hip, backwards, corporate CFOX which in turn was dominated by the small conservative crooked clique that made up the Canadian Music industry. Unlike KROQ in L.A. which actively sought out new music and constantly broke new bands, CFOX did the opposite and had a long history of blocking out new music. The station functioned for the benefit of just a small handful of powerful players most notably, Bruce Allen. Music journalist, Tom Harrison explains that by the early 80’s, “Bruce Allen and Sam Feldman ran Bruce Allen Talent Promotions, which managed BTO and Bryan Adams and Prism.Those bands became a symbol of the music establishment – the whole mainstream thing, Bruce became a major figure of opposition. Sam Feldman, his partner branched off into the booking agency and between them they had a lock on all the clubs in Vancouver and the radio stations – two AM stations that played top 30, CKLG and CFUN and the FM stations CFOX and CFMI. When punk thing started happening there was no way they were going to let that stuff on the air or in the clubs.” Canadian Radio acted more like Hadrian’s wall, built to keep the barbarians out!
Bruce Allen standing guard of his empire.
I’m not sure how much my Dreamworks A & R guys actually did in following up on “checking out” Crystal Pistol. I however, did make that journey home a couple times and got to see Crystal Pistol in all their glory. I remember one sold out Vancouver show where Mik Ireland announced his arrival by emptying a full pitcher of beer onto his own head before launching into the first song. It was sleazy Guns & Roses era rock n’ roll with an undercurrent of Vancouver punk nihilism. They were your perfect “I don’t give a fuck” party band glorifying bad lifestyle choices and playing the rock n’ roll they wanted to play whether anyone liked it or not. Crystal Pistol’s song “Rock Star” is actually quite poignant and the refrain “Everybody hates you when you love Rock N’ Roll!” should resonate with anyone who has ever attempted to make music in Canada. It’s a dead end, but you do it anyway despite all the forces at work against you.
Lead singer, Mik Ireland.
Crystal Pistol released their debut on Alert Records in 2005. The song “Rock Star” seemed an obvious hit song! A hard rock anthem that could have easily been played between Motley Crue and Offspring. They had quickly found an audience who responded enthusiastically to their hedonistic, unapologetic brand of rock n’ roll. After touring Europe, the rock press there cited Crystal Pistol for influencing a sleazy hard rock revival. You can see youtube videos of bands in Spain or Sweden doing cover versions of Crystal Pistol songs! Crystal Pistol looked like an unstoppable “Locomotive” but somehow they got derailed! Despite all their success abroad, at home Crystal Pistol ran into a now too familiar problem. They couldn’t get any radio support at the most crucial point in their career. The band had actually ended up funding their European tour themselves because the Alert Records promotion budget was all spent on “working” their music to radio. Ten thousand dollars of “working to radio”, could land you in medium rotation. CFOX kept sending back their song and giving them the run around, stonewalling and wasting time with requests to cut out this or do that, the band kept complying, spending more and more money to try and make the station happy only to have CFOX decide that they’ll be playing Nickelback’s “Rock Star” instead! (Nickelback simply had more money behind them to buy airtime… and they were the priority customer as far as Modern Rock Radio was concerned).
Pistol on tour!
CFOX rotation playlists have always been blatant in their small town corporate rock cronyism. CFOX had managed to keep generation after generation of artistic talent off the airwaves. They spent the 70’s and 80’s functioning as Bruce Allen’s personal jukebox while simply ignoring the most significant and vibrant era of Vancouver musical history! So Crystal Pistol joined the long list of Vancouver rock n’ roll to be banished from the airwaves, from D.O.A. to Pointed Sticks to The Modernettes to Art Bergmann to Skinny Puppy and the Sons Of Freedom to Slow to the Scramblers to Psychomania & Pure & Pluto to JP5 to D.B.S. to SNFU to all the post grunge rockers like The Spitfires to Flash Bastard to Black Halos… You name it, they didn’t play it!
Mik with fans.
The truth is that CFOX hates you if you love rock n’ roll! It’s laughable that the station’s motto was “the Fox Rocks!”, when all they’ve ever done is come up with creative ways to collect payola and keep their audience blissfully unaware of any actual rocking going on! The only time that the Ramones got on CFOX was when they announced the band members deaths! Compare CFOX’s top 100 to KROQ’s top 100 both from 1982. You’ll notice that CFOX has 4 acts near the top that Bruce Allen had a stake in (Loverboy, The Headpins, Streetheart and aptly named, Payolas) It’s also made up of archaic 70’s corporate rock with Asia at number 2 and The Clash at the very bottom of the list. KROQ has The Clash on the top of their playlist. It includes Adam Ant and X, KROQ’s playlist is relevant and reflects the actual musical landscape of 1982! It’s downright heroic in comparison!
Today, CFOX no longer has a monopoly on music and thanks to the internet, nobody needs to listen to them playing mediocre “modern” rock, Bryan Adams or Nickelback ad nauseam. But the damage was done, and thanks to the stranglehold Canadian Radio had over our music, we’re now known as the country that produced the shittiest rock stars! We gave the world, the Barenaked Ladies, Chilliwack, and Our Lady Peace! Despite it all, since Crystal Pistol’s debut they’ve racked up over 100 000 plays for their videos on youtube and satisfyingly seen their legacy grow. At their height, Crystal Pistol shows were rambunctious, wild, unpredictable rock n’ roll fun! Now they’re back to play a rare reunion show at the Rickshaw Theatre on Valentines Day! It’s the closest thing to a rock n’ roll circus that Vancouver has seen in a long time, with the outrageous gorelesque of BLOODY BETTY and NEIL E. DEE’s DANGER THRILL SHOW performing stunts. Musical guests backing them up are gothic punks NIM VIND, As well as un-radio friendly rockers STARBOYS, GLORYWHORE, THE TOXICS & SMASH ALLEY! On Saturday Feb.14th, you have a chance to come out and celebrate the music that CFOX didn’t want you to know about! It’s going to be a night for everybody who actually love rock n’ roll!
The new VAMPIRE BATS video in support of their debut “Cemetery EP” is out on youtube! The song “Baby Libertine” features a guest appearance by Jordy Birch, the former lead singer for alt-rock band PURE who had a string of underground hits in the 90’s (Anna Is A Speed Freak, Blast, Spiritual Pollution). In the video, made by director Stefan Sigerson and Flash Action films, the band have recreated shot for shot scenes from Edie Sedgwick’s iconic Warhol era films. The Vampire Bats themselves perform in a “silver factory” influenced set and the Andy Warhol atmosphere is further evoked in the later warehouse party scenes. All this was filmed at the bands infamous “Vampire Bat Cave” studios in Vancouver which used to be an illegal punk rock party spot called the “peanut gallery”. Julia Mauro (Aka Ava Lure) a local actress and burlesque performer, steps gracefully into the role of the troubled Warhol Superstar. Some of the underground films recreated include; The Kitchen, Beauty No. 2, Poor Little Rich Girl as well as the original screen test that Warhol made all his superstars undergo. The narrative of the video fell into place as a rise and fall story, and unless the viewer is familiar with the work of Sedgwick, Warhol and the 60’s factory, the video will be seen simply as that. All the references are stylistic and allude to her work without any explanation. The song “Baby Libertine” itself draws heavily from the Velvet Underground, and is a unabashed tribute to Lou Reed who was a major influence on the band and this track walks a strange line between indie pop and classic rock.
Our original storyboard! The video was shot extremely quickly going from concept to the edit room in two weeks.
Video features Julia Mauro with Justin Somjen, Cheryl Lee Holliday, Vanessa Turner, Viktor Kuhn, Isabelle Dunlop, Mark Henning and Robert Edmonds.
Justin Somjen and Julia recreate “The Kitchen”.
Vampire Bats lead singer, Marc.
Julia in the Vampire Bat Cave.
Vampire Bat Cave party scene.
Cheryl Lee Holliday.
Vanessa Turner of Petroleum By-Product.
Mark Henning of Combine The Victorious.
Viktor Kuhn, Vanessa and Cheryl.
Co-Director, Marc Godfrey.
Julia Mauro does the Warhol Screen test.
Jordy Birch, Thorsten Abel, Marc and Pete Bourne.
In the Silver room, Jordy, Thorsten, Marc and Chris Tait.
SECRET AGENT RECORDS MAGAZINE 
