Martha and The Muffins -- Echo Beach

Daeva Trac via Wikimedia Commons

 

Welcome to another Reminiscings of Youth for this Thursday. There were times when I was frankly in a dead-end job and often reminisced during the drudgery about an old place where I used to know friends and had fun. For me, that hallowed place was the International Student Centre in Cumberland House at the University of Toronto. It's apparently now known as the Centre for International Experience. Having worked there as well as played there, a lot of the university clubs reserved rooms for activities and for a long while, the Japanese-Canadian Students' Association had an office on the third floor. 

For songwriter and member of the Toronto New Wave band Martha and The Muffins, Mark Gane when he endured his own job from Hell, his hallowed place was Sunnyside Beach along Lake Ontario in our common hometown. And from that came the idea for "Echo Beach" which was released in February 1980. I didn't know about the significance of the lyrics back then but I remember the song as one of the first ones made in Canada that I actually got hooked on when I finally discovered the joys of pop music. The source album "Metro Music" which was also released in February that year has a map of lakeside Toronto with Sunnyside Beach in there somewhere.

I'm not sure anymore but I had assumed that there were two music videos for "Echo Beach", one was of Martha and The Muffins playing on stage (which is above) and a conceptual one where the band members were strangely doing calisthenics in a park late at night somewhere (Sunnyside Beach, perhaps?). Perhaps I'm hallucinating, though. Regardless, although the band enjoyed success in Canada with a lot of their other singles, "Echo Beach" was probably the only single that had any significant fame outside of the country. It scored No. 5 on Canada's RPM and No. 37 on Billboard's Hot Disco (!) singles chart in the USA. It also went Gold in the Great White North and won a Juno for Single of the Year. Martha and The Muffins is also represented through another ROY article on "Black Stations/White Stations".

So, what was also coming out in February 1980 in the record stores in Japan?

Yoshimi Iwasaki -- Aka to Kuro（赤と黒）

Masashi Sada -- Doukeshi no Sonnet（道化師のソネット）

The Chanels -- Runaway