Private School

Websites:  https://supremeecho.bandcamp.com/album/private-school
Origin: Vancouver, British Columbia, 🇨🇦
Biography:

Private School were a first-wave Vancouver punk band whose identity formed at the intersection of art school culture, downtown street energy, and a scene that was still inventing itself in real time. The group emerged in 1978 from loose Friday-night jams at the Vancouver School of Art’s painting department in Gastown, where musicians, students, and future scene-makers collided amid film projections, improvised noise, and a general sense that anything was possible. What began as chaotic after-hours sessions quickly hardened into a band once Ron Nelson decided to replace the dissolving jams with something more focused and intentional.

From the outset, Private School stood apart. Their early performances—often staged right inside the art school studios—combined punk urgency with unexpected textures: violin, electric piano, and eventually saxophone. Visually, they rejected the standard punk uniform. Instead of sleeveless denim and buzz cuts, they appeared in white shirts with upturned collars and sunglasses, projecting a cool, self-aware aesthetic that felt closer to art-rock than street brawl. It was a look—and a sound—that made people stop and reassess what “punk” could be in Vancouver.

Personnel shifted quickly, as was typical of the era. Early bassist Martin Noetzli returned to Switzerland when his student visa expired, while keyboardist Reed Eurich departed after a chaotic Canada Day show at Stanley Park. The band’s defining shape coalesced once saxophonist Jaime Clay was finally persuaded to join, transforming Private School into something genuinely singular on the local circuit. With Nelson on vocals and guitar, Dave Gregg’s fiercely committed guitar work, Maddy Schenkel’s glissando-rich violin, Tony Faulk’s bass, and Walter Makaroff’s exuberant drumming, the group locked into a sound that could veer from raw punk to angular, atmospheric passages within a single song.

Private School became fixtures at the Windmill on Granville Street, playing the deadest nights of the week—Mondays and Tuesdays—and slowly building a devoted following. Bills were fluid: bands opened for each other on alternating nights, the Dishrags and D.O.A. passed through regularly, and guests were often folded into the show. Poet bill bissett read over the band’s backing one night; Generators vocalist Randy Panhorst joined them onstage on others. Nelson, always thinking visually, even arranged for Polaroids to be taken during performances and thrown into the crowd mid-set. The shows confused some punks, alienated others, and converted just enough to make the band feel essential rather than marginal.

Their guerrilla self-promotion became legend. Posters reading only “Private School Is Coming”—no venue, no date—appeared across downtown, reinforcing the idea that the band was less an act than an approaching event. That same confidence carried into their recording debut, the four-song 7-inch EP Lost in Action, cut in 1979 at Pinned Studios. Funded largely through Dave Gregg’s inheritance, the sessions captured the band at full strength and preserved their most distinctive moments on tape.

“Science Fiction” (listed as “Sci-Fi” on the original EP) became the group’s most ambitious studio creation. Clay, frustrated by how the song collapsed into brute force live, used tape delay and overdubbed saxophone lines to create a layered, space-age dialogue between two horns. Recording the track in a bedroom-turned-isolation booth filled with glow-in-the-dark star maps and model spacecraft only reinforced the sense that the song belonged to another atmosphere entirely. The result was punk filtered through science fiction, late-night television, and experimental studio play—an approach virtually unheard of in the local scene at the time. Elsewhere on the EP, Faulk’s “Fuck You” and “I Wanna Know” delivered blunt, personal statements, while Nelson’s “Money, Guns and Power” took aim at corporations, authority, and the forces flattening music and society.

The band’s most visible moment came when Private School opened for The Police at the Commodore Ballroom during the British trio’s first North American tour. The night was pure Vancouver chaos: a last-minute soundcheck, Stewart Copeland singling out Clay’s newer song “It’s a Religion” for praise, a broken drum pedal mid-set, and Subhumans drummer Dim sprinting onto Granville Street in search of a replacement while the audience waited. The set was shortened, but the impression lingered—Private School belonged on that stage, even if circumstances conspired against them.

By late 1979, the cracks were showing. Clay wanted more dynamics and space; Gregg was increasingly drawn toward the harder, buzzsaw aggression that would soon place him in D.O.A.; Makaroff departed by August; and despite capable fill-in drummers, the band’s momentum ebbed. Once the Lost in Action EP finally appeared, Private School were effectively finished. Nelson went on to later projects including the Singing Cowboys, Magic Dragon, and Courage of Lassie; Gregg became a full member of D.O.A.; Clay formed Warsaw; and the others drifted away from the scene.

Private School’s recorded legacy is brief but outsized. Lost in Action remains one of the most distinctive documents of early Vancouver punk—a record that bridged raw energy with art-school experimentation, folding violin and saxophone into a genre that supposedly had no room for either. Later appearances on compilation releases and the eventual remastering of the original tapes reaffirmed what those Windmill crowds already knew: for a short, intense moment, Private School weren’t just part of the scene—they helped define its possibilities.
-Robert Williston

Private School – early formation (1978)
Ron Nelson: vocals, guitar
Dave Gregg: guitar
Martin Noetzli: bass
Maddy Schenkel: violin
Reed Eurich: electric piano

Private School – core / Lost in Action lineup (1979)
Ron Nelson: vocals, guitar
Dave Gregg: guitar
Maddy Schenkel: violin, vocals
Jaime Clay: saxophone
Tony Faulk: bass
Walter Makaroff: drums

Private School – later / transitional drummers (1979)
Ian Tilles: drums
Andy Graffit: drums
Robert Bruce: drums