Artist / Band

Glamorcult

Origin Toronto, Ontario, 🇨🇦

Websites

Share This Page

Biography

Eric Simpson and keyboardist Don Stagg started out together in Majik, whose private single ‘Five Years’ backed with ‘Hermits Tales’ came out in 1977, arranged and produced by the two of them. As VIIth Temple, with Mike Fisher on bass and Dave Norris on drums, they recorded the hard progressive LP Under the Burning Sun at Pegasus Studios on May 8, 1978, and pressed 200 copies. That same year Simpson and Stagg formed Drama in Mississauga. Almost every Saturday they recorded a song on a TEAC four-track, making electronic music while everyone around them played rock or pop, and in 1979 they released the album Loneliness on Psycho Records in a pressing of 500, followed by the Old Hollywood 7-inch. Simpson formed Glamorcult in the early 1980s as the next step, with the first recordings coming about a year after the Drama sessions. Simpson built the project around rhythm and beat, with instrumental pieces alongside the songs, and he saw the name as the fusion of music and fashion: pop, like fashion, keeps mixing old glamour with the new to define the culture of its moment. Costume, set design, photography and choreography were all part of the idea, and musicians joined at different times so the project could perform live.

Three records came out in 1983 and 1984. Simpson produced and recorded the Tokyo Streets 12-inch EP for Freedom Records, including a new version of ‘Anna King’, a song first recorded with Drama. He then released two four-song 7-inch EPs on Table Thirty Records: Forever Strangers in 1983 and Tropical Romance in 1984, the second closing with ‘Would It Be Over’ and featuring Robin Girard alongside Simpson. Both Table Thirty records credit their production to Tanhauser Gate and their publishing to Tears In The Rain Music, names taken from Roy Batty’s closing speech in Blade Runner. The sound was drum machine, keyboards and voice, with melodic, romantic songs set in spare electronics.

‘Tokyo Streets’ stayed on CFNY-FM playlists in Toronto for years, and its EP version appeared on the station’s Hardest Hits Collection Volume Three in 1993. Simpson was nominated for Most Promising Male Vocal at CFNY’s 1984 U-Know Awards, and Glamorcult for Most Promising New Group the following year. The band was also featured on CityTV’s The New Music in a segment hosted by Daniel Richler.

A flood later destroyed the master tapes for Forever Strangers and for ‘A Dream Girl to Me’ and ‘Anna King’ from the Tokyo Streets EP, leaving the original vinyl as the only source for those recordings. In the late 1990s Simpson had digital masters made from the tapes that survived. They became Early Glamor, a small-run CD of his 1980 to 1982 recordings, and Moments of Glamor, which gathers work from 1984 to 1994 and was reissued around 2002.

Simpson never stopped recording as Glamorcult. Around 1996 he reunited with Don Stagg for Within Gothic Towers. Shadows From the Past was recorded between 1996 and 1999, and The Stone Sessions between 2002 and 2005, released around 2006. Around 2012 a 7th Temple CD revisited ‘Under the Burning Sun’ from the original VIIth Temple LP. Dark Entries reissued Drama’s Loneliness on vinyl in a 2018 remaster, expanded with the Old Hollywood songs and unreleased tracks. A Price to Paris followed in 2016, then Music for Film in 2017, a set of instrumentals recorded between 1983 and 1992, and Atlantis Under the Sea in 2020, with more released digitally.

In July 2020 Simpson wrote to the Museum of Canadian Music asking why so little of his work was on the site, and he followed up with a package of CDs, recordings and notes on each project. His catalogue has been part of the collection ever since.

-Robert Williston

Discography
Tokyo Streets EP 12" 1983
Forever Strangers 7" EP 1983
Would It Be Over 7” EP 1984
Moments Of Glamor - 1984 to 1994 (1997) CD REISSUED IN 2002
Early Glamor - 1980 to 1982 CD 1997
The Hardest Hits Collection Volume 3 - “Tokyo Streets - EP Version” -1993
Shadows From The Past CD 1999
The Stone Sessions CD 2006
A Price To Paris CD 2016
Music For Film CD 2017
Atlantis Under The Sea CD 2020