Eric Simpson and Don Stagg have been making records together since 1977. That year, as Majik, they released a private single, ‘Five Years’ backed with ‘Hermits Tales’, arranged and produced by the two of them, with Stagg on keyboards and Simpson on vocals and guitar. With Mike Fisher on bass and Dave Norris on drums they became VIIth Temple, and on May 8, 1978 they recorded Under the Burning Sun at Pegasus Studios, a hard, dark progressive LP pressed in an edition of 200 and later reissued on Radioactive.

Later in 1978 the pair formed Drama in Mississauga. Almost every Saturday they recorded a song on a TEAC four-track, a couple of takes with very little overdubbing, shaped by whatever was on the radio that day. Everyone around them was in a rock or pop band, and Drama were making electronic music. Their album Loneliness came out on Psycho Records in 1979. Five hundred copies were pressed, and about two hundred ended up in the garbage as the band moved from apartment to apartment. The Old Hollywood 7-inch followed that year. In 2018 Dark Entries remastered Loneliness for its first vinyl reissue, expanded to a double LP with the Old Hollywood songs and unreleased tracks.

Simpson carried Drama’s electronics into Glamorcult in the early 1980s. The Tokyo Streets 12-inch and the Forever Strangers and Tropical Romance 7-inch EPs came out in 1983 and 1984, ‘Tokyo Streets’ stayed on CFNY-FM playlists in Toronto for years, and Simpson has recorded as Glamorcult ever since, through Atlantis Under the Sea in 2020.

Around 1996 the two came back together as Within Gothic Towers, based in Grimsby, Ontario. Stagg handled keyboards, sounds and atmospherics, Simpson sang and played guitars and keyboards, and singers Richard Aubert and Lisa Bunga joined them. Stagg and Simpson wrote all of the material together. Around 2012 they also revisited ‘Under the Burning Sun’ on a 7th Temple CD.

Around 2005 Stagg started a new band, Dream Aria, writing the first songs on a Korg Karma keyboard. He brought in producer and drummer Garry Flint and found lead singer Ann “Aria” Burstyn online, and the lineup grew to include Jon Casselman on bass and Mark Crossley on lead guitar. Dream Aria mixed rock, goth, progressive rock, opera, ambient and world music across three albums: In the Wake (2005), Transcend (2008) and Fallen Angel (2011). Most of their listeners were in Europe and the United States, and by the band’s count they drew more than 220,000 followers on MySpace.

The Museum of Canadian Music holds much of the pair’s work, from Drama and Within Gothic Towers to Dream Aria, and Glamorcult’s catalogue has been part of the collection since 2020.
-Robert Williston