Information/Write-up
Doug Randle (1928–2013) was a Canadian composer, arranger, conductor, and songwriter whose career bridged jazz, television, advertising, and socially conscious pop. Rooted in the Canadian jazz scene of the 1950s, he built a reputation for sophisticated orchestrations and sharp wit, qualities that would define his later work.
Born in Calgary, Alberta, Randle began as a pianist and arranger, quickly establishing himself among Canada’s postwar jazz elite. His early years laid the foundation for a lifelong fascination with orchestration, harmony, and the tension between popular entertainment and serious composition. In the early 1960s he moved to England, working as an arranger for figures such as Wally Stott (later Angela Morley) and Peter Knight, contributing to BBC productions and refining the polished orchestral pop sound that would later surface in his own recordings.
Randle returned to Toronto in 1966, where he became a staff composer and arranger at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In this role he contributed to CBC’s LM transcription series, which spotlighted Canadian singers and ensembles for broadcast use. He arranged and conducted Elan Stuart & Doug Crosley, Vocalists (LM 30, 1966), a jazz-pop vocal showcase, and Tommy Common, Vocalist (LM 10, 1967), a split LP shared with the Brian Browne Trio. These albums, distributed mainly to radio stations, capture Randle in his prime as an arranger, blending jazz sensibilities with light entertainment in the CBC house style.
In 1968 he collaborated with Ron Solloway on Lady Emma, an original musical commissioned by CBC’s Light Entertainment Department for television broadcast. With Randle providing music, lyrics, direction, and arrangements, and Solloway writing the book, the show dramatized the scandalous 18th-century affair between Lady Emma Hamilton and Lord Nelson. Recorded at Hallmark Studios in Toronto with Cleone Duncan, Leo Leyden, Stevie Wise, and Ed Evanko, Lady Emma showed Randle’s flair for theatrical composition and conceptual work.
By 1970 Randle was ready to undertake his most ambitious project. Recorded at the CBC with producer Dave Bird and a band drawn from Toronto’s finest session players (Moe Koffman, Rob McConnell, Guido Basso, Peter Appleyard), Songs for the New Industrial State was issued in 1971 in a limited pressing of 500 copies on the short-lived Kanata label. Sung by Tommy Ambrose and Laurie Bower, the album merged sunshine pop, baroque orchestration, and biting social commentary. Randle’s lyrics dissected corporate greed, advertising phoniness, environmental decay, and the unease of middle age with startling candor, turning the language of jingles and commercial persuasion inside out. Songs such as Colored Plastics and Vive La Company lampooned consumer culture, while Nicolston Dam and One Way Swimming meditated on nature and escape. The album closed on a rare note of optimism with Life Will Be Worth Living After All.
Although Songs for the New Industrial State quickly disappeared due to poor distribution, its uniqueness was undeniable. Rediscovered decades later, it was reissued by Light in the Attic Records in 2009 and hailed internationally as a lost Canadian classic. Critics compared it to the conceptual pop of David Axelrod and the vocal harmonies of The Free Design, noting both its relevance and its eccentric originality. Pitchfork praised the record as “a work of singular vision that earns its second airing through Randle’s inventive sense of arrangement and to-the-point honesty.”
Randle continued working as an arranger and composer into his later years, and shortly before his death he completed a second full-length project, The Day Fats Waller Died. Featuring his daughter Joanne Randle on vocals and musical direction by Vancouver pianist Ross Taggart, the record assembled an ensemble including Campbell Ryga, Brad Turner, Sharon Minemoto, Ken Lister, and Craig Scott. Intended for release in 2013–14, the project reflected Randle’s enduring commitment to writing songs that balanced wit, pathos, and finely crafted arrangements.
Doug Randle passed away in 2013, leaving behind a career that spanned jazz clubs, children’s television, jingles, musicals, and one brilliant, unexpected pop masterpiece. From the CBC transcription records of the 1960s to the cult rediscovery of Songs for the New Industrial State, his work is now recognized for its honesty, sophistication, and enduring relevance.
-Robert Williston
All Music composed by Doug Randle and published by Eskimo Music
Produced by Dave Bird and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in September 1970
Engineered by Larry Morey and Ian Jacobson
Cover Photo by Gene Lees
Liner notes:
What is this album all about? It’s about the revolt of the forty-year-old.
In the last decade, we have been subject to such a sandsstorm of propaganda about the beauty and freshness and originality and honesty of the young (in a campaign carried out largely by megacorporations anxious to sell them something, and nothing, and even less than that), mere moves mechanicised like flattery that few have stopped to see them getting sick of the word “youth”.
It apparently has never occurred to the boys of the Beatle ages that what canful for adults, fitted up with cliches and directives, injustice and inhumanity of the Kafka world we live in. Perhaps we adults find what’s marred is our reasoning and earnest work whereas the kids start with nothing and what they discover they start anew. We adults know in detail. When they are rebellious, we can afford to wink because we also know they are right. Our life annoyance is thus Billions Doug Randle?
Who is Doug Randle? One of the most interesting composers to come to Canada in years, and one of the most talented.
Among the “new” songwriters, it is customary for his peers to turn out tune while pulking in his cheeseburgers. Doug Randle has always been a serious and even solemn boy. Some people may not have taken him seriously because he has been associated with a lot of things that are called commercial.
He wrote and arranged, for example, much of the music that made Bob Homme’s “Friendly Giant” show one of the longest-running children’s series in the world. He wrote jingles in a free-associative style without cynicism, that had a fresh style without compromise.
And he wrote orchestrations that are a joy to envy. He’s amazing. There are those who think that this is a somewhat dark album. I think it’s a life in a sardonic gallacity of word and yet drippings of an beautiful piece of work. It is full of compassion, and above all honesty.
Many things in the past, Doug’s influences. A boy from Calgary’s solidly English home from a family that is “well set in Calgary’s respect,” he never was a part of the rebellion in his going music from the element of rebellion in the going music from his time. The album marks a curious rebellion in general but it is set forth in some general way that is ultimately an assessment of the situation as they interpreted the situation corporately.
Doug brought a tremendous background to writing. After a stretch in music in Vancouver, he went to England, where he worked as an arranger for Wally Stott, Peter Knight, and BBC-TV. He returned to Canada in 1966, settling in Toronto, where he has since been making arrangements for singers and jingles and writing. Now: “the important thing is to be known outside this market. Not as a jingle writer. Not as a kid composer. But as a writer of adult music that has wit and relevance, and period to it that will make you more desirable. You are older, your will again discover that with music that fits your ambitions and work. He has skill, as discovered but laid wasted when his skills acquired into the world of jingles and corporate records and arrangements.”
He has the skill to stand back and write, as he proves in this record, “a full grown man’s album”.
The lyrics are bitter sometimes but the wit always has the relevances we’ve. You cannot resist the pleasures of Ella, or the loneliness of One Way Swimming. Doug has written a grown man’s album, about people and love, and politics, and life, and nothing.
Listen, but don’t believe every word. That’s the point about adults.
Doug and his wife actually saw what is described in the song: a little girl, resplendent and hill-locked, child of her mother’s second marriage, named her doll after him and solemnly buried it in the garden. That song, Isn’t It A Pity, should be a wistful little girl’s song.
Isn’t It A Pity seems at first to be a wistful song of the little girl. And it is. But it is much more than that. It is the beginning of an album that works beautiful process of growing into same. The awareness of growing and living.
You’ll find in Nicolston Dam the wistfulness, but later in your listening frightening Vive La Company. Suddenly frightening as a big corporation. First he has voted for the corporation but then had to vote against the corporation. But as he finds his life’s own.
It’s an album of children and a song of pathos, by One Way Swimming, that tells it all.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Doug is his brilliant mind, his sense of wit, his sense of humour, his love of irony, his sense of sardonic tragedy, but above all, his sense of humanity.
Doug Randle is an adult genius.
British Columbia
B.C.'s Imogen Moon reimagines her late grandfather's cult 1971 album with elements of jazz and soul
Doug Randle's psychedelic pop album becomes something new with Imogen Moon's 'When They Start Rebelling'
Courtney Dickson · CBC News · Posted: Sep 03, 2023 9:00 AM MDT | Last Updated: September 3, 2023
A girl with big crimped hair poses in front of a red background
Imogen Moon, 22, is the granddaughter of the late Canadian composer Doug Randle. (Submitted)
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Imogen Moon remembers her grandfather as someone who was active, swimming a mile a day and walking as much as he could.
"He was a glowing radiant ball of energy," she told North by Northwest host Margaret Gallagher.
Moon also remembers him constantly playing music.
Her grandfather was the late Canadian composer Doug Randle, whose love of writing music and playing jazz landed him a job as an in-house composer with CBC in the 1960s.
In 1971, Randle released the album Songs For The New Industrial State, which mixed pop with lyrics that take on heavy topics like environmental activism and the perils of corporate life.
The album reached a new audience when it was reissued by Light in the Attic Records in 2009. Pitchfork called the re-release "a work of singular vision that earns its second airing through Randle's inventive sense of arrangement and to-the-point honesty."
A purple sky over a city
Doug Randle's 'Songs For The Industrial State' was released in 1971 and reissued by Light in the Attic Records in 2009. (Submitted)
Moon grew up listening to Songs For The New Industrial State and found comfort in it following her grandfather's passing in 2013 when she was just 12 years old.
Now she and her mother, Joanne Randle, worked to recreate his work with their own flair. The result was When They Start Rebelling, an EP that was released earlier this summer.
Legendary B.C. jazz musician Phil Nimmons turns 100
Reimagining
Moon, who lives on Galiano Island, emphasizes that her grandfather was a jazz musician through and through, but Songs For The New Industrial State was a psychedelic pop album.
"That's how he wanted to get the message across," Moon said.
When They Start Rebelling features elements of Randle's original love — jazz — as well as soul.
At 22, Moon is relatively new to singing. She had spent many years in dance before she asked her family to help her make an EP as a high school graduation gift.
And she did make that EP, titled The Child Cyrus, when she was just 18 years old.
Then, she said, she and her mother had the same idea to recreate Doug Randle's work.
"She's doing the background vocals on the album, which was incredible, and you'll hear them if you listen for them.," Moon said. "We have very similar voices."
Liner notes
Moon said the new album title was taken from the liner notes of her grandfather's album.
"Songs for the New Industrial State is a gorgeous title and has so much meaning behind it," she said.
"But it is very long. We were trying to think of something that would not make this album feel like it was a cover album."
When she found the line "when they start rebelling," she knew that was the title of her collection.
A woman stands in a stream as fish jump around her
Imogen Moon's latest EP 'When They Start Rebelling' is available now. (Cellar Live)
"There's always a rebellion and it's happening in so many different ways currently. It also implies that it hasn't happened enough and that we have to keep working towards a new goal or maybe just approach our goal in a different way."
Moon says she hopes she's done the album justice.
"It's very emotional. I've had so many dreams where he comes to me in my dreams and he says, 'I'm proud of what you've done.'"
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