Old Hollywood (picture sleeve)

The cover of Drama’s only album is a photograph Don Stagg took from the roof of his apartment building overlooking Toronto: a teenager, early in the morning, sniffing glue. Inside is a stark electronic record Stagg and Eric Simpson made on a four-track tape machine at a time when nearly everyone around them was playing in rock or pop bands.

The two had been playing together for several years. As Majik they put out a private single in 1977, ‘Five Years’ backed with ‘Hermits Tales’, 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 recorded Under the Burning Sun at Pegasus Studios on May 8, 1978, a dark, heavy progressive LP pressed in an edition of 200.

Later that year, in Mississauga, they started Drama. Simpson sang and played bass and guitar, and Stagg played keyboards, now over a drum machine. Almost every Saturday they recorded one song on a TEAC four-track, a couple of takes with very little overdubbing, shaped by whatever was playing on the radio that week.

Those Saturdays became Loneliness, released on Psycho Records in 1979 and pressed by World Records. Simpson and Stagg wrote and arranged every original on it. The vocal songs fill side one, opening with ‘As I Breathe on the T.T.C.’, an ode to the Toronto Transit Commission with words by Phil Buckley, and running through ‘Anna King’, ‘Space Age Punks’, ‘God Is a Machine’, ‘Feable’ and ‘Got to Get Off the Earth’. Side two is instrumental. It opens with ‘Electronic Pink Panther’, their take on Henry Mancini, then moves through ‘Human Question’, ‘Traffic’, ‘Loneliness’, ‘Jungle Chant’ and ‘Hidden Melodies’. Seance Centre later described the pair as having “traded in their velvet and chord charts for thin ties and a cheap drum-machine,” and placed the record somewhere between krautrock and new wave. By the band’s account, five hundred copies were pressed and about two hundred ended up in the garbage as they moved from apartment to apartment, leaving roughly three hundred.

Before 1979 was out, Drama released a four-song 7-inch EP, Old Hollywood, and this time they were a band. Simpson wrote, arranged and produced ‘This Time’, ‘Come On Over’, ‘Old Hollywood’ and ‘A Kiss Without Lust’, singing and playing bass, with Stagg on keyboards, Kevin Buss on guitar and Dave Norris, their drummer from VIIth Temple, back behind the kit.

The partnership outlasted Drama. Simpson carried the electronics into Glamorcult, recording a new version of ‘Anna King’ for the Tokyo Streets 12-inch in 1983. Around 1996, by Simpson’s account, he and Stagg came back together as Within Gothic Towers, and around 2012 they revisited ‘Under the Burning Sun’ from the VIIth Temple LP on a CD released as 7th Temple. Stagg went on to found the progressive rock band Dream Aria in the mid-2000s.

The surviving copies of Loneliness became sought after by collectors of early electronic and minimal wave records, and sealed copies still turn up. On December 7, 2018, Dark Entries gave the album its first reissue, remastered for vinyl by George Horn at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley and expanded to a double LP with the four Old Hollywood songs and nine previously unreleased tracks and demos, including ‘You Are the Special One’, ‘Nuclear Waste’ and an alternate version of ‘Come On Over’. It came in Stagg’s rooftop photograph, with an insert of photos and liner notes by the band.

-Robert Williston