Vampire Beach Babes

The Vampire Beach Babes were one of Toronto’s great oddball underground bands of the early 2000s, a group that built an entire haunted beach-party universe out of surf rock, goth, glam, garage, psychobilly, dark humour, monster-movie kitsch, and theatrical pop. They described themselves as pioneers of “Gothic Surf,” and for once the invented genre label actually fit. Their sound suggested The Ventures dragged into a goth club, The Cramps sent to a beach blanket party, or Bauhaus suddenly deciding that a little sunshine might be tolerable after all.

The band formed in Toronto in 1997 around Baron Marcus and founding guitarist Ricky Las Vegas, with Bunny joining shortly afterward and becoming one of the group’s defining original members. Over the years the lineup shifted often, with the Vampire Beach Babes sometimes appearing as a compact unit and at other times expanding into a larger cast of players, singers, and characters. Bunny remained a key figure in the band’s mythology and music, contributing percussion, vocals, rhythm guitar, and later becoming increasingly involved in the vocal and compositional side of the project. Other members and contributors across the band’s history included Eris, Heather, Anita Cocktail, Velvet Babe, Buster Babe, Devil Man, Siren, and others who moved through the group’s strange orbit.

From the start, the Vampire Beach Babes were not simply a band with a gimmick. They were a band with a world. Baron Marcus framed the group around opposites: “Vampire” as the inward, mystical, shadowy side, and “Beach Babes” as the outward, playful, pop-cultural side. That tension became the band’s identity. The music could be funny, campy, and ridiculous, but it also had real hooks, real atmosphere, and a clear understanding of the traditions it was twisting. Surf guitar, goth drama, rockabilly swagger, electronic programming, horror-show humour, and club-scene theatricality all became part of the same blood-spattered beach towel.

Their debut release, Reckless Summer, arrived in 2000 and introduced the band’s early formula in full. Recorded at Vanderock Studios in Toronto, produced by Anthony Vanderburgh and the Vampire Beach Babes, and mastered by Steve Benford at Phase One Studios, the seven-song disc included “Creepy Baby Man,” “Run Danger Boy, Run,” “Gothic Surf-a-rama,” “Gothmobile,” “Tomb Mau Mau,” “Horseshoes (Up My Ass),” and “Tomb Mau Mau (Two Fisted Party Mix).” All songs were credited to R. Chappelle, M. MacDonald, and A. Vanderburgh. The record’s look and sound captured the VBB idea perfectly: hot-rod imagery, vampire theatrics, camp humour, and a surf-punk attack dark enough for the goth kids but bright enough to dance to.

“Gothic Surf-a-rama” became one of the band’s signature early tracks and was included on Gothic Sanctuary, a gothic music compilation issued by Attic Records. The Vampire Beach Babes’ own early promotional language leaned into the absurdity, calling the band one part Ventures, two parts Bauhaus, with a touch of The Addams Family, The Munsters, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was a useful description. Their music sat somewhere between a haunted drive-in, a fetish fashion show, a midnight surf party, and an old horror-comedy television broadcast.

The group’s early Toronto presence grew quickly. They became part of a lively crossover circuit that touched goth clubs, punk rooms, horror events, surf nights, fetish-themed art and fashion events, and alternative music festivals. Their December 1, 2000 performance at The Opera House in Toronto was later cited in band materials as being voted second-best performance of the year by the Gothic online community Dark Entries, behind VNV Nation and tied with Nine Inch Nails. By New Year’s 2001, they were performing for a large crowd at The Big Bop in Toronto, and by the following year they had appeared at events such as Fetish Masquerade and an RCA Records showcase at CBGB’s Gallery in New York City.

Their 2002 EP Attack of the Killer Bikinis pushed the concept even further. The four-song release featured “Attack of the Killer Bikinis,” “Hawaii Shirt From Hell,” “Dark Kind of Ecstasy,” and “Surfing Swamp Monster From the Planet Zon.” The credited lineup on the release included Buster Babe on bass, Velvet Babe on keyboards, Horny Babe (Baron Marcus) on lead vocals, Bunny Babe on percussion and vocals, and Devil Man on lead guitar. Produced by Anthony Vanderburgh and the Vampire Beach Babes, and recorded and mastered at Vanderock Studios and in Baron Marcus’ boudoir, the EP was brighter, sharper, and more cartoonishly dangerous than its predecessor.

Exclaim! writer Coreen Wolanski captured the EP’s appeal in a November 2002 review, describing it as a “curious marriage of goth, surf-punk, rockabilly, leather, PVC and sunscreen.” That was exactly the point. The Vampire Beach Babes were funny, but not disposable. They could write catchy riffs, they understood the swing and motion of surf music, and they knew how to make theatrical absurdity feel like a proper rock and roll event. The EP also reinforced their ties to horror and cult-film culture, thanking Lloyd Kaufman and the crew at Troma, Rue Morgue Magazine, and many figures from Toronto and New York’s underground scenes.

The Troma connection was especially fitting. Lloyd Kaufman, the cult-film figure behind Troma Entertainment, selected the Vampire Beach Babes to write the theme song for Tales From The Crapper, a project that suited the band’s gleeful horror-trash humour. Around the same period, television crews from BRAVO and The New Music documented the group at Toronto’s Velvet Underground, and the band was also featured on CityTV and MuchMusic programming connected to goth culture. For a group this strange, the Vampire Beach Babes proved surprisingly media-friendly: they were vivid, quotable, visually memorable, and impossible to mistake for anyone else.

In 2004, the band released Beach Blanket Bedlam through Divine Industries. The album, issued as Divine Industries DIK4642, gave the Vampire Beach Babes their most substantial statement to date. Produced and engineered by Kurtys Kidd, mixed by Vezi Tayyeb, and mastered by Andy Krehm at Silverbirch Productions, the album was recorded at Devilman’s Lair, Vanderock Studios, Kensington Sound, and Baron Marcus’ Boudoir, with mixing at Kensington Sound in Toronto. Its thirteen tracks included “Hot Foot,” “Broken,” “Bad Boys Bad Girls,” “Johnny Don’t Race,” “Stars In Your Eyes,” “Sandflea,” “Sunshine On Me,” “Waves,” “Devilman,” “Spank That Thing,” “Droppin’ Da Curl,” “When You Cry,” and “Slippin’ Away.”

Beach Blanket Bedlam showed the band expanding beyond the first shock of the joke. The traditional surf ingredients were still there — twanging guitar, cars, beaches, bad behaviour, and catchy hooks — but the sound had become fuller and more polished. Exclaim! described the album as the band returning with “more attitude, playful silliness and naughty seaside fun,” noting how the record used surf music’s traditional sounds and then filtered them through the group’s vocal and lyrical mischief. It was still camp, but it was increasingly confident camp, made by a band that knew exactly what it was doing.

The Vampire Beach Babes also kept growing beyond Canada. They toured the United States, played Canadian Music Week and NXNE, and built a surprisingly international online following at a time when independent bands were just beginning to understand what the web could do. Their own site regularly reported heavy traffic from outside Canada, with fans in the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Poland, France, and the United States. The band treated the internet not just as promotion, but as part of the show, posting updates, rough mixes, video clips, fake mythology, and in-world storytelling around the VBB universe.

By 2005 and 2006, the band’s sound was becoming heavier and darker. Baron Marcus described the newer material as rediscovering the “vampire” side of the group, with inspiration from industrial darkwave, KMFDM, VNV Nation, The Birthday Massacre, and other harder-edged electronic and gothic influences. The music was still playful, but the balance was shifting from surf camp toward a broader “gothic-pop” and glam-noir identity. Baron Marcus often spoke of the band in terms of colliding polarities: humour and mysticism, surf hooks and electronic programming, silly lyrics and deeper historical or esoteric references.

That evolution led to one of the band’s biggest international moments. In October 2006, the Vampire Beach Babes travelled to the United Kingdom for shows in Blackpool, Plymouth, and Whitby, including a performance at Whitby Gothic Weekend opening for The Damned. For a Toronto band that had begun by fusing surf rock with vampire kitsch, landing on a major UK goth festival stage was a natural but still remarkable destination. Around the same period, the band was also being positioned in international alternative press as a group to watch.

The mid-to-late 2000s saw the Vampire Beach Babes continue moving into darker, more theatrical territory. Their website updates from the period describe work on Death and the Dancefloor and the long-developing Freak Parade, with Baron Marcus, Bunny, Siren, Sunshine, and others shaping new material through rehearsal-room experiments, studio sessions, and live performances. The title track “Freak Parade” dated back to a 2005 jam and became central to the band’s later mythology. Songs such as “Only In Darkness” also connected the group to television placement, with VBB music appearing in the series The Best Years.

-Robert Williston

Lineup:

Bunny: percussion, vocals, rhythm guitar
Eris: guitar, track programming
Baron Marcus: lead vocals, rhythm guitar, track programming
Heather: bass, guitar
Anita Cocktail: bass