EP

Bumpers formed in Ottawa in 1979 with Bernie Maisonneuve on guitar, Mike Rouleau on bass, Michel Paquin on drums and Carl Schultz, a former Carleton student, on keyboards and electronics. Maisonneuve and Rouleau sang lead, with Schultz adding spoken, dialogue-style vocals. Three of the four wrote songs, and Schultz described the competition between them as healthy. They played their own material only.

Their sound was electronic rock with a sense of humour. Reviewers compared them to Devo, Split Enz and The Cars, and their songs looked at modern life from a cool distance, with titles such as 'Mod School' and 'State of Fright' about alienation in a crowded world. On January 26, 1980, they were on the bill at the 80's Club, the city's punk and new wave room, on its final night before it closed.

By the fall of 1980 the band had moved to Toronto. On October 17 they were back in Ottawa to open for Teenage Head at Carleton University, and the student paper called them one of Ottawa's better new wave bands, noting that a crowd there for Teenage Head took warmly to a band that sounded nothing like them. At the end of October they played Toronto's Headspace as a showcase for music business people. Early in November they spent $150 an hour recording five originals at Springfield Studio outside London, Ontario, with another eight hours of mixing still ahead. Maisonneuve remembered Schultz losing his concentration when a tractor rolled past the studio window.

When they returned to Ottawa for a week at Hooper's, November 17 to 22, Rouleau had forgotten how cold an Eastern Ontario winter could be, having got used to going out in Toronto in just a sweatshirt. New songs like 'The Beat Song' and 'African Corp' were in the set. In Toronto they were lining up opening spots, including a possible two-night stand at The Edge.

They called what they were doing "media music," and the name described the stage show as much as the songs. At La Place, the University of Ottawa restaurant, on February 28, 1981, four television sets hung over the band, glowing blue and playing 1940s film clips and early TV commercials, along with two videotapes and an experimental film the band had prepared. The reviewer found the screens so compelling that the audience kept watching them instead of the band. Rouleau moved like a robot, drawing comparisons to Gary Numan and Ric Ocasek, while Maisonneuve, in a beret and bandana, earned the nickname "Bernie Von Sternberg." Schultz admitted the show was still taking shape. The band's ambition was to become internationally famous and to be named as an influence by musicians in years to come.

Their only record came out on Mediatron Records as two 7-inch singles in a gatefold sleeve. Rouleau's 'Log 1', the longest song at 4:41, opens the first disc, MDT-001, backed with his 'Ian'. The second disc, MDT-002, pairs 'Media Music', which Rouleau wrote with Schultz, with Maisonneuve's 'I Watch You Go'. The band produced the set, and Schultz engineered it. Four songs the press singled out from their live shows stayed off the record: 'Mod School', 'State of Fright', 'The Beat Song' and 'African Corp'.

-Robert Williston