Heavy Metalloid Music From a Mall Roof: The Simply Saucer Tapes That Waited Fifteen Years

Hamilton, Ontario in 1973 was a steel town with no scene, no music press and no obvious reason to produce one of the most forward-facing rock records of the decade. Simply Saucer produced it anyway, and then failed to release it for fifteen years.

A band that sounded like 1977 three years early

The band formed in 1973 around guitarist and vocalist Edgar Breau, who named it in tribute to Pink Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets. It started as a loose six-piece with saxophone and occasional violin, then contracted by October 1973 into the lineup that matters: Breau, bassist Kevin Christoff, drummer Neil DeMarchant, and keyboardist John LaPlante, who performed under the name Ping Romany and whose real instruments were theremin, audio generator and analog synthesizer.

That last detail is the whole story. Most proto-punk bands of the era were working from the Stooges and the MC5. Simply Saucer were working from the Stooges, the Velvet Underground, Syd Barrett-era Floyd, krautrock and Stockhausen at the same time, and they had a member whose job was to make the record sound like it was coming apart from the inside.

Two days in a basement in Ancaster

In July 1974 the band’s manager Rick Bissell paid for studio time at Master Sound, a basement setup in the Ancaster home of two brothers named Bob and Daniel Lanois. Six songs came out of those sessions.

Breau’s production brief was not a conversation. He handed the Lanois brothers copies of the Stooges’ Fun House and the Velvets’ White Light/White Heat and told them that was the target. What came back was cut essentially live off the floor, with Romany’s electronics bleeding through everything.

The historical footnote is bigger than the session itself. Daniel Lanois went on to become one of the most influential record producers alive, and the Canadian music history Have Not Been the Same credits the problem of capturing Simply Saucer’s unconventional sonics as one of the early catalysts for the atmospheric production style he later became known for. The band nobody heard was, in a real sense, the training exercise.

The mall roof, the vocal mic and a two-track Tandberg

On 28 June 1975, Simply Saucer played on the roof of the Lloyd D. Jackson Square shopping mall in downtown Hamilton, to whoever happened to be walking below. Breau introduced the band as playing “heavy metalloid music.”

Part of that set was captured on a two-track Tandberg machine, running off Breau’s vocal microphone. No multitrack, no isolation, no second take. Three songs from that afternoon survived, including the ten-minute “Illegal Bodies,” and they became side two of the eventual album. Recorded under conditions that should have produced an unusable artifact, they are arguably stronger than the studio side.

Fifteen years in a box

Nothing was released. Lineup changes started in 1976 as Romany and DeMarchant left, and by 1977 Steve “Sparky” Park of Teenage Head had joined on second guitar, pushing the band toward a more conventional sound. The only record Simply Saucer put out while they existed was a 1978 single, “She’s a Dog” backed with “I Can Change My Mind,” on Gary Pig Gold’s Pig label. The band broke up in July 1979.

The 1974 basement tapes and the 1975 rooftop tape finally surfaced in 1989 on the tiny Mole Sound label as Cyborgs Revisited, ten years after the group had ceased to exist. A significant share of the credit belongs to Chris Stigliano of the fanzine Black To Comm, who was putting Simply Saucer on covers before there was an album to review.

The canon caught up

Once the record existed, it moved fast. Cyborgs Revisited placed 48th in Chart magazine’s 1996 reader poll of the greatest Canadian albums and 36th in Bob Mersereau’s 2007 book The Top 100 Canadian Albums. Julian Cope made it his album of the month on Head Heritage in May 2001. Sonic Youth dedicated a Hamilton show to the band. Cargo reissued it in 1991, and Sonic Unyon expanded it in 2003 with the 1978 single and later demos attached.

The uncomfortable part of the story is not that Simply Saucer were ahead of their time. Plenty of bands were. It is that being ahead of your time is worth nothing without a document, and the only reason anyone can hear this one is that a manager paid for two days in a basement and someone pointed a home tape deck at a mall roof. Everything else the band did went unrecorded, and it is gone.