November 10th 1990, Skinny Puppy at The Concert Hall

 

In many ways Skinny Puppy were a revelation for me, an introduction to a new world of sound and the way that music could be made. Where a lot of the music being released in the mid- to late-eighties followed typical song structures and conventional instrumentation, Skinny Puppy pushed the boundaries of those forms, applying new ideas and approaches that spoke to a new ideal. They had a much more expansive sense of how sounds and samples could be used in their work, and they actively challenged the way people thought about music. There's no question in my mind that Skinny Puppy were different from any of the other bands that I was listening to at the time.

Yet even despite that difference in sound, they existed within an interesting era when Canadian content rules meant that radio stations were required to play a certain amount of Canadian music, and since Skinny Puppy were from Vancouver that meant they got a fair bit of radio play which contributed to a familiarity and popularity that may not have been as possible elsewhere or elsewhen. I'm not saying that they were at the top of the charts hanging around with Madonna and New Kids on the Block, but they were getting regular play and building a solid audience that were looking for something new.

The size of that audience meant that Skinny Puppy were able to play some pretty decent sized shows, including a pair of gigs at the Concert Hall in Toronto in 1990. I went to see them on the November 10th show with my friend Dave, and from our view on the right side of the balcony it was unlike any other show I had been to up to that point in my life. An eclectic and increasingly disparate wave of sounds washed over the crowd like a dark flood, while Nivek Ogre alternately growled and screamed and intoned lyrics with a sinister menace. There were scratchy distorted videos that played behind the band, and there was a dark tree on stage with claw-like branches.swaying and reaching out to the audience. They played Tin Omen and Worlock and I think that this was the tour where they debuted the Stilt Man routine with Ogre stalking around the stage on prosthetic stilts. It was all rather overwhelming, but it was also rather brilliant, an apocalyptic blend of sound and theatre and madness unlike anything I had ever seen before...  

Skinny Puppy's mad brilliance influenced a lot of people, and in the years following I saw tons of bands trying to capture the same kind of sound and style to varying levels of success. Some of them were able to reach similar heights, and some of them not so much, but I've always appreciated those efforts, that desire to bring together ideas in new ways that challenge our notions about what music should sound like and what performance should look like. I guess that idea plays a large part in my interest in seeing live music. Performance is always moving forward, always pushing boundaries, always trying to do something new, and Skinny Puppy completely embodied that idea with their work, opening doors for countless others to follow through, and while they may not have been the first band to do so, they were among the first to make me think about performance in new and different ways, and I'll always be grateful for them opening my mind to those possibilities...