Kevan Staples, co-founder of the band Rough Trade. Mr. Staples died of cancer on March 23 at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital. He was 75.Courtesy of family
In 1981, the provocative Canadian rock band Rough Trade appeared on the sketch comedy series SCTV. In a segment called Pre-Teen World, the musicians were asked, “In the underground pop world, which is better, bondage or humiliation?” Singer Carole Pope quickly said humiliation. Guitarist and keyboardist Kevan Staples was of a different mind.
“Truthfully,” he ventured, joking about sadomasochism, “I prefer discipline.” In fact, Mr. Staples was the musical leader of a group known for its frontwoman’s visual raunch and lyrical audacity. If not discipline, he lent direction, in the form of funky rhythmic ideas and spikier New Wave vamps that carried Ms. Pope’s satirical wit, winks and electric erotica.
“Staples played the foil, both visually and musically,” The Globe and Mail’s Chris Dafoe wrote in 1988, reporting on a solo concert by Ms. Pope at Toronto’s Diamond Club, where Mr. Staples guested on guitar. “His loose style and dippy grin added a welcome note of irony to the proceedings and his controlled, minimal guitar style played well off Ms. Pope’s visions of excess.”
Rough Trade, the four-time Juno winners who rose to fame on the lusty lesbianism of the scandalous 1981 hit High School Confidential, had ceased to function as a band two years prior to 1988. Ms. Pope, though, still in need of counterbalance, continued to work with her long-time musical (and one-time romantic) partner.
Carole Pope and Kevan Staples, c. 1980.Supplied
“Kevan was Rough Trade’s bandleader,” said concert promoter Gary Topp. “He was quiet, laidback and always happy, but the other bandmembers really respected him. When I did their lights at the Horseshoe Tavern, I always followed Kevan, not Carole. You knew what was going to happen by watching what he was doing on stage.”
Mr. Staples, the stylish Rough Trade co-founder and co-songwriter who went on to write music for Canadian documentaries and TV series, died of cancer on March 23 at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital. He was 75.
“Kevan was an elegant man,” said Bernie Finkelstein, who released most of Rough Trade’s albums on the Canadian independent label he founded, True North Records. “If rock ‘n’ roll had a Fred Astaire in those days, it was Kevan Staples, not Bryan Ferry.”
The only son of a couturier father and an interior designer mother, Mr. Staples was sartorially inclined. In a Globe profile in 1981, Alina Gildiner wrote that the shoulder pads on his jacket were “so dominating they make his head look like an afterthought.”
'Kevan was an elegant man,' said Bernie Finkelstein, who released most of Rough Trade’s albums. 'If rock ‘n’ roll had a Fred Astaire in those days, it was Kevan Staples, not Bryan Ferry.'Courtesy of family
Rough Trade, named after a sexual slang term, released six studio albums from 1976 to 1984, including the breakout Avoid Freud in 1980. The album design featured artwork from the hip multimedia collective General Idea.
The 1981 follow-up LP, For Those Who Think Young, reached No. 9 on the Canadian sales chart, thanks in part to the single All Touch, the band’s lone hit in the United States. The name of 1982’s Shaking the Foundations was as much a mission statement as an album title.
At a time when the Canadian music industry was just finding its own legs, Rough Trade’s Ms. Pope was reaching between hers – lyrically, on the electro-beat single Crimes of Passion, and literally, on the nationally telecast, ultraconservative Juno Awards, where a bold gesture by the singer was later described by the CBC as the “crotch-grab heard ‘round the world.”
In truth, Rough Trade was mostly heard and experienced just in Canada. Though music critics adored the band for its avant-garde edge and fans appreciated the danceable music and suggestive taboo, the band was unable to land a major label record deal. Even a pair of high-profile gigs opening for David Bowie on his Serious Moonlight Tour in 1983 did not help.
“They were a sensation on all levels when they hit, but the fact of matter was that the big labels were scared of them,” Mr. Finklestein said.
Scared of them, perhaps, but not of their music. A cover of Rough Trade’s Birds of a Feather appeared on Tim Curry’s major label debut album Read My Lips in 1978, produced by Bob Ezrin. Dusty Springfield (with whom Ms. Pope had a relationship) sang the Staples-Pope compositions Soft Core and I Am Curious on Ms. Springfield’s 1982 album White Heat, released on Neil Bogart’s Casablanca label.
By the time prominent American film director William Friedkin used their song Shakedown in his 1980 Al Pacino crime thriller Cruising (about New York’s leather scene and a serial killer who preyed on gay men), Mr. Staples was already envisioning a post-pop career “writing music rather than songs,” he told The Globe.
Mr. Staples first met Ms. Pope in 1968, while auditioning for the same band (which never materialized). The singer recounted the moment in her 2000 memoir Anti Diva:
“Then he walked into the room, this gorgeous boy-man with blue-black hair and an aura of sweetness. … He pulled out a beautiful white Gretsch guitar and started playing atonal Aquarian-like things.”
They lived together in Toronto while starting up a pair of bands, beginning with the art-folk trio O, formed in the late 1960s with keyboardist Clive Smith. They memorably played a gig on top of a bus parked at City Hall for a National Film Board project.
“We were on top of that bus all day, but we were fearless and keen,” recalled Mr. Smith, who later abandoned his music career to co-found Canadian animation studio Nelvana in 1971. “There are only a few people with whom you can truly laugh, and Kevan and I seemed to have the same stupid sense of humour.”
The short-lived acoustic duo the Bullwhip Brothers eventually morphed into Rough Trade, which was essentially Mr. Staples and Ms. Pope with different accompanists over the years. The band’s first poster had the slogan, “repulsive yet fascinating.” Their first proper concert was a midnight show in 1975 at the Roxy, a Toronto movie theatre.
“They had never played with a professional public address system,” said Mr. Topp, who promoted the show. “They were so loud they drove everybody out of the theatre. It was hilarious.”
Their presentation was sexually charged cabaret rock, with underground elements of bondage and other leathered passions. In 1977, they brought in U.S. female impersonator Divine to co-star in a one-night musical, Restless Underwear, at Massey Hall. The critics panned it.
“The show made no sense,” Ms. Pope wrote in her autobiography. “It was titillating and stupid. In short, it was everything we aspired to.”
It was lost on some that Rough Trade’s sexually explicit schtick was parody. Rather than risking self-parody, the influential band broke up in 1986. Although they reunited from time to time over the years for live performances, their final album of new material was 1984’s O Tempora! O Mores!.
“We basically had reached a level,” Mr. Staples recalled in 1994. “You could easily go on and on and make a living, but it just wasn’t interesting to us anymore.”
Kevan Murray Staples was born Jan. 23, 1950, in Toronto. His father was Everett Staples, a CBC costume designer and later an accomplished couturier. His mother was Ray Staples (née Burridge), an interior designer known as the flamboyant “lady with the hats” as a frequent guest on Marilyn Denis’s daytime talk show, CityLine.
On the program she expressed her opinions on design with refreshing candidness. When asked once by audience member, “What should I do with this couch?” she responded, “Burn it.”
Her son spent a lot of time as a child and teenager at the 22-room home of his grandparents, Mabel and Arthur Burridge, who ran an antique shop called Century House, in Pleasant Point, Ont. The house was on Sturgeon Lake, where young Kevan learned to swim and appreciate all that nature had to offer.
His flair for fashion (and tight trousers) emerged early. “When I was 13, I had my dad sew me into my pants,” he told Globe fashion writer David Livingstone in 1983. “My dad was a tailor and I wanted a 13-inch cuff.”
His scholastic career ended abruptly at the age of 17, while in Grade 12 at North Toronto Collegiate Institute. His mod style, impressive hair length and harmless rebelliousness were not appreciated by the vice principal. When he declared his intention to quit school to become a musician, his mother, quite reasonably, suggested he learn to play an instrument.
It being the era of Ravi Shankar, he purchased a sitar. His father later bought him his first guitar. One of his first music gigs was as a roadie with the Toronto rock band the Ugly Ducklings.
Ms. Pope and Mr. Staples at the LA Pride Festival, on June 9, 2007, in West Hollywood, Calif.Amanda Edwards/Getty Images
“Kevan was a very talented musician,” said Mr. Finkelstein, who signed Rough Trade to his record label after attending their concert at the Danforth Music Hall. “I thought he was the greatest rhythm guitarist I’d ever heard.”
In 1977, Mr. Staples formed a duo of a different kind, with Detroit native Marilyn Kiewiet, a fashion designer. The couple married six years later at the Millcroft Inn & Spa, in Caledon, Ont., where Ms. Pope was Mr. Staples’s best man. Guests included bandmates, maverick hairstylist John Steinberg and Labelle singer Nona Hendryx, who collaborated musically with Mr. Staples.
Ms. Kiewiet designed stage outfits for her partner, as well as for the band and Ms. Pope, including a cheeky costume in black and clear vinyl (with a cutout bottom) for the singer. “They were fun times,” Ms. Kiewiet said. “For a few years, we lived the rock ‘n’ roll life.”
After Rough Trade, Mr. Staples stepped out of that lifestyle to write music for documentaries and television commercials. “It was beautiful, emotional music,” his wife said. “Kevan derived so much satisfaction writing scores.”
Mr. Staples suffered cancer in the last three years of his life. He leaves his wife, Ms. Kiewiet; their daughter, Sacha Meli; and grandchildren, Sienna and Rafe.
“Kevan kept his humour right to the end and talked about his condition as if it were a silly inconvenience and laughed at the improbability of his situation,” Mr. Smith said.
Mr. Finkelstein said although Mr. Staples knew his time was limited, he didn’t dwell on it: “When I asked him how he was, he’d say that it was complicated and that we would talk about it one day. But that day never came.”
Ms. Pope and Mr. Staples at the 2023 Canada’s Walk of Fame ceremony in Toronto.Andrew Lahodynskyj/The Canadian Press
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