It was a few months after Charles and Diana came for Expo 86, a time when the Skytrain was brand new, and you could probably still count downtown residential towers on your fingers.
Follow it a little further and you’d see some old carpet stores, with cheap office spaces upstairs where a few bands used to practice.
Photo: City of Vancouver Archives: CVA 772-1223.
It was also the socially conservative era of Reagan, Thatcher, and Mulroney. (In British Columbia we had our own colourful version for a while — Bill Vander Zalm — but that’s a whole other story.)
In entertainment news, The Beachcombers and Front Page Challenge were still on Canadian TV, but most people were watching The Cosby Show, Cheers, and Dynasty — and the top albums in Canada were glossy offerings from Madonna and Huey Lewis.
But during this post-punk / pre-grunge time, there was also what we used to call an “alternative” music scene. Not every city had campus radio, but Vancouver did — CITR, from the University of British Columbia. The station played local independent music and put on and promoted shows, and their monthly magazine (Discorder) interviewed local bands and reviewed gigs and demo tapes.
A lot of musicians and artists in the mid-1980s were tuning into CITR (when they could pick it up) and the late-night CBC Radio shows that played new and non-mainstream music,* listening to records on indie labels, and placing ads in The Georgia Straight** to find bandmates.
And most evenings in late 1986 if you wanted to hear a local band, you had a choice of places where you could see them play.
Here’s just some of what was happening on the local alternative music scene in the month of November 1986.
Shindig was (and still is!) CITR’s battle of the bands.
Image: Discorder.
Bands practiced in basements or in shared living spaces if they were lucky, and also in old warehouses and cheap office spaces. I remember some practice spaces in beautiful heritage buildings but also a few that were just bare boxlike rooms, upstairs from a carpet store on Terminal Avenue. With three or four bands sharing one of those rooms it was quite cheap. (At least in theory, if they each played one opening gig a month — at $50 a show — they could easily cover the rent.)
Some big touring acts too. Image: Discorder.
There were gigs almost every night, in venues like the Savoy, the Town Pump, John Barley’s, and the Railway Club, and, on weekends, the Arts Club on Seymour Street.
And that wasn’t all. CITR’s Discorder magazine for November 1986 also shows listings for live bands at the Luv-A-Fair (best known as a dance club), Club Soda, and Channel One (in the West End).
At the time it felt like we all knew each other and it was a really small scene, but looking at these listings, I don’t think that was possible, because you can see there was a lot happening. And that’s not even including the big out-of-town acts that came in and often had local bands open up for them. Those shows often happened at the Commodore and Eighty-Six Street, on the former Expo grounds.
Notes:
*Brave New Waves on weeknights, and Nightlines on weekends.
** Vancouver’s free weekly newspaper, started in the late 1960s.