Smash It Up: Y in Dub listening party @ The Piston, Sunday

DJ/Zine maven Nick Smash will spin some records at 7 pm followed by The Pop Group's Y in Dub at 9 pm at The Piston on Sunday

Copies of The Pop Group's Y in Dub will be available for $20 cash only along with a special edition of Nick's "Smash It Up!" zine.

The Clash On The Danforth: 40 Years Later

From Alone and Gone author Nick Smash...

It seems hard to believe but The Clash played their first concert in Toronto at The Rex Danforth Theatre 40 years ago next month.

During the month of February, The Toronto Public Library at Pape and Danforth will be hosting a photographic exhibition celebrating this hugely important event in Toronto's music history. The exhibition will be featuring some of the large format posters as displayed in 'Toronto Calling', the 2010 exhibition curated by Nick and Simon White at Steamwhistle Brewery. 1979 was a good year for fans of The Clash living in Toronto as they played 2 gigs while at the peak of their career. The first was at The Rex on February 20th and the second at The O'Keefe Centre  on September 26th.

CLASH ON THE DANFORTH AT THE LIBRARY will be a multi media format exhibition using large format photos, collage type posters, original artifacts, video screen photos and old school cassette tapes. I'll be getting back behind the lectern and pontificating about how great these gigs were and what they meant to their fans as the punk scene was changing. The opening night will be Friday (February 1) at The Public Library (701 Pape Avenue – just south of Danforth) from 7pm to 8pm.  Copies of "Alone And Gone" and "What You Don't Want Is What You Get" will be available.

Listen to The Clash's performance at The Rex in 1979 below.

Nick Smash "Gone Talking" @ The Lilian H. Smith Library, Thursday

On Thursday (May 10), Wavelength will continue its year-round Music Talk series with a deep dive into the little-known corners of Toronto music history. In association with the Toronto Public Library’s “Make Some Noise” series, Canadian Music Week and Myseum of Toronto, Wavelength presents a talk by UK-based writer/musician/publicist Nick Smash. A Toronto native, Smash was deeply involved in the city’s vibrant DIY post-punk scene in the early ‘80s, as the creator of the fanzine Smash It Up! and a member of the bands Rent Boys Inc. and the Dave Howard Singers. Nick Smash has called the U.K. home since the mid-’80s but continues to keep the memory of this vital era in Toronto independent music history alive and relevant.

Between 1979-86, a group of defiantly independent bands, also including A Neon Rome, Breeding Ground, Fifth Column, the Hunger Project, Kinetic Ideals, L’Etranger, Sturm Group, Tulpa, Vital Sines, the Woods Are Full of Cuckoos, Young Lions, and Youth Youth Youth, dominated Queen West clubs in the years after punk’s initial explosion, devoutly in opposition to their music’s commercialization as “new wave.” Heard mostly through self-published fanzines, cassettes, and campus radio at the time, these groups are now mostly left out of the historical record, discoverable only through used record bins and YouTube rips. Yet these bands laid the groundwork for the Toronto indie-music explosion, and their immediate descendants included civic icons Blue Rodeo, Change of Heart, Cowboy Junkies, Rheostatics, and Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet.

This multi-media talk will reintroduce a new generation to this long-forgotten scene, as documented in Nick Smash’s 2015 self-published book, Alone and Gone: The Story of Toronto’s Post-Punk Underground, which is being reprinted in conjunction with this talk. Smash will also discuss a new venture to get this lost music heard by new ears in the 21st century.

NICK SMASH ON “GONE TALKING” - TORONTO POST-PUNK IN THE EARLY ‘80s

In the summer of 1977, I got a job at Music World on the corner of Yonge Street and Gould. It was while filling the bins with vinyl import singles from the UK that I got a taste of punk rock. An introduction to the world of underground fanzines and weekly copies of the NME soon inspired me to publish my own fanzine called Smash It Up.

The dingier clubs of Toronto beckoned and trudging up the terrifying staircase at the Turning Point, or negotiating the equally terrifying clientele of Larry’s Hideaway meant I was making connections and meeting people of a like minded DIY philosophy. It was an eye-opening experience, as the strict rules of punk rock soon fell away to the broader post-punk worldview.
Fanzines gave way to record-it-at-home tape zines, which led to a stint of percussive clattering in Rent Boys Inc. The inevitable move to London UK was soon followed by the band splitting up, which was followed by a busy year with The Dave Howard Singers.

A stint writing about hip-hop during 1986-89 introduced me to the core of the UK music machine and soon I found myself working at Island Records in their press office. Fast forward to 2010 and all those photos me and my brother Simon White took during the post-punk years were presented as large format posters at the Steam Whistle Brewery, for an exhibit called Toronto Calling. Writing about all those experiences for a self-published book called, Alone And Gone: The Story of Toronto’s Post Punk Underground, has now brought me to the Lillian H. Smith Library (239 College Street) on Thursday (May 10) from 7-8pm. Listen to some of Nick's faves from the archives on the Equalizing Distort blog right here.

Alone and Gone book launch w/ Nick Smash @ The Rivoli, Saturday 1pm–4pm

Nick Smash will be present with copies of his T.O. scene document which you can purchase right here.