Back to the ’70s with former VJ Champniss
Before he was helping shape a country’s musical culture on MuchMusic, Kim Clarke Champniss was a typical London teenager trying to find a direction in life.
That direction, it turns out, was towards northern Canada. Way north. Desperate for work and eager to leave England in the early ’70s, he took his dad’s advice and answered a call for work with the Hudson’s Bay Co. in “the old country.”
Off he went to Eskimo Bay (now called Nunavut) in the Northwest Territories, where he worked as a fur trader and lived with the Inuit for a year. A strange place for a British kid with a Bowie haircut and a love for discotheques.
“I walked in and introduced myself to my manager, and he was like ‘What the …?’ As it turned out, I loved every minute of it..
“It was the perfect transition from a young, precocious teenager into adulthood.”
These tales and many more comprise Champniss’s new book Skinheads, Fur Traders, and DJs, which traces his journey from the north to Winnipeg, where he purchased a car and travelled across Canada, eventually settling in Vancouver where he attended University of British Columbia, paying the bills as a disco DJ just as the scene was taking hold.
It follows Champniss as he becomes a top DJ at one of North America’s most influential new wave clubs, Vancouver’s Luv-AFair, and his time managing one of Canada’s early electronic bands, Images in Vogue.
It’s also the basis for his theatrical monologue coming to the Mahtay Cafe in St. Catharines Saturday, a more intimate version of a larger show he’ll be bringing to Hamilton in January.
Champniss looks at it as the tale of an “outsider” who eventually becomes entrenched in Canada’s way of life and eventually its pop culture, leading to an on-air job with MuchMusic in the mid-’80s (which forms a separate book).
“When you travel across Canada, even just living up north, there are all these amazing stories,” he says. “I ran across them by accident, just because I was an open-minded kid trying to find my way in life.”
Champniss, who moved to Niagara Falls over the summer, has been performing the 45-minute show regularly in recent months. While people may expect him to share the dirt from MuchMusic, he says they’re just as fascinated with tales from the ’70s.
“The 1970s is completely underserved,” he says. “What disco did was, it allowed the DJ to become an artist-slash-producer. The whole EDM (electronic dance music) scene we have right now finds its roots in disco music.”
Champniss will focus on the ’90s for his next book, Filthy Lucre, focusing on that brief period when the music industry was bloated with success before the bottom fell out.
“It was an unbelievable time,” he says. “Hence, the reference to filthy lucre … there was so much money.”