CAROLE POPE’S NEW STAGE
A female-centric concert series and a musical are in the works for Rough Trade veteran,
Get ready for Carole Pope: The Musical.
Actually, the musical’s working title is Attitude, but Pope, the brassyvoiced, Scarborough-raised agent provocateur who musically pushed the envelope of sexuality in song and performance with Rough Trade, is in the process of shopping around the book.
“It’s kind of based on my late brother (Howard, one-time Drastic Measures guitarist who died in 1996), and it’s based on him going to New York and joining a band,” Pope, who performs Friday at the Phoenix, explains via phone from Ottawa.
“It includes the New York club scene and AIDS and performance art. I’m going to compare it to Rent — which I’ve never seen, but it’s what people say — and Hedwig (and the Angry Inch). It’s a little bit like that.”
While Pope, 70, sorts out further Attitude details, she has a show to put on: this Friday at the Phoenix, she convenes Music for Lesbians, the first edition of a concert series. On the bill are Pope, DJ Betti Forde, new Gerald Eaton/Jarvis Church protégé Jordan Alexander and the genderneutral Rae Spoon.
“It’s basically just a showcase of women artists and trans artists to show our perspective,” Pope says of the concert. “It’s all about the female gaze.”
She concedes that the series is the brainchild of one of the proprietors of the Phoenix, Lisa Zbitnew.
“It was kind of her idea, because we have a lot of great artists and bands that people don’t know about,” Pope says. “I’m just interested in curating other artists besides performing, you know?
“Rae and I collaborated at Artswells (a summer arts festival in Wells, B.C., in the Cariboo Mountains) last year. I just think Rae is an amazing, talented singer-songwriter-composer. They were my first choice.”
Pope says she has a list of contenders for future performances and hopes to run the show “maybe every two or three months, I hope.”
But her schedule is busy as it is: she’s been working on recording new music for a six-song EP, her first since her 2015 EP also titled Music for Lesbians.
And that’s besides working on Attitude with co-writer Kate Rigg of Slanty Eyed Mama, the self-proclaimed Asian-American, hip-hop, rock ’n’ roll, spoken-word comedy duo, for the better part of three years.
Pope, who has been based in the U.S. since the early ’90s and has called Los Angeles home “on and off” for the past 15 years, admits the musical — which will include songs from her fondly remembered New Wave band Rough Trade as well as “some of my solo stuff” — has been “a giant learning curve.”
“I’m a big theatre freak, but I had no idea about how that stuff (staging a musical) works, so I’m just learning. But anybody who has read it really likes it and thinks it’s going to happen, so that’s encouraging.”
Right now, the duo has staged a few read-throughs and “a partial singthrough,” and is looking for a director, producers and investors.
“I talked to one investor in L.A. and said, ‘I just want some seed money, like, $25,000,’ and he said, ‘No! What about a quarter of a million?’ ” Pope says, chuckling.
“And I said ‘OK!’ But really, it depends on the director, because that’s the person who’s really going to take it to the next level.”
It’s a whole new field for Pope, once a pillar of the Toronto music scene’s most provocative corners.
In the early 1970s, she teamed up with Kevan Staples to form the band O, followed by the Bullwhip Brothers and eventually Rough Trade, playing such downtown Toronto haunts as Grossman’s Tavern.
The Manchester-born Pope paved the way for performance artists and singers such as Peaches and Rae Spoon, enjoying mainstream success with Rough Trade’s cheeky topical lesbian anthem “High School Confidential.” And while the North American LGBT community has made plenty of social strides in the 50 or so years since Rough Trade emerged, Pope feels the not-so-friendly Trump presidency south of the border puts many of those rights so tenaciously won in their crosshairs.
“I think the boundaries that were broken are being built back up,” Pope says.
“The political state we’re in right now — you think that things are more open, but are they really? Sadly, a lot of the stuff that I’ve written or the Rough Trade stuff is even more relevant right now. Ultimately, maybe this shakeup is going to be a positive thing. I have to think of it that way.”