Long before Madonna made it trendy to shock people with her in-your-face sexuality, Carole Pope was the ultimate shock-rocker.
From the time the England-born, Toronto-raised singer started up the Canadian new wave group Rough Trade with pal Kevan Staples back in the mid-1970s -- evolving from previous groups O and The Bullwhip Brothers -- Pope was donning bondage attire, tight leather pants and T-shirts bearing S&M scenes.
"Let's face it, (Madonna) tries to shock people visually, but she never really makes any statements in her music. Her music really is like, um, disco," Pope says down the line from her Los Angeles apartment.
The self-professed 'anti-diva' makes a valid point. Take away the video medium, and it's hard to fathom the heavy breathing on the Material Girl's Justify My Love or the playful boy-teaser Dress You Up being in the same league as, say, "She makes me cream my jeans when she comes my way," from Rough Trade's 1981 signature hit High School Confidential.
Parody
"I knew that I was making sexual and political statements but it was really about us being a parody," Pope says.
"(Kevan and I) were kinda bored by what was -- or what wasn't -- going on in the music scene at that time. We were doing our thing to just get off because it was fun. And however people interpreted our work was fine with us."
Aside from the fashion-to-the-fore aspect of the group, Rough Trade were musical innovators. Pope and Staples were the first band to record a direct-to-disc album -- the limited edition Rough Trade Live from 1976.
By the time they signed to True North Records in 1980, Rough Trade were already into a "mishmash of stuff that, when we started recording, kind of morphed into rock or alternative but with a very big rhythm and blues influence."
That defined Rough Trade's brand of new wave -- which will be resurrected for a mini-reunion tour that stops by Barrymore's Saturday night -- through five albums between 1980-84 (Avoid Freud, for those who think young, Shaking The Foundations, WEAPONS and O Tempora! O Mores!) before calling it quits in 1986.
Typecast by media
"We just felt like a parody of ourselves by that time," Pope says. "We were so typecast by the media -- no matter how much we evolved as musicians, I was still the raunch queen."
While the two remain friends to this day, Pope moved to Los Angeles in 1989 to break away from the typecasting and became active writing film and television soundtracks, as well as recording an occasional solo album.
Last year, Pope's oft-controversial autobiography Anti-Diva was published, featuring stories about her affair with the late Dusty Springfield, her thoughts on AIDS, sexuality and sexual politics and the new breed of divas on the music scene today.
"I mean, I am a diva but I can also pull it apart and look at how ridiculous it is," Pope says.
"A lot of women singers I know I consider divas because there's elements of self-sabotage, egos constantly have to be stroked ... in short, I just think we're all f---ed.
"But look at all the Canadian women artists, especially Alanis, Celine and Shania Twain. They're selling more stuff than the men. Tina Turner had the biggest grossing concert of the year."
