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Sometimes interviews begin in an absurdly niche place.

Take a listen to the Young Fresh Fellows’ “November”, the kickoff track to the  band’s wonderful 2020 LP Toxic Youth. In between lines, there is a really striking vocal element, a catchy, silly repetition of what I think are 16 nuhs: “nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh.”

From the first time I heard it, it sounded awfully familiar, but… what did it remind me of?

It took me months of listening to the song, little “nuhs” chewing on my brain, to figure it out: it was the bup-bup-bup-bup-bup-bup-bup-bup backing vocal on Polly’s “Put a Little English On It”. 

The man behind Polly, Paul Leahy, died of cancer in February 2017. Though I knew him best as half of NO FUN, in his last years, he had moved on to front Polly’s hard-glam revival, making music that was equal parts T. Rex, Mott the Hoople, and David Bowie. “Put a Little English On It” was the standout track on Polly’s All Messed Up.

Could the similarity be mere coincidence? I had previously established, when Fellows Scott McCaughey and Kurt Bloch were touring through town with the Minus 5, that they knew NO FUN; David Matychuk, of that band, had told me about hearing of McCaughey buying NO FUN’s magnum opus, Snivel, when shopping in Vancouver around when the album (actually a two-cassette box set) was first released.

McCaughey confirmed that something of the sort indeed had happened, and we gifted him a Snivel CD (available through Atomic Werewolf, NO FUN’s label).

So if the Young Fresh Fellows knew NO FUN, they might have known Polly. And they had certainly overtly nodded to Vancouver bands before: check Jim Sangster’s background vocals on “I Don’t Let the Little Things Get Me Down”, which are described on the back cover of The Men Who Loved Music as a deliberate nod to Slow, with whom the Fellows had shared a bill back in the 1980s.

Video of Young Fresh Fellows 12 – I Don’t Let The Little Things Get Me Down

So maybe the nuhs in “November” had been in some way inspired by the bups in “Put a Little English On It”?

First, I asked McCaughey. He didn’t know, but thought it was at least worth asking Kurt Bloch about, because apparently, the nuhs in “November” had been Bloch’s idea.

The plot thickened considerably, and started to seem a bit less farfetched, when I discovered that around the time Toxic Youth was being recorded, Kurt Bloch had come up to Vancouver to see the Pointed Sticks at the Rickshaw, for a Christmastime pre-COVID performance in December of 2019. It was probably the gig where the Pointed Sticks had debuted their cover version of, yep, Polly’s “Put a Little English on it.” 

So Bloch not only had actually heard the song, but he was in The Rickshaw when that clip was recorded! So maybe, just maybe, he knew it?

Bloch was very patiently bemused as I laid this all out for him. Which took about five minutes, because we also had to make sure we were both right-side up on the Zoom call (Bloch initially came in sideways), and that he could hear my shared audio. Bloch’s hearing, after a lifetime onstage, is not so great, so for much of the Zoom call, I had a closeup of his hair-shrouded ear, to which he was holding the phone. Plus, of course, I’m speech impaired, as a result of multiple tongue cancer surgeries, which improved nothing, communications-wise. Eventually, I made my question clear, whereupon he chuckled and said, “You know, I cannot answer that question! I don’t know!”

We came a long way to get nowhere much, but Bloch runs with the theme of “November”.

“Honestly, I love that song on the Young Fresh Fellows record, absolutely,” he says. “Maybe me and Tad sang that part? Once you do something on a song that you haven’t really heard that much before, it kind of becomes part of the song and you don’t remember the impetus for it, or who did it, for that matter!”

Scott definitely credited him with the vocal idea, I observe.

“Nice, well, then—good on me!” Bloch says, laughing amenably. “It’s really cool, but it could have come from many places”.

The Tad he had referenced, by the way, is not fellow Seattleite Tad Doyle, but Tad Hutchison, now-retired Young Fresh Fellows drummer and onetime very-occasional lead vocalist. (Find “Unimaginable Zero Summer” online. He also did lead guitar on the singularly goofy “Trek to Stupidity”, off 1985’s Topsy Turvy, and was involved in the band’s art). Hutchison has been replaced, insofar as he can be, by NRBQ’s John Perrin on the kit.

So what is Bloch’s history with Vancouver?

“Gosh! We first started going up to Vancouver when we were teenagers,” he recalls. “Because there was more of the kind of music that we liked than there was in Seattle. I can’t remember the first time we went up to Vancouver to see bands, but we would have seen D.O.A. down here in mid-’78. They played at the first Bird, the Seattle music club. I remember the D.O.A. show very well: they came across a little heavy-handed for the first bit of their show.

Bloch adopts a Joe Keithley-esque growl, and intones: “’We’re tough and were punk rockers!’. And we loved punk music, but we were, even at 17, judgemental about people. Like, ‘Oh, these guys sure think they’re tough!’ But by the end we loved them and we’ve loved them ever since.”

Bloch also remembers seeing Vancouver scene veterans the Furies, but can neither remember the exact time nor the place that he saw them: “We saw them in a loft-sort-of in Seattle, and had never heard of them, but when you’re that age and you see a telephone pole poster, you think, ‘Wow, that looks like something cool! The Furies sounds like a band we’d like!’ I forget what other bands were on the bill, but we paid $2 to get in and we went and got our ass kicked by kick-ass music. Like, whoa! Wow! Wow! Wow! Then basically had never heard of that band again, ever, until recently.”

We checked in with Furies’ frontman Chris Arnett, who says the gig was probably an August 1977 show at the Seattle Oddfellows Hall with Seattle’s the Feelings opening and the Lewd headlining. It was the Furies’ first live show with John Werner on bass, he reports, adding that the Furies were the first Canadian punk band to play the U.S…. just like they were the first band from Vancouver to play a punk rock show here. 

Video of In America

Bloch moves onto the Pointed Sticks and their first 45s. He had those and saw them in Seattle in 1979, he reports, and it left him amazed by the variety of music Vancouver had.

“Because D.O.A. and the Pointed Sticks, really, had nothing in common with each other, yet those were kind of the two kinds of bands we loved: we loved the kickass punk bands and we loved the rockin’ pop bands.”

By that point, Bloch was a veteran attendee of shows north of the border.

“When my first band the Cheaters blew up and cancelled our show at the Smilin’ Buddha, which would have been early November of 1979, we were were already familiar with the Buddha. We could to bars legally there by that point; the drinking age in Seattle is 21, so we’d try to play in bars, here, but they’d kick you out  as soon as you started playing, so it just wasn’t fun. Whereas we could go up there and watch bands and really have a good time. So we were super-excited to go up there and have a weekend at the Smilin’ Buddha.”

The Fastbacks started right after the Cheaters folded.

“Our first show was February of 1980,” he recalls. “By later 1980 or early 1981, we ended up going up to Vancouver with our buddies in X-15 and playing the Smilin’ Buddha. I believe we played more shows in Vancouver in 1981 than in Seattle!”

That May 1981 gig, with X-15 headlining and the Fastbacks opening, also featured East Van Halen as the middle band on the bill. Bloch remembers Benny Doro, the guitarist. (For those who don’t, seek out the Randy Rampage solo track “Livin’ on Borrowed Time”, which is basically a five minute excuse for the greatest extended guitar solo in Vancouver punk history—one of a few things Mike Usinger and I agree on 100%).

Iconic Vancouver photographer Bev Davies was present and snapped picture, including one of a 17-year-old Duff McKagan, later of Guns N’ Roses, on drums. A Fastbacks photo taken by Davies the next year, in March of 1982, with Kim Warnick on bass and vocals and Lulu Gargiulo on guitar, reveals a brick-walled venue we’re guessing might have been the Laundromat, though Bloch is not sure where that show was. 

The Fastbacks, back in the day. Bev Davies.

Photos from that very gig are also on the back cover of the Fastbacks’ 1982 12” EP, The Fastbacks Play Five of Their Favorites, which has a song with singularly relevant topical heft, “In America”, wherein Warnick, on vocals, muses about maybe it being time to leave her country, which is failing its potential badly. Backing vocals are provided by the Dynette Set, Scott McCaughey’s pre-Young Fresh Fellows band, which had a strong girl-group influence. 

Also on the back cover of the EP, there is an illustration of a dorky-looking fellow in a red sweater, with “No Threes” above him and “Safety First”. What’s going on there, exactly?

“No Threes was the name of our record label, which we started I guess in 1979, and Safety First is our buddy Brian Fox, who also had a record label that put out the Moberleys first album, about 1979. He helped finance, or at least the pressing of, the record”.

But why No Threes? What’s wrong with threes?

“Well, to be honest, we wanted the record label that seemed mysterious, because we loved Blue Öyster Cult and bands that were slightly mysterious. And we loved the Blue Öyster Cult’s symbol. So we had a No Threes sign that originally said No Left Turn, and we took it off its pillar and re-painted it so it said No Threes. That would have been as early as 1977, even, because the No Threes sign was on the stage at the first Cheaters show, which was in March of 1978. So before there were thoughts of it being a record label, the No Threes sign existed. Later, we decided to make a record label.”

Video of Randy Rampage – Livin’ On Borrowed Time

Another obscure question I put to Bloch involves the solo for the Fastbacks’ “K Street”, which has a playful quality that reminds me of  very much of the solo on Doug and the Slugs’ “Wrong Kind of Right”.

Bloch acknowledges that the solo for that song is a composed one, and that he is aware of Doug and the Slugs.

“But I couldn’t say that they were an influence. But as for sharp-eyed spot-the-influences question… a lot of times the solos were the impetus for the song, so the solo part would come first and the rest of the song would follow it. So you may listen to the first Fastbacks’ single, ‘It’s Your Birthday’, and the guitar solo in that song is not copied from, but is directly inspired by, the guitar solo by Bill Napier-Hemy in ‘Out of Luck’! But that is an obvious influence, a tip of the hat to Bill and to anyone who wants to go back and dissect it”.

There was more from Kurt about his transition from the Fastbacks (who have continued to record, though Warnick has retired from touring) to the Young Fresh Fellows (playing their first Vancouver show in decades this Saturday), but we must skip some of that to allow Bloch space to wince and giggle at questions about the episode in the Hoodoo Gurus dressing room, as recounted by Grant Lawrence in Dirty Windshields, and discussed a bit with Scott McCaughey here. More to come from Nick Thomas, on that! 

“The behaviour was terrible”, Bloch says with a grin. “It cannot be justified in any way, but that did happen. The Smugglers were on the bill, and maybe on the poster, and then a bunch of things got messed up, and it got a little messy in that dressing room! All we knew was that our friends the Smugglers were to open the show, and we get there and they say the Smugglers can’t play. That’s not that cool!”

Of course, the Fellows invited the Smugglers to play anyhow, mid-way through their set, which did not endear the band to the promoters.

However, Bloch continues philosophically, “There was quite a bit of pretty bad behaviour in that era. Probably not just by—I could say by ‘us,’ but, uh, me. But also by other bands! Of course none of it was out of anger, it was just wild, pent-up energy, and oftentimes thinking you were being funny, without thinking of the consequences. So definitely the table with the snacks on it at the Hoodoo Gurus’ show got a little messed up! For whatever reason. Probably the main reason is being over-served!”

The Young Fresh Fellows, with Kurt Bloch on lead guitar, play the American on Saturday (March 11). Tickets here.