It has been six years since London’s Call the Office closed its doors, but now the beloved former venue is being remembered in a documentary premiering at the Windsor Film Festival next weekend.
Call the Office: A Documentary has been a three-year labour of love for filmmaker Sean Stanley.
“Not only did it bring incredible bands through the city … for decades, it also created a vibrant social hub. People would come here and just hang out,” Stanley told CBC News.
“Even if you had no clue who these three bands were, you [knew you] were going to see something good that night, and that was very exciting.”
Call the Office is seen from Clarence Street in London, Ont., in June 2013. (Matthew Trevithick)
The documentary premieres Oct. 31 in Windsor, and will play at London’s Hyland Cinema in November. It features rare footage and photos provided by musicians, former staff and patrons, covering the venue’s early days to its closure in November 2020.
For a place that meant so much to so many, including the countless local and independent bands it helped find an audience, Stanley said it was important the documentary truly honour the venue.
The hardest part was getting the film to a two-hour runtime from a four-hour cut, a process that was “very painful,” he said.
“We are getting older, people are passing away. And if you don’t tell this story now, in 20 years somebody will be researching, and they’ll be like, ‘Oh, that sounds exciting,’ but they won’t have experienced it.”
LISTEN | Filmmaker Sean Stanley talks Call the Office documentary (2024):
London Morning7:11New Call The Office documentary in the works
Call The Office was a significant venue in London, where many top acts played in their formative years. Local filmmaker Sean Stanley is working on a documentary about the London landmark and he told London Morning about his own fond memories from inside Call The Office.
Stanley said the documentary also touches on the history of the building at 216 York St., which dates back to 1880. Originally called Atlantic House, it was also known as Hotel Bodega, Hotel Cecil and, for four decades, the York Hotel.
Call The Office (CTO) opened in the space in 1984, continuing a musical legacy that began taking shape in the 1960s with the loosening of Ontario liquor laws. Those of an older generation still remember the Nihilist Spasm Band’s Monday shows at the York starting in 1966.
Though CTO developed a reputation for punk, hosting homegrown acts including 63 Monroe, The Demics and October Crisis, it also booked other genres, including reggae, rock, rap, and to a lesser extent, country and western, Stanley said.
“[There’s] things like The Tea Party playing Wednesday nights for $3 and doing three sets of music. There’s a lot of memories like that of bands that spent their early days there and seeing how far they’ve come,” said Tony Lima, CTO’s longtime former co-owner, who also booked its acts.
“Sum 41 sold out Canada Life Place. They used to come and open up and be the first of five bands on a bill for $6.”
Call the Office’s former co-owner, Tony Lima, photographed in November 2025 showing off two of the many show posters he designed for the venue. (Kendra Seguin/CBC London)
Household names have taken the stage over the decades, including The Tragically Hip, Blue Rodeo, Nelly Furtado, Nickelback, Barenaked Ladies, Bif Naked, Blink 182, Queens of the Stone Age, Goo Goo Dolls, The Sadies and Crash Test Dummies, to name a handful.
CTO also showcased local talent including The Gandharvas, Constantines, Single Mothers and Thunder Queens, and most famously, an up-and-coming British quintet called Radiohead. Hot off their chart-topping sophomore album, The Bends, the group hit CTO’s stage on July 24, 1995. Price of admission: $10.
“Bands that are only vaguely familiar with CTO, the first thing they’ll say is, ‘Didn’t Radiohead play there?’”
Ahead of the gig, a sleepy Thom Yorke phoned into BBC Radio 1’s Evening Session.
“It says here on this piece of paper that I’m in London. Is that in Ontario? London, Ontario, in a place called Call the Office, which is a club. I’ve just got off a bus and I’ve been awake approximately five minutes.”
Call the Office in December 2020, roughly two weeks after its closure during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Matthew Trevithick)
Lima says it may be hard to believe a band like Radiohead would play CTO, but “that’s the way things used to be done.” CTO was one of several gigs they played across Canada that year.
“At one point in time there were clubs like Call the Office all across Canada and the U.S. that were an important part of breaking new music and exposing people to new underground sounds. Most of those places are gone now,” said Lima, who left CTO when it was sold in May 2019.
CTO is among them, along with other lost local music spots including The Wick, The Embassy, London Music Club and Norma Jeans.
Renovation plans provide hope for CTO’s return
CTO faced an uncertain future in 2018 amid mounting financial and maintenance challenges, and though Londoners came to its rescue, the COVID-19 pandemic proved a tougher foe.
“In a post-lockdown world … people don’t go out as much as they used to. That makes live music much more difficult,” Lima said.
The building itself was sold twice in 2020, including for roughly $1 million to TKFV Holdings Ltd., a London-registered company run by Kenneth and Nemesia Demelo.
Kenneth, president of Toronto-based Icon Insulation, has spoken of his affinity for CTO and his plans to renovate and reopen it. City officials say the project received site plan approval in September 2025, but declined to provide details outside a formal MFIPPA request.
WATCH | The story of Call the Office told through its show posters:
Before they were famous: The bands who played London’s Call The Office
Former Call The Office co-owner Tony Lima designed close to 3,000 posters for shows at legendary London music venue during his 28 years working there. Five years after Call The Office shut its doors, Lima is using the posters to look back at the musicians who rolled through London before they made it big.
“Renovating any space that holds heritage designation … does require getting through some administrative hoops,” said Fausto Iannialice, a spokesperson for Kenneth Demelo.
“I would call it a renovation and resurrection of the Call the Office building … It may not look exactly like Call the Office did 10, 15, 20 years ago, but the purpose of the building will still be the same.”
That includes nurturing local talent, he said.
“There (are) less and less of those venues available … and I think there was a real desire to include and maintain those memories for the community that were so influential.”
The Call the Office building in downtown London, Ont., on Oct. 9, 2026. The building’s current owner has spoken about his plans to renovate and resurrect the venue. (Matthew Trevithick/CBC)