Kevan Staples, co-founder of legendary Toronto rock band Rough Trade, has died at the age of 74.
Staples co-wrote the band’s risque breakout hit High School Confidential, as well the songs Birds of a Feather and All Touch.
His death was announced in a social media post by band co-founder Carole Pope, who said he died on Sunday.
“He was a bright light that will burn forever,” she wrote on Instagram.
When Rough Trade burst on to the scene in the late 1970s, they shook a lot of people up. Including the audience at the Juno Awards.
The band won four Juno awards in the 1980s and was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2023.
“Their music challenged conventions and left a lasting impact on Canada’s cultural landscape,” says a post on the Canada Walk of Fame’s Instagram page.
No other details of Staples’s death have been released.
Decades-long friendship
Pope and Staples first befriended each other in the late 1960s, the pair said in interviews during their career. In her 2000 autobiography Anti Diva, Pope recounted the progression of their relationship and formation in 1974 of Rough Trade, which included a previous group named the Bullwhip Brothers.
Rough Trade gained a following with performances at small clubs in Toronto, opening slots for visiting bands like Roxy Music and the Tubes, as well as providing the music for the 1977 revue Restless Underwear, featuring the trailblazing drag performer, Divine.
By that time, they had self-released their debut, Rough Trade Live!
“We had a strong gay following, we had a strong arts community following,” Staples told CBC decades later. “There was an audience for what we were doing, and that was apparent.”
Rough Trade would release five more studio albums after hooking up with Bernie Finklestein’s Canadian label True North, beginning with Avoid Freud in 1980. Their releases were dotted with provocative songs with frank depictions of lesbian sex, bondage and titles such as Lie Back, Let Me Do Everything and Dyke by Default.
They were able to garner Canadian radio airplay with other songs, such as Weapons, Shaking the Foundations and Crimes of Passion.
They played to some of their biggest audiences ever opening for David Bowie on Canadian dates of his 1983 Serious Moonlight tour.
Carole Pope, Jo-Anne Brooks and Rough Trade perform on CBC’s 90 Minutes Live in 1977.
The group bowed out of its own accord in 1986 with a tour, telling reporters at the time that they did not want to simply tread water financially, with attempts at cracking the American market beset by a series of issues with U.S. labels.
They were also frustrated that the group’s reputation was overshadowing their music.
“Besides writing about sexuality, we were also writing about politics and people didn’t pick up as much on that here,” Pope told the Canadian Press in 1994.
The pair reunited for shows in 2001, not long after the release of Pope’s book.
There would be sporadic dates in subsequent years, with Staples also spending time scoring movies and television shows. It was not unknown territory for Staples, as he and Pope, along with Brent Carver and Carol Bolt, had won a Canadian Film Award for best original score for the 1978 Canadian film One Night Stand.
As for his best-known work, Staples once told CBC, “I think we did our part in shaking up the Canadian industry.”
