Don't Walk Past
Blue Peter's big hit
Blue Peter was the band that never got that big break. Never got that big record label, never got the push to a market outside of Canada. And when it looked like they might, their frontman left the band, effectively dissolving it. This song is their legacy.
When MuchMusic launched, there were a group of videos that were in heavy rotation. This was one of them. The video was shot a couple of years before at the band’s insistence after watching MTV’s launch1. It’s directly by legendary director Rob Quartly - only his third video. As he put it, “We were all trying to find out what video filmmaking was all about. We created a weird world that echoed the music and the dynamic of Paul as a performer.” The video was inspired by Blade Runner. See if you can see the references.
The tall weedy guy in the video is Paul Humphrey. His style is akin to Cy Curnin’s.2 A theatre student, he dropped out to focus on Blue Peter. He returned to the theatre world in 1985 because as he said later, “Towards the end of Blue Peter it didn’t feel like me up there singing, it was some pop star guy.” After a few years as an actor, he settled in to work as a composer and sound designer. And like most people in Toronto theatre, he had a day gig. For many years he was waiter/bartender at the Victory Cafe, which is where I met him. By that point he was using a cane. He said it was because his dancing threw out his hips but now I wonder if he was in the early stages of the disease that killed him in 20213.
The band would occasionally get together to do a gig. Here’s one of the last ones from 2011.
Enjoy your song of the day!
MTV did play this video despite the band having no American distribution.
There’s definitely similarities between this video and the one for One Thing Leads to Another.
Multiple system atrophy (MSA)
It really sounds familiar- I was (and still am) obsessed with obscure new wave artists from the 80s. I get a little Bryan Ferry vibes too. A sort of British accent whether real or put on. Awesome song!
Wow, this is a great song! I’d never heard it before but when I played it my wife knew it immediately from her time growing up in Canada through her late 20s before she relocated here to Bermuda. It’s a shame the band never broke through, I would’ve loved to hear more music from them!