Dead Bob

Dead Bob is the current creative vehicle for John Wright, drummer, co-founder, and songwriter from the long-running Victoria punk band NoMeansNo. After decades spent behind one of the most recognizable drum kits in Canadian underground music, Wright returned with Dead Bob as a project rooted in both archival material and new writing, carrying forward the restless rhythmic intelligence, dark humour, and genre-defying energy associated with his earlier work while placing it in a looser, more personal frame.

The project began during the pandemic, when Wright found himself revisiting songs and demos from different periods of his life. Some of the material reached back to the NoMeansNo years, while other pieces were more recent, written and recorded in the woods of British Columbia. Dead Bob’s debut album, Life Like, was released in 2023 and was largely a John Wright solo record, written, performed, recorded, and produced by Wright with help from a circle of friends and collaborators. The title track itself had NoMeansNo roots, having originally appeared in connection with Dance of the Headless Bourgeoisie before Wright reshaped it for Dead Bob.

Although Dead Bob began as a solo incarnation, it quickly grew beyond that. Wright brought in collaborators including Byron Slack, Kristy Lee Audette, Ford Pier, Selina Martin, Aidan Wright, and lyrical contributions connected to earlier work with his brother Rob Wright. Rather than functioning as a nostalgia exercise or a NoMeansNo reunion, Dead Bob became a way for Wright to open the vault, reshape older ideas, and push new songs into a present-tense form.

The live version of Dead Bob gave the project a second life. Ford Pier, Byron Slack, Kristy Lee Audette, and Colin MacRae joined Wright to turn the homegrown recordings into a working band, with the group bringing a more active, collective force to the material. That shift became central to Dead Bob’s second release, Nothing Changes Everything, where the live band takes a much larger role: Pier on keyboards and trombone, Slack on guitar, Audette on guitar and trumpet, MacRae on bass, and Wright on drums, with everyone contributing vocals. Selina Martin also returned as a collaborator.

Nothing Changes Everything continues to draw from Wright’s archive of old and new demos, including material connected to some of the last songs he worked on with Rob Wright for NoMeansNo, but the sound is pushed forward by the energy of the live lineup. The result is less a return to the past than a continuation of Wright’s long habit of refusing fixed categories: punk, post-punk, art-rock, oddball pop, rhythmic attack, and sideways humour all remain in play, but the centre of gravity is unmistakably Dead Bob.

-Robert Williston