Right Now!- The World Needs A Clear Head (EP)

By 1983, punk was already changing. The stripped-down shock of 1977 had fractured into dozens of regional scenes and increasingly specialized sounds. Hardcore was getting faster, louder and more rigidly defined, while post-punk was pulling in almost the opposite direction. In Ottawa, Porcelain Forehead somehow managed to sit awkwardly — and wonderfully — between those worlds.

Their first independent EP, Right Now! – The World Needs A Clear Head, does not sound like a band trying to decide which camp it belongs to. Instead, stylistic instability becomes part of its identity. Across six songs and barely eleven minutes, Mike Hillis, Chris McLellan, Bruce Stevenson and Ian Seabrook jump between garage punk, hardcore bursts, crooked funk rhythms, stop-start bass lines and songs that can seem to change direction before the listener has completely worked out where they began. That refusal to settle down is precisely what makes the record interesting.

Porcelain Forehead had formed only the previous year, but there was already considerable punk history connecting the musicians. Hillis arrived in Ottawa with more punk experience behind him than his younger bandmates. His involvement stretched back to Windsor, where he had been drawn toward punk after buying Patti Smith’s Horses in 1975 and eventually fronted the Dry Heaves, followed by Tainted Meat and Angry Raisins. Guitarist Chris McLellan had also been a member of Angry Raisins, providing a direct musical connection between the two groups.

There was another link through Brian Bunt, who had played guitar with Angry Raisins and later sang with Forbidden Fruit, alongside McLellan and drummer Ian Seabrook. In August 1982, after leaving Forbidden Fruit, Bunt suggested that Hillis try singing with the teenage musicians he had recently left behind in suburban Nepean. Hillis expected little from the encounter. Instead, after only a couple of hours of jamming, they had already created several songs. With Bruce Stevenson on bass, Porcelain Forehead grew from there.

By 1983 they had contributed material to the Blender Mix compilation, but Right Now! represented something considerably more important: their own record, made on their own terms.

The EP was recorded at Ambience Recorders in Ottawa, engineered by Phil Bova and produced by D. McCaig. Hillis later recalled that most of the material was recorded essentially live. One notable exception was ‘Human Torch’, whose vocal was redone because the original performance simply was not raw enough. That small detail tells you quite a bit about Porcelain Forehead. Polish was useful only if it did not remove the things that made the music dangerous in the first place.

The record opens with ‘That Number Again Folks’, perhaps the closest Porcelain Forehead came here to something conventionally catchy. Even then, they cannot resist undermining the obvious punk formula. The song takes aim at American television evangelism and the culture surrounding figures such as Jerry Falwell — the endless appeals to call a number, send money and place one's trust in whatever salvation is being sold. The title carried another joke as well: the riff itself was deliberately familiar, essentially acknowledging to the listener that, yes, you have probably heard something like this before.

That self-awareness is central to Porcelain Forehead. They could be political without becoming solemn, confrontational without abandoning absurdity, and sufficiently immersed in punk to make fun of punk while playing it.

‘Q’ immediately makes the record harder to categorize. The rhythm section becomes particularly important here and throughout the EP. Bruce Stevenson’s bass frequently behaves as something more than a foundation for the guitar; it darts through the arrangements, punctuating them and occasionally appearing to pull the entire song sideways. Ian Seabrook’s drums can drive straight ahead when required but are equally comfortable disrupting the internal momentum. The result is punk music with an unusually twitchy nervous system.

‘How High?’ lasts less than a minute. There is almost no opportunity for conventional development, which is part of its charm. It arrives, makes its point and disappears before anybody can interfere with it.

Flip the record and the difference between Porcelain Forehead and a generic hardcore band becomes even clearer. ‘Human Torch’ is frantic but peculiar. Hillis’s vocal sounds less like conventional singing than someone attempting to force an entire argument through the microphone before somebody switches it off. Behind him, the band repeatedly avoids the obvious route, with Stevenson’s clipped bass figures in particular giving the song an angular, nervous quality that continually pushes against the straightforward punk attack.

Then comes ‘Unfinished Porch’. Its attack on the relationship between corporate power, politics and individual obedience is distilled into a brutally simple idea: big business knows who its friends are, and everybody else is expected to fall into line.

This is also where the physical presentation of Right Now! becomes inseparable from the music.

The record does not look like an aspiring commercial product. The original run consisted of approximately 1,000 copies, housed in thick cardboard sleeves individually silkscreened on the front, with the track information stamped on the reverse. Inside was a foldout insert crowded with handwritten lyrics, cartoons, photographs, altered advertisements, political imagery and fragments of popular culture. It looks like a punk fanzine because, spiritually, that is exactly what it is.

Even the credits join in with the wonderfully straight-faced declaration:

Inspiration: JESUS CHRIST

Advertising slogans, corporate imagery, religion, Cold War anxiety, consumer culture and absurdist humour collide across the insert. Even René Magritte’s ‘Les Souliers Rouges’ is dragged into the visual chaos. The title consequently feels less like an album title than something pasted onto a wall: Right Now! The World Needs A Clear Head. The joke, of course, is that almost nothing inside the sleeve suggests anyone has actually achieved one.

The closing ‘Gleaning Ground’, clocking in at under a minute, ends the record before there is any possibility of comfort. Its compressed, fragmented attack perfectly suits a band that seems almost constitutionally incapable of stretching an idea simply because convention says a song ought to last three minutes.

What becomes increasingly obvious across these six songs is how poorly Porcelain Forehead fit inside any convenient definition of hardcore. Speed and aggression are certainly present, but so are strange pauses, funk-inspired bass movement, eccentric guitar figures, abrupt rhythmic turns and Hillis’s highly theatrical vocal delivery. None of these things feel decorative. They are part of the band's basic musical language.

Porcelain Forehead were interested not simply in playing fast, but in making the listener uncomfortable, amused or confused enough to pay attention. Their politics worked the same way. Corporate power, religion, militarism, consumer culture and social obedience could all become targets, but humour kept the songs from collapsing into lectures. The absurdity surrounding the message was often as important as the message itself.

The band operated within the improvised infrastructure that kept underground music alive during the period, eventually sharing stages with groups including M.D.C., the Minutemen, the Butthole Surfers and the Dead Kennedys. These connections were not the product of conventional management machinery. Bands traded contacts, fanzines circulated information, college radio played records, musicians slept on strangers’ floors, and recordings travelled through mail-order catalogues and hand-to-hand exchanges.

Sometimes records simply disappeared.

Hillis later remembered that his Aunt Marjorie in Michigan paid the postage to send approximately 200 copies of the EP to Rough Trade’s California office in the hope of improving distribution. Rough Trade ran into difficulties around the same time, and the band never discovered what happened to the box. For a record pressed in only one thousand copies, losing roughly one-fifth of the entire pressing somewhere inside the underground distribution system feels almost perfectly appropriate.

Porcelain Forehead continued touring through Ontario and Quebec and into the northern United States, playing clubs, community spaces and wherever else the punk network could accommodate them. They also developed quickly. The band that recorded Right Now! was already evolving toward the material that would later appear on Frog Boy Lives. The original Porcelain Forehead period lasted only from 1982 to 1985, but in those few years the group managed to create a body of music that resisted the increasingly rigid boundaries developing within punk itself.

On April 23, 1985, Porcelain Forehead played what became their final original-era performance at the Palladium in Montréal, opening for the Dead Kennedys alongside D-Ploy and Genetic Control. Hillis remembered approximately 1,200 people being there. For him there was an additional symmetry: the concert took place almost exactly seven years after his first punk band had played at his Windsor high school.

The group eventually reunited decades later, returning to the stage and making their early recordings available again, but the original seven-inch remains the artifact that most perfectly captures Porcelain Forehead at the moment Ottawa punk was discovering what it could become.

Right Now! – The World Needs A Clear Head is short, political, sarcastic, handmade, visually chaotic and musically restless, and almost every part of the object bears evidence of people doing things themselves because nobody else was going to do it for them. Someone wrote the songs, someone booked the studio, someone designed the collage, someone silkscreened the cardboard, someone folded the insert, someone stamped the back, and somebody’s aunt paid to mail two hundred copies across the continent. Six strange little songs somehow escaped into the world.

That is why Right Now! – The World Needs A Clear Head matters beyond its rarity. It documents a period when Canadian punk was not one coherent national movement but dozens of small scenes inventing their own identities and infrastructure as they went along. Porcelain Forehead did not need to sound like Vancouver, Toronto, New York or Los Angeles. They sounded like four people in Ottawa absorbing punk, hardcore, funk, political theatre, advertising, Cold War anxiety and absurdist humour and throwing all of it back in whatever form seemed useful at the moment.

More than forty years later, the record still refuses to behave itself.

That is exactly why it deserves to be remembered.

-Robert Williston