NFG b/w I Don't Know

The Filters were a Burlington, Ontario punk and new wave band made up of Gene Goral on vocals and synthesizer, Jeff Danna on guitars, Doug Barlett on bass and Dave Massey on drums. Everything they issued under the name fits on one 45, ‘N.F.G.’ backed with ‘I Don’t Know’, released by Mannequin Records in 1981. The A-side runs one minute and forty-seven seconds and is credited to Danna and Goral.

Mannequin was run out of Burlington by Paul Abrahams, who managed Spoons and started the label to put out that band’s first single, ‘After The Institution’, in 1980. Kinetic Ideals came second with ‘Life In Shadow’, then Ceramic Hello with ‘Climatic Nouveaux’ and the album The Absence Of A Canary, pressed in a run of a thousand and since become one of the most sought-after Canadian electronic records of its decade. The Filters arrived fifth in that sequence, at MAN005. For a suburban town on the far side of Hamilton harbour, it was a remarkable eighteen months of records.

The single was cut at Sounds Interchange in Toronto with Dave Beare engineering, and the sleeve credits production to Mike Danna, Jeff’s older brother. Mychael Danna had been writing music with Tim Clément since the two were teenagers in the mid-1970s, and their self-produced A Gradual Awakening, the first of the environmental music albums they built their early reputation on, appeared in 1982, the year after the Filters 45. His screen work started with Family Viewing in 1987, the same year he began a five-year run as composer-in-residence at Toronto’s McLaughlin Planetarium.

‘N.F.G.’ catches Jeff Danna at the very start. He grew up in a Burlington family active in local theatre and the church choir, had no patience for piano lessons, took to the electric guitar instead, and was working professionally at fifteen. A hand injury at twenty-two ended his performing career. Mychael suggested he play guitar on film scores, where he could stop when his hand needed it, and that work led to Cold Comfort and a Genie nomination. The screen career that followed runs from The Boondock Saints and Resident Evil: Apocalypse through The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, The Good Dinosaur and Onward, much of it alongside his brother.

The Filters did not break up so much as change singers. Ricky Rose, lately of Lennex, came in on lead vocals, Goral moved to keyboards and backing vocals, and the same four instrumentalists became Channel 5. The four-song 12-inch that group made for Rooftop Records in 1982 has Jeff Danna writing all of the music and Goral all of the lyrics. Channel 5 carried on after Rose left, with Scott Graham singing, into the middle of the decade.

Goral stayed in the circle around Mychael Danna and Tim Clément, playing accordion on North of Niagara in 1995 and contributing additional programming to Tim Clément’s Waterstation.

Two songs is the whole of it. The 45 holds four Burlington musicians in the months before a new singer changed the name of the band, with both Danna brothers on it years before either of them scored a film.

-Robert Williston