ST (EP)

Channel 5 were a Burlington, Ontario new wave band who came directly out of The Filters, a four-piece made up of Gene Goral on vocals and keyboards, Jeff Danna on guitar, Doug Barlett on bass and Dave Massey on drums. The Filters released ‘NFG’ backed with ‘I Don’t Know’ on Mannequin Records in 1981, the Burlington label whose catalogue also carried Spoons, Kinetic Ideals and Ceramic Hello. That single was cut at Sounds Interchange in Toronto and produced by Mychael Danna, Jeff’s older brother.

The singer who changed the name arrived from Niagara. Ricky Rose had fronted Lennex, the band he built with Johnny Dee that worked the Ontario and eastern seaboard circuit and toured as far as Europe and Japan. Lennex cut demos at Toronto’s Jhana Sound and put out a version of ‘Where Did Our Love Go’ backed with the group’s own ‘Crying For More’ on Dave Rave’s Warpt Records in 1981. Rose’s co-write ‘She’s Got It’ won Q107’s Homegrown competition and landed on the station’s 1982 compilation, which helped bring Lennex a deal with Attic Records. Rose and Dee then fell out and the group came apart, Dee going on to form Honeymoon Suite. Rose surfaced in Burlington, Goral moved across to keyboards and backing vocals, and The Filters became Channel 5.

The new lineup recorded four songs for Rooftop Records in 1982, issued as a 12-inch, RTREP01. Rose sang lead, with Danna on guitars and vocals, Goral on keyboards and vocals, Barlett on bass and Massey on drums and percussion. The writing arrangement was unusually clean. Jeff Danna composed all of the music and Gene Goral wrote all of the lyrics. Side one held ‘How Could We Know?’ and ‘So Good To Me’, side two ‘Record Go Round’ and ‘Breaking Down’.

Brian Ainsworth and Mike McCarty produced and engineered the sessions at Sound Kitchen, a commercial room on Weston Road in Toronto running MCI 16 and 24 track machines and an MCI 636 console. The mixes were finished at United Media Studios with Peter Willis assisting, and George Graves mastered the record at The Lacquer Channel. Ainsworth was already well established in the Toronto business, having managed The Kings and set up Extreme Records to record them before Bob Ezrin came in on the sessions that became their breakthrough. Graves had worked at RCA and at Doug Sax’s Mastering Lab in Los Angeles before joining The Lacquer Channel in 1978. For an independent release, there were professional hands at every stage of it.

Rose left once the EP was out. At Attic’s urging he assembled a new band, Perfect Affair, whose self-titled 1983 debut was produced by Mick Ronson and carried a fresh version of ‘She’s Got It’. He later led The Rick Rose Band and worked as a staff songwriter for Sony Music in Nashville and for Warner-Tamerlane. He died on July 14, 2024, at sixty-four.

Channel 5 carried on with Scott Graham out front, a singer who joined a band that already had a record in the shops. Under that lineup the group won Q107’s Homegrown contest twice. Graham names ‘Break the Chains’ and ‘Tell Me Why’ among the songs of that period, both engineered by Paul Northfield, and says the Northfield recordings survive unreleased. ‘Breaking Down’, from the 1982 EP, appeared on Q107 Homegrown Volume Six in 1984. Graham went on to a solo album, Little Heroes, and to a career as a performer, author and speaker working with children.

The Rooftop record is also the first substantial document of Jeff Danna as a composer. Born and raised in Burlington, he was playing professionally while still a teenager, and a hand injury in his early twenties ended his run as a performing guitarist and pushed him toward writing for the screen. He built a long career in film and television scoring, on his own and alongside his brother Mychael, with credits including The Boondock Saints, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, The Good Dinosaur and Onward. Every note of music on the 1982 EP is his.

Gene Goral stayed inside the same musical circle, turning up later on records by Mychael Danna and Tim Clément, including accordion on North of Niagara and additional programming on Waterstation.

The Rooftop 12-inch was for a long time the whole of Channel 5’s recorded legacy. It holds the full Filters instrumental lineup with a new singer in front, four of the earliest Jeff Danna songs committed to record, Gene Goral’s lyrics, and a Toronto production team at the top of its trade. The Homegrown winners and the Northfield tapes are still out there, unissued.

-Robert Williston