On April 17 1985 SCW returned to the Mayfair Hotel in Kitchener, Canada for another performance. This time they performed upstairs at a club called Level 21. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear they performed as Sweet Children of the West; the name would be resurrected later on when they were banned from performing as Sucking Chest Wound. The focus of the show was on videos prepared beforehand and played back on video monitors located throughout the performance space, along with slides projected onto the stage.  SCW performed largely behind screens, occasionally venturing out onto the stage to tweak knobs etc.

Here’s an edit of the performance

The first proper SCW performance occurred on November 30, 1984 at the Chandelier Room of the Mayfair Hotel in Kitchener, Canada. The show came about through a Fine Arts course that PnrH was taking at the University of Waterloo. The show was actually marked by his professor and applied towards his credit for the course!

Ticket for the show – by PnrH

The performers included all four members of SCW plus an additional four performers recruited for the show. SCW played in the background while the other four were up front using various mic-ed up domestic and industrial tools: Charles on vacuum cleaner/balloon, Jim on sewing machine, Claudio on power tools and John on heavy metal. Film projections and video were also part of the staging. All the performers wore masks cast from their faces with plaster bandages, similar to the ‘death masks’ dating back to the middle ages. The workers rose up against their slave masters but the power tools of the workers were no match for the media tools of their slave masters…

A mask being made for dWM – note the glasses underneath the plaster…

The masks as worn by Jeff-0 and dWM during the show

Video edit of the show

After the performance, SCW played a set that included Albert Ayler’s Ghosts and Donna Summer’s I Feel Love, before the power was cut by the hotel proprietor. This excerpt illustrates SCW’s critique  of the disco-industrial complex that would would be a central theme of SCW’s work right through until their demise in 1997.

I Feel Love