Somewhere
between Noddy Head and The Pumps ... was
this trio, warming up for Harlequin:
Chris Burke-Gaffney, Lou Petrovich,
Greg Gardner
The Pumps were high school
friends Chris Burke-Gaffney on vocals and
bass, Lou Petrovich on lead guitar, and
Terry Norman Taylor on drums, along with
Brent Diamond on keyboards. Their
debut album, Gotta Move - recorded at Le
Studio in Morin-Heights, Quebec - produced
3 singles and made the group a household
name across Canada. The band opened for
such acts as Prism, AC/DC, Toronto, and
Triumph.
STILL PUMPED AFTER 40 YEARS IN
MUSIC BIZ
Intent on forming a band of their own,
Terry Norman Taylor, a drummer, and
Burke-Gaffney, who took up bass guitar,
recruited a “really awesome” lead
guitarist named Lou Petrovich, whom
Burke-Gaffney knew through community club
hockey. The three of them spent a fair bit
of time over the next two years holed up
in Taylor’s basement working on
arrangements to classic rock tunes such as
Cream’s Sunshine of Your Love and Led
Zeppelin’s Black Dog.
In 1974, Burke-Gaffney and Taylor helped
put together Max Damien, a progressive
rock outfit that penned and performed
20-minute-long epics in the vein of Yes
and Genesis. That band, which included
Brent Diamond on keyboards and future
Harlequin member Glen Willows on guitar,
broke up in 1975, at which point
Burke-Gaffney moved to Toronto for “a
change of scenery.”
He returned to Winnipeg in 1977. Early the
next year, he reunited with Taylor and
Petrovich, this time as the Pumps, a tag
suggested to them by a buddy who spotted
the word “pumps” while leafing through the
Yellow Pages and thought it would be a
good fit for a rock band.
Almost from the start the Pumps, whose
sound was a mix of hard rock, English
blues and new wave, had a huge local
following, regularly filling hotel bars
such as the Marion and the Norlander.
“But because we were also writing our own
material and felt being a three-piece was
limiting us in that regard, we added Brent
(Diamond) on keyboards. That’s when things
really started to take off,” he says.
Polygram signed the Pumps to a record deal
in 1979. The group recorded Gotta Move,
which spawned the singles Bust the TV,
Coffee With the Queen and Success (the
latter of which ranks as one of the
greatest stuttering songs of all time,
alongside the Who’s My Generation and
Elton John’s “buh-buh-buh” Bennie and the
Jets) at Le Studio in Morin-Heights, Que.,
a facility that also hosted the likes of
Asia, David Bowie and the Police.
Armed with a hit album (well, in Winnipeg
at least; a CITI-FM sales chart dated Feb.
22, 1980 listed Gotta Move at No. 3,
behind Tom Petty’s Damn the Torpedoes and
Pink Floyd’s The Wall), the Pumps soon
found themselves sharing concert bills
with a fair number of rock ‘n’ roll
heavyweights.
“Bands like Streetheart and Harlequin may
have been selling more records than us but
we were becoming known more and more for
our live shows,” Burke-Gaffney says. “I
specifically remember opening for AC/DC at
the Winnipeg Arena and being called out
for an encore at the end of our set. That
was pretty awesome.”
The Pumps parted ways with Polygram
Records in 1981.
David Sanderson Excerpt from ARTICLE
published in the Winnipeg Free Press,
August 11, 2018
