THE LAST POGO (1979; 26 minutes)
Produced and Directed by Colin Brunton and Patrick Lee; Edited by Patrick Lee
Buy it on Vimeo for $9.95 CDN, or rent it for $3.73.
From Dangerous Minds:
“In 1978, Toronto (and some Hamilton) punks answered Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, a movie lousy with Canadians, by putting on their own star-studded farewell concert at the city’s Horseshoe Tavern.
All of the following photos were done by Ross Taylor, and all taken between 1976 and 1980, and they’re all copyright. First one above is The Dead Boys’ Cheetah Chrome with the Viletones’ Steven Leckie. Cheetah is the only non-local featured in our feature doc The Last Pogo Jumps Again, because The Dead Boys played in Toronto a lot and Cheetah is awesome.
Illustration by Rick Trembles.
What’s long and hard on a Pogo staff member? Making The Last Pogo Jumps Again: A Biased And Incomplete History Of Toronto, Hamilton and London Ontario Punk Rock And New Wave Music Circa September 24 1976 To December 1 1978, Parts One And Two. We started back in June 2006, but we’re now in post-production, albeit with one or two more interviews we’d like to ...
We thoroughly enjoyed a read of Keith Richards‘ autobiography Life in between making notes on the (currently) five-and-a-half-hour version of The Last Pogo Jumps Again: A Biased And Incomplete History Of Toronto Punk Rock And New Wave Music Circa September 24 1976 To December 1 1978.
Whoa! Canadianish Sally Fields takes on fifteen guys at once. Choo-choo!
One thing we found interesting was how often Toronto was mentioned ...
Anywhere, Saskatchewan.
Co-director Colin Brunton is holed up for a month in an hotel in Regina, Saskatchewan meticulously grinding through the current six-hour cut (!) of The Last Pogo Jumps Again: A Biased And Incomplete History Of Toronto Punk Rock And New Wave Music Circa September 24 1976 To December 1 1978, while counterpart and co-director Kire Paputts is living large in lurid Las Vegas with lady friend Liz ...
Hand-drawn handbill by John Pearson; 1973; courtesy Mark Moore
We couldn’t make this movie — The Last Pogo Jumps Again: A Biased And Incomplete History Of Toronto Punk Rock Circa September 24 1976 To December 1 1978 — without the generous help of, well, pretty much everyone who was into the scene, a scene that arguably started in the pot-smokey confines of Gary Topp’s subversive Original 99 Cent Roxy ...
Image from daymix.com
Pogo H.Q. is abuzz with activity as the editing continues, the last interviews are lined up, and the staff and crew are scheming up what sort of April Fool’s Prank they can pull. Will we announce that The Last Pogo Jumps Again: A Biased & Incomplete History Of Toronto Punk Rock Circa September 24 1976 To December 1 1978 will now be released in 3-D? Will we blog ...
From the April issue of Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll
This months Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll has a six-page transcription of an interview Last Pogo director Colin Brunton did with Greg Dick at CIUT-FM in 2009, after The Last Pogo was released on DVD (and still available for only $12.00!) It’s distributed in sixty countries so lots of folks overseas will get a small taste of the kind of action we had ...
After almost four years of shooting for The Last Pogo Jumps Again, here’s a list of all the local bands from the specific era September 24 1976 to December 1 1978 that we’ve represented in the film: The Androids, Arson, The Battered Wives, The B-Girls, The Cads, Cardboard Brains, Crash Kills Five, The Curse, The Dents, The Demics, The Diodes, Drastic Measures, The Existers, The Fits, Forgotten Rebels, The Government, ...
Last week the Pogomobile tooled over and visited with The Existers’ George Higton, who was also the founding publisher/editor of the late seventies local fanzine Shades. Prior to that, George wrote for the seminal NYC paper The New York Rocker. And once we upload the tape (into our third terrabyte of footage for all you geeks out there) we’ll let you know what was going on in George’s head.
Handbill from ...
The Last Pogo Jumps Again studies the evolution of Toronto from small town to big city and it’s pop/counter-culture lifestyle during the early and mid-70s. It centers around the first wave of Toronto punk rock and new-wave music, from the Ramones playing the New Yorker Theatre in ’76 through the police shutting down Teenage Head and causing a riot at the Horseshoe Tavern’s infamous “The Last Pogo” concert in December 1978.
