The Last Pogo
Released 2008
The Last Pogo is an all-too-brief 26-minute glimpse at the Toronto punk scene circa 1978. The film set out to document one last-hurrah at the Horseshoe Tavern, a venue that two promoters known as The Garys had been booking with legendary punk groups both local and international for a short while. Despite their brief tenure at the club, the list is nevertheless a veritable who’s who: Dead Boys, Talking Heads, MC5, B52’s, Cramps, The Police, Suicide and many more. Those international bands were not the focus of this Last Pogo, though, this concert was more of a local affair. The lineup featured Teenage Head, The Viletones, The Ugly, The Mods, The Secrets, The Cardboard Brains and The Scenics.
While billed as a night of punk rock mayhem, the footage tells another story; the crowd looks to be made up more of relatively mild-mannered and happy Canadian art school kids than unhinged and dirty punk rockers, and tales of wildly thrashing fans and a near riot with police and firefighters are perplexingly nowhere to be seen. The bands too look very tame in comparison to what this writer commonly thinks of as punk rock of the era, bordering on new wave or art-school rock for the most part. That said, Steven Leckie of The Viletones is said to have been a pretty wild character whose stage antics were the stuff that Sex Pistols/GG Allin punk rock legends are made of.
Despite the apparent relative calm of Toronto punk – I was expecting degradation and violence! – The Last Pogo is a great and enjoyable document of the fashion and music of that Toronto scene of the time. Both the sound and footage are surprisingly high-quality, especially in comparison to a lot of the sadly primitive documentation from the early punk and hardcore years. The bands are good too – if you actually find yourself watching this obscure DVD, you either already know and love these bands or you will want to seek out some records after seeing the film.
