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Tranquillity Base
If You're Lookin' / Fun - 7"
RCA - 1970
Michael Panontin
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Everyone of a certain vintage has memories of Ian Thomas' 1973 hit 'Painted Ladies', a song that spent a few weeks up in the single digits on the powerhouse CHUM-AM charts that November/December. (My own recollections are of the archetypically Canadian sort: being driven to early morning hockey practices while the song blasted through tinny car speakers on CKLW radio in Windsor (ON), with those springy keyboard and guitar riffs nudging the snow-covered suburban streets from their pre-dawn slumber.)
It wasn't Thomas' first brush with fame, though. Thomas had spent the latter part of the sixties as one-third of a folk group called Ian, Oliver and Nora (with guitarist Oliver McLeod and singer Nora Hutchinson). By the end of the decade, the Dundas (ON) trio was joined by Bob Doidge on bass and Nancy Ward on keyboards, renaming themselves Tranquillity Base. The group issued a couple of forty-fives for RCA in 1970, the first of which, the breezy, soft-rocking 'If You're Lookin'' managed to reach a respectable #24 slot on the RPM 100 chart that year.
RCA seems to have had even higher hopes for the group, with RPM mag reporting in its March 13 issue that 'If You're Lookin'' "is a 100% Canadian content recording which hit RCA's US execs with such an impact they have arranged for a simultaneous US release, a rare happening." Unfortunately, that US pressing met with little success south of the border, as did a follow-up disc up here in Canada, 'In the Rain' (also on RCA).
For a brief period, Tranquillity Base sang their silky three-part harmonies backed by various classical orchestras, including the Toronto Symphony and the Hamilton Philharmonic. But that stardom was fleeting, and after a couple of years Thomas, newly married and on the cusp of fatherhood, left the group for a producer's job at the CBC.
But he was in his heart always a songwriter first. "You often hear people say 'I quit songwriting because I needed a job,'" he would tell the Hamilton Spectator in 2011. "Well, if you say that, you're not really a songwriter. You write songs whether you need a job or not." Thomas, who spent the next couple of years tending to his young family and commuting to Toronto from not-so-near Burlington, was busy penning songs in his spare time, the bulk of which would make up his first album, including of course the memorable 'Painted Ladies'.
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