Kim Clarke Champniss
Kim Clarke Champniss is a Canadian television personality and musician best known as a MuchMusic VJ in the 1980s. He was born in Bahrain and raised in London, England, and started as a child actor, appearing in the 1960 film Village of the Damned and in a Quaker Oats commercial. He moved to Canada at 19, worked briefly for Hudson’s Bay Company in Arviat, and studied at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
Growing up in Vancouver, he became a DJ at the new wave club Luvafair in 1980 and then managed the band Images in Vogue. He joined MuchMusic as the host of Rockflash and City Limits, and he produced music documentaries, including a tribute to Bob Marley. In 1993 he became a cohost of The New Music, a role that drew controversy when guests like Marianne Faithfull, John Lydon, and The Bee Gees walked out over his questions. He left The New Music in 1996 and moved into production for MuchMusic and CHUM Limited, contributing to Bravo! and serving as head of programming for MuchUSA.
In 1997, he released the album A Sound Mind under the name KCC & Dancespeak, with collaborators Joe Vizvary and Dave Rout. He left CHUM in 2000 to form his own company, Invisible Republic, which managed artists including Serial Joe and the revived The Grapes of Wrath. He returned to on‑air work in 2005, hosting The Word This Week on BookTelevision and A-Channel, and also did radio work in Toronto on Edge 102 and Boom 97.3.
In 2013 he published The Republic of Rock ‘n’ Roll: The Roaring ’80s from Curtis to Cobain. In 2018 he received a Canadian Screen Award nomination for Best Writing in a Lifestyle or Reality Show for his work on the Juno Awards of 2017.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 18:35 (CET).