Singing Fools

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Singing Fools were a short-lived Canadian music duo from Ottawa, made up of Tim Dunlop and Kevin Murphy. They created hip hop–style songs with political lyrics and formed in November 1982. They released a self-produced 1982 vinyl single, The Bum Rap, which got campus radio airplay. The track mixed simple guitar and drum-machine sounds with clips of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s "just watch me" line from the 1970 October Crisis. It’s often called Canada’s first rap record, though Mr. Q had released rap earlier in 1979.

In 1985 they released The Apocalypso, a civil defencercise–themed record with a video that got regular play on MuchMusic. The video even featured a cameo by Ottawa Mayor Marion Dewar. The EP also included Grave Expectations, a drum-backed reading by historian E. P. Thompson of his anti-nuclear poem The Place Called Choice. That year they were signed by A&M Records; A&M re-released The Apocalypso but soon dropped the group, and they released a self-produced mini-LP Call Me Lucky in 1986. They were nominated by themselves for Best Independent Artist at the CASBY Awards in 1986. A 1987 deal with Amok Records led to the Cold War–themed single Funkenstrasse (Europa’s on the Radio). After Dunlop and Murphy split in the 1990s, Singing Fools became an online music and video production company.