MIA alumnus recreates 40-year-old hit

Cover art for the single, 'Bad Side of Sunrise' featuring singers performing in a studio. CREDIT: COURTESY OF GEOFF TEBBUTT
Geoff Tebbutt got his former MIA classmates together to record a 40-year-old song.

Fanshawe’s Music Industry Arts (MIA) program has existed since the beginning of the 1970s. It has seen new genres emerge over the decades and evolve with every graduating class.

For one MIA alumnus, what started out as an lost memory has turned it into a homecoming of sorts. 

Geoff Tebbutt attended the MIA program twice from 1982 to 1984 and from 2002 to 2005. Tebbutt traces his passion for producing and writing music all the way back here to the college.

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During his first years in the program, Tebbutt was tasked with writing a song that would then be recorded and produced by a second-year MIA student.

“Before any of the other second-year’s heard it, Tom Barker, my locker partner, heard it and one day at a party on a Saturday night, he grabbed a guitar and played it like reggae and loved it!” said Tebbutt.

The song that Tebbutt had presented to Barker was called “Bad Side of Sunrise,” which was first intended to be a blues song before it was changed. In the summer months leading to his move to London, Tebbutt was living with his mother and siblings above her deli in the small town of Lytton, BC.

He made a living by making pizzas in the back corner of the deli, and in his free time, he was songwriting.

“While I was living above the deli across the street from a bar, all I would be doing there was go drink, come back to the apartment and drink some more until I realized, ‘Oh the sun is coming up,’ so I wrote it a few lines and recorded it on a Ghettoblaster,” said Tebbutt.

In 1984, Tebbutt graduated and moved on from London taking along with him most of the tapes he recorded during his time at Fanshawe. Ten years later, Tebbutt’s car was broken into and the original tape containing the “Bad Side of Sunrise” was stolen.

It wasn’t until 2002, when Tebbutt came back to Fanshawe for his second round in MIA, that he would come to discover forgotten artifacts from MIA’s past. A former professor found the original tape and returned it to its rightful creator.

Then, as Tebbutt was awaiting to have a medical procedure done, he and his band, Knights of Roses decided to start recording new music as well as re-recording some old favourites from his past.

“For the last three years, I’ve been stuck in my house in a wheelchair and since I’m in front of my computer for 12 hours, just watching YouTube videos, I figured why not finish a few projects?” said Tebbutt.

He then recorded most of the instrumentals of the song in the living room of his house which he converted into a home studio.

Tebbutt then was awarded a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, which paid for a day’s worth of vocal recording. That’s when he then reached out to Barker and former classmate, Julie Choquette, to reprise their roles and recreate the song with a modern twist.

“It felt like homecoming, as it had been 40 years but it felt like it was just a couple of weeks since we saw each other. It was exciting but at the same time amazing to see how well everyone had gotten at their craft,” said Tebbutt.

The song “Bad Side of Sunrise” is available to stream right now on SoundCloud and Bandcamp.