Information/Write-up
Python were a hard-edged Vancouver rock band whose brief early-1970s existence produced one of the nastiest and most exciting Canadian singles of the era, the the now-coveted 1972 Foot Records 45 ‘Shock Treatment’ b/w ‘Pink Ladies.’ Emerging from an earlier Montreal-Vancouver outfit called Lucifer, Python fused Chicago blues devotion, Stones-style swagger, clubland grime, and a confrontational attitude into a sound that felt raw even by the standards of the day. Their lineup centred on Chris Raines (guitar, vocals), David West (guitar), Dave “Tex” Pemberton (bass), and Warren Cann (drums), with earlier and later contributions from players including Simon Gadban and Al Walker. The single was reissued by Supreme Echo in 2025, bringing overdue attention back to a band that had burned out long before the Canadian underground was properly documented.
The roots of Python lay in two separate Ontario trajectories. Chris Raines, born October 2, 1951, grew up outside Cobourg, where his father converted the bottom floor of an old barn into a rehearsal space. Still a teenager, Raines was already heading into Toronto to play with older, better musicians during the explosive mid-1960s scene. David West, meanwhile, came out of Sudbury and Capreol, where he formed his first group, Red Prune, and learned guitar obsessively by watching bands at the local hockey arena, then running home to practise before the details slipped away. Both were shaped by the blues, though in different ways: Raines through early stage experience and the Toronto club circuit, West through northern Ontario restlessness and a deepening obsession with electric blues players like Albert King, B.B. King, Robert Johnson, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and Johnny Winter.
Before Python, there was Lucifer. West drifted west as a teenager, lived briefly in Vancouver’s countercultural scene, then joined up with Simon Gadban. By late 1969 they had moved to Montreal and formed Liberation Train, a blues-based group that opened for the Deviants at McGill in early 1970. Around the same time, Raines had made his own detour through Buffalo, where he lived with a Black family, played in clubs, absorbed gospel firsthand, and witnessed the city’s racial tensions at close range. Those experiences deepened his sense that blues and gospel were not simply musical forms but lived expressions of struggle, danger, release, and truth.
Raines and West eventually connected in Vancouver, bonded over blues, and then headed east again. In Montreal, with Gadban back in the picture, they formed Lucifer. The group played clubs and concerts in Montreal, the Eastern Townships, Trois-Rivières, and elsewhere in Quebec, opening for acts such as April Wine, Mahogany Rush, Mashmakhan, Johnny Winter, and Long John Baldry. They also played rougher rooms, including the biker bar Chez Dieu in Old Montreal, where the reception could be volatile, surreal, and very much of its time. Lucifer carried a darker, more openly confrontational image, but by late 1971, after the group returned to Vancouver without Gadban, it was reshaped into Python.
The name change signalled less a softening than a sharpening. West later described Python as a less in-your-face name than Lucifer, but the band’s character remained all edge. Warren Cann’s arrival on drums was crucial. More disciplined than the others, image-conscious, and already carrying the ambition that would later serve him well in England, Cann helped tighten the band musically and visually. Dave “Tex” Pemberton joined on bass, and Python began working steadily around British Columbia in high schools, bars, strip clubs, and whatever other rooms would have them. Cann would later become a founding member of Ultravox, giving Python an unexpected but very real link between Canadian hard rock and British new wave.
Python’s lone single captured that lineup at its peak. Recorded at Vancouver’s Psi Chord Studios with Robin Spurgin and issued through Foot Records, ‘Shock Treatment’ and ‘Pink Ladies’ distilled the band’s identity into two tough, lean performances. Raines later framed ‘Shock Treatment’ as a response to the manipulative social world surrounding bands and club culture, while ‘Pink Ladies’ came from an encounter with a group of women drinking the cocktail of the same name before a show. The record was meant partly as a calling card to get the band better gigs, and though it drew some local radio play in Vancouver, it went nowhere commercially. Only about 500 copies were pressed, and the original became exceptionally scarce. The reissue finally restored the single to circulation more than fifty years later.
What survives most vividly in Python’s story is the atmosphere around the music. This was a band that played to bikers, students, drunks, engineers, and club regulars across Western Canada and beyond. Their road stories are half cautionary tale, half outlaw folklore: violent club confrontations, late-night highway disasters, strip-club gigs, and the kind of unstable living arrangements that seemed standard for young musicians trying to force a future into existence. That intensity fed directly into the music. Python were not polished careerists; they were young men with guitars, nerve, and just enough studio time to get something dangerous onto tape.
By 1972 the group was already splintering. Cann left for England, where he joined Tiger Lily, the band that soon evolved into Ultravox. West followed to London in early 1973, eventually passing through Michigan Flyers, Cards, and later resurfacing in Vancouver as David Raven, leading David Raven and the Escorts. Raines, meanwhile, remained active in Vancouver and soon formed the mid-1970s band Sixty-Six Six with guitarist Craig McCaw, whose earlier work with the Poppy Family had made him one of the city’s most recognizable musicians. He also worked around the Bill Lewis Music shop on Broadway and its downstairs recording facility, Bullfrog Studios, which had become a gathering point for Vancouver musicians, and later spent a decade at CKVU-TV. Python itself dissolved almost as quickly as it had cohered, leaving behind a single 45 and a trail of stories that suggest a much larger career might have happened under different management, better timing, or a little more money.
Instead, Python became something rarer: a band remembered not for a long catalogue but for a flash of captured voltage. Their lone record stands as a tough West Coast document from that transitional moment when late-1960s blues-rock curdled into something meaner, street-level, and proto-punk in spirit. In that sense, Python belong to a small but important class of Canadian groups whose discographies are tiny, but whose sound and attitude still hit with startling force.
-Robert Williston
Sources:
Python – Shock Treatment b/w Pink Ladies booklet (Supreme Echo reissue); interviews with Chris Raines and David West; research by Jason Flower.
Musicians
Chris Raines: guitar, vocals
David West: guitar
Dave "Tex" Pemberton: bass
Warren Cann: drums, arrangements
Songwriting
Written by Chris Raines and David West
Arranged by Warren Cann
Booklet credits:
Interviews & research by Jason Flower
Additional research & copy editing by Frank Manley and Michael Tension
Design by Michael Tension
Images courtesy of Gary Osborne, Chris Raines, David West, Rob Frith, and newspaper microfilms
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