Sinnerismes

Les Sinners’ François Guy (left) with Louis Parizeau smoking banana peels in the 1968 NFB movie “Kid Sentiment”, directed by Jacques Godbout.

François Guy is one of my favorite songwriters from Québec, and also one of the most underrated, in my opinion. In the 60′s, he simply had a knack for writing the damndest catchiest Bubblegum tunes this side of Clarksville, à la Boyce & Hart or Kasenetz/Katz. His early 70s solo recordings are also magnifique pop gems. He wins points in my book for having some of the strangest (yet endearing) ideas and concepts, notably the infamous Lunours/Moonbears, featured in this post, and for being a fantastic arrogant anti-conformist in his glory days with Les Sinners. The band can also boast to having recorded Québec’s first “concept” album, “Vox Populi” (available to download here).

François Guy fronted the group and wrote most of the band’s songs, most notably with Charles Linton (who last I heard was singing “O Canada” at National League hockey games). The band split in 1968 and Guy, Linton and drummer Louis Parizeau went on to form La Révolution Française in 1968. Parizeau reformed Les Sinners in 1970, but this time without Guy and Linton.

What interests me though are the side projects that popped up throughout all this. I’m not sure how it came about, but James Boivin (aka “Jay”, Les Sinners’ first guitarist), John (beats me who John is) and François Guy released a beeee-ooo-tiful folk pop single called “Six O’Clock in the Morning” and “I Do Believe in Music”. Primo stuff! The single was recorded in NYC and produced by Michael Wright, for Aquarius Records.

In 1969, François Guy’s creative but by then surely drug-induced brain created “The Moonbears”/”Les Lunours”, who were allegedly a “joke band”, according to my friend Satan Bélanger‘s liner notes in his comp “Freakout Total” (on Mucho Gusto), describing their concept as “interstellar mascots” who once “attempted to enact a scene of alien spacecrafts invading a cornfield”. While I am sure this is true, the mere fact that Guy went through the effort of recording the two songs in French AND English makes me wonder just how much of a “joke” it was. It sounds and looks like it would have made a great children’s tv show. Who knows what they were thinking! If only there were more information about them!

The French version of “We Are Bi Bi Ba Ba Boum Boum” is featured on “Freakout Total”, which just so happens to be my all time favorite compilation. All weirdo French pop and Psychedelia, it comes highly recommended.

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Tags: 60s folk, 60s music, 60s psychedelic, les sinners, outerspace, psych, Quebec music, strange

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