This is – at least to me – an amazingly intense, mysterious and beautiful record : the Janko Nilovic produced 1968 Epta single.

Janko Nilovic is today considered a genius composer and poet, and is very much sought after by record collectors, especially his Library music. Yugoslavian, Janko Nilovic moved to France in the 1960s where he wrote and composed night and day in his apartment. He experimented with instruments and with fellow musicians, friends and artists. This is one of many, many records that resulted from those recording sessions. Many of his recordings have never been released, although a lot have been reissued as part of Library Music compilations or various reissues. If you are not familiar with him I strongly suggest you search for more of his material.

Not much is out there on “who” Epta actually was, in fact there’s nothing on this guy, so I am very tempted to believe Janko Nilovic *is* Epta…(Epta’s accent also kind of gives it away).

The single not only boasts Nilovic as a producer and songwriter (althought here spelled “Yanco”) but also has two major French names as composers: Serge Franklin for “Bye Bye Brighton” and – shocker – Michel Jonasz for (my favorite) “Les nuits sans lune”. (If you’d grown up hearing 1980′s Michel Jonasz “pop jazz” like I did, you’d be shocked too).

(I don’t have a cover for this record, so the photo you see here was taken from the site 45 Tours de Rock Français)

So long, goodbye!

Epta – Les nuits sans lune
Epta – Bye Bye Brighton

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.