Ma femme et mon chien

All right ladies: take a good look at this guy.

Have you not been seduced yet by the double/triple/quadruple vision of extreme hotness?

Oh yes, it’s À la carte’s countdown to Valentine’s Day! In the next couple of days I shall be bringing nothing but LUV songs for all my gentile readers.

First off, in case you haven’t noticed, all the MP3s previously archived on this site are gone. From now on, every post will feature MP3s for 2 WEEKS ONLY! Before you hit the panic button, hit the “Subscribe to à la carte” button on the right hand corner of this blog. You’ll have a choice to subscribe to either my RSS feeds, or to receive email notifications everytime I post to my blog. That way you are sure to never miss a post!

Back to Monsieur Charby : Pierre Charby was a French/Moroccan singer whose claim to fame was that he participated – and didn’t win – in Eurovision’s 1977 contest.

This song is an ode to his fans. It’s also the greatest and creepiest tribute to “fans” I’ve ever heard from any artist in my life.

First off, the song is GREAT and is always a dance floor favorite. It has grooves you would not expect from someone wearing *that* shirt.

Secondly, the lyrics are just insane. In a nutshell, Charby has a huge hard on for his “petites fans chéries” (his “young female fans”). As he puts it, he loves them because they “follow him everywhere”. So, this song is for his psychotic league of fans. Love it! (so does he!)

He also doesn’t have “one wife”, he sings, but “5000 wives”. Big Love!

But how much does he love his fans, I hear you ask? “More than my wife, and my dog”. The greatest love of all!

He’s a keeper!

This one goes out to the Facebook Pierre Charby fan page!

Come back tomorrow until Sunday, February 14 for more Valentine’s Day offerings!

Pierre Charby – Mes petites fans chéries

Halloween Treat #3: Montreal’s Condition

Here’s a band that is so fantastically creepy, they made one of my high school girlfriends cry tears of horror when I played it for her one dark and stormy night. Back to her safety net of Richard Marx, she went, but not before telling everyone I was a Satan worshipper.

The band in question was Condition, Montreal masters of ghoulish psychobilly, horror hops and creepy dance jives. Montreal in the 90s and especially the 80s was well known for its garage and psychobilly scenes, and for some reason Condition never really stood out, at least not to my knowledge, something I fail to understand given their amazing material and, of course, singer. To this day, I have rarely met anyone in Montreal who has heard of them. They recorded three albums throughout their career, all very hard to find, and the album featured here is “Swamp Walk”, their 3rd and last one.

There is no doubt that Julia Gilmore, lead singer, was the main force behind the band. Her voice was unique and her vocal techniques hinted towards Jazz more than pop. She moved to Montreal in the 80s from New Hampshire to study art at Concordia University, and today is an accomplished painter. Other band members were Slim Lanthier and Vinny Vezina.

I first saw Condition on television at the age of 15 or 16, when I lived with my parents in St-Clin-Clin des Moeux-Moeux, PQ. My very impressionable young self was suddenly glued to my television set as I saw a creepy but beautiful Julia Gilmore sing the dramatic and, let’s face it, scary as fuck Beat my Daddy to the Grave on primetime Quebec TV, a surreal moment if there ever was one. If I remember correctly, she wore a thorned vintage dress and had fake blood dripping from her mouth as she sang.

Condition were my first taste of Montreal’s bubbling underground scene and later when I got my first radio show on CISM, I played the living daylights out of this record (which I’m sure you can tell from the very used record cover in the above photo). The album even appealed to my mother, who enjoyed their covers of “Runaway” and “Caravan”. Despite the dark undertones, some of these tracks are simply gorgeous, such as Ghost Train or the title track Swamp Walk. The album was recorded at Beat Studio, in Berlin.

For those of you who would like to discover more forgotten Montréal/Québec underground music, I would urge you to visit my friend Sébastien’s wonderful blog “Patrimoine PQ” for his series on forgotten Québec underground music.

Happy Halloween, kiddies!

Condition – Beat my Daddy to the Grave
Condition – Ghost Train
Condition – Swamp Walk
Condition – Bop or Drop