Mondo P.Q. !

Bonne nouvelle : Je suis de retour à mon premier amour, la radio! (avec tout mon respect, cher blogue)

Dès le mercredi 8 juin, sur les ondes de CIBL, 101,5 FM à Montréal!

Tous les mercredis de 19 h à 20 h, c’est avec grand bonheur que j’animerai l’émission MONDO P.Q. avec mon ami Sébastien Desrosiers, auteur de l’EXCELLENT blogue Patrimoine P.Q.

Mondo P.Q. sera une émission consacrée aux chefs d’oeuvres oubliés et aux illustres méconnus du psychédélisme, pop, rock et folk québécois. Vous y entendrez aussi des trames sonores groovy et jazzées, du funk, de la soul, du garage, de l’électro, etc.

Première : mercredi le 8 juin, à 19 h (heure de Montréal). Disponible en version Podcast sur le site de CIBL et prochainement, sur notre site mondopq.com .

Vous pouvez également nous “aimer” (euh…) sur Facebook!

Un exemple de ce que vous pourrez y entendre?

Normand Gélinas

Normand Gélinas – Cécila

****

Great news! I will soon be back on the radio, my first love (no offense, blog).

Starting Wednesday, June 8, I will be hosting “MONDO P.Q.” on Montréal’s CIBL 101.5 FM, with Sébastien Desrosiers, author of the AMAZING blog Patrimoine P.Q.

MONDO P.Q. will be entirely devoted to unknown, obscure, and/or just plain good Quebecois psych, groovy jazz, sunshine pop, library, folk, etc.

Want an example? Click on the above MP3!

MONDO P.Q. will be broadcast (in French) every Wednesday, from 7 to 8 p.m. (E.S.T.) and will be archived on both CIBL’s website and our own: mondopq.com .

While you’re at it, like our Facebook page!

Bernard Chabert

I have to say…it’s quite unnerving to write about an artist you don’t know much about, but when you search what’s out there on Bernard Chabert, there really seems to be a sea of non-information. Or maybe I’m just not looking in the right places.

Regardless, Bernard Chabert is someone I am completely fascinated by. Chabert himself also appeared to be completely under the spell of The Beatles – who wasn’t? – and their distinct sound seemed to easily melt into French pop gems, under Chabert’s masterful direction. I’m absolutely certain that if Chabert had kept up at it, he’d be right up there with Polnareff as one of the greats. Heck, I’m almost to a point of giving him that winning title anyway.

Chabert also seemed to think he was all that…take a look at the cover of his most coveted single (unfortunately not available in this post, due to the fact that I don’t have the ridiculous amount of money it would cost to acquire it):

“Those who don’t believe in Chabert, are the same people who, in seventeen hundred and some peanuts, didn’t believe in WOLFGANG A. MOZART. So there” says the cover.

Oh dear.

Don’t get me wrong: I kinda think Chabert is all that too, and quite frankly I’ll admire anyone who is willing to write *that* on a record cover.

Anyhoo, back to the three records featured on this post.

If you have my friend Satan Bélanger’s fantastic Freakout Total* comp, then you already have one of his songs: Olga Selzer (spelled Helga Selzer on the cover, but Olga on the original record). By far, this is one of his best, and one of THEE most underrated French rock tunes of the late 60s. Again, I’m always baffled as to why Chabert was not a superstar in his own right. The B-side was a cover of Hot Leg’s (ie 10CC’s) Neanderthal Man. Both these songs feature French prog band Triangle.

All these songs are just brilliant. Even that Dear Prudence sort of rip off (Dear Jean). My personal faves are L’Ascension sociale de Francis F and Il part en Californie.

Bernard Chabert – Olga Selzer
Bernard Chabert – L’homme de l’univers (Neanderthal Man)
Bernard Chabert – Easy Miss Lizzy
Bernard Chabert – Mare Serenitatis
Bernard Chabert – Tramway 7B
Bernard Chabert – Dear Jean
Bernard Chabert – Il part en Californie
Bernard Chabert – L’Ascension sociale de Francis F

* available through Mucho Gusto Records: http://www.muchogustorecords.com/

You can click on each of the three cover shots for a closer look.

Epta/Nilovic/Franklin/Jonasz

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

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.