Kiddie a Go-Go #5 : Secret Agent Kiki

Bonjour!

It’s funny because since I started the Kiddie a Go-Go themed posts, this blog has been painfully unpopular, har har!

Well then…MOVING RIGHT ALONG…*is this thing on?*

Maybe this will shake things up: Kiki!

Kiki was a Belgian boy signed to Palette Records, the top Belgian label of the time.

Real name: Kiki Isaye, later to become the drummer for Belgian band Blue Rock. Photo here (please note: this info is taken from a thing called the interweb…MIGHT NOT BE ACTUAL FACT! What do you think?)

Kiki released a bunch of 45 singles, including one I’d love to get my dirty mittens on called “Vive les chansons yéyé”.

Here he is singing a fantastic song called “L’Agent secret”, in which Kiki tells us that what he reallys wants to be isn’t a yéyé singing star but a Secret Agent man! He would be so good at it that even James Bond would want him dead, he sings. This one is very much in the style of Nancy Sinatra’s “Last of the Secret Agents”.

And finally, another nice poppy yéyé track called “L’Affreux Jojo”, which has nothing to do with the Michel Polnareff song of the same name.

Bon baisers de Kiki!

Kiki-L’Agent secret
Kiki-L’Affreux Jojo

Après Ski

Here is the complete A-Side of the soundtrack to a 1971 Québec movie called Après Ski, with music by Jacques Crevier & son ensemble. Most people would refer to this movie as “soft core”, but I don’t think it even came close to that. It was, to put it simply, a sex farce with very little content, like the British “Carry On” movies, maybe.

In those days the province of Québec had just gone through the Quiet Revolution and had finally broken itself free from the conservative and manipulative Catholic Church and from the Duplessis government. Sex, drugs, Catholic Church words used as swearing, etc., quickly became socially tolerated. That’s why so many movies like this one started popping up in the province in the late 60s and early 70s (“L’initiation”/”Valérie”, etc.), moreso than in the rest of Canada.

The B-Side of the soundtrack are pop songs by Quebec artists of the time. The movie starred Daniel Pilon (who later became an American soap opera star) and Céline Lomez. Even René Angelil had a small part.

I love how IMDB lists “Fingering” as the first keyword search for this movie.

This record somehow found its way into record collectors’ want lists, and is now worth a ridiculous sum of money because of it. I suggest you just download it here instead.

Le grand Marc
L’âme de feu
Le doux renard
Les yeux brûlants
La course endiablée

Tony Roman

Tony Roman and Nanette Workman

Last night a littly birdy flew in my house and said “I read a blog today and it lied to me”. Why, what did it say?”, I asked. “It said it would have a new post about Tony Roman later that day, but that was over a week ago”.

Oh…well what can I say, I’ve been busy. And to make matters worse, since my last post, another great Québec artist, Boule Noire, passed away, only last week. Tony Roman and Boule Noire (Georges Thurston) knew each other very well and Tony Roman was just about to organize a benefit party for Boule Noire, when he himself was told he had only a few weeks to live.

It’s very unfortunate how most people, the public and the media, have a very limited knowledge of Tony Roman’s contributions to Québec’s music history. For most, he was the guy who did that French cover of Manfred Mann’s “Do Wha Diddy” (with the exception of Jean-Christophe Laurence of Mucho Gusto, who wrote about him in La Presse and was invited to talk about him at Radio-Canada’s morning show. If you speak or understand French, you can hear this excellent interview here. – Jean-Christophe was one of the KEY players in the reissue of Les Maledictus Sounds – a Tony Roman and Jean-Pierre Massierra production from 1968.)

I was about to write a gigamantic post about Tony Roman, but a great francophile American blogger called “Tête carrée” has beat me to it. Please read his GREAT post about Tony Roman here.

In the meantime, here are two Tony Roman produced songs from a 45 single of mine. The “band” is called Les p’tites souris du Père-Noël (Santa Claus’s little mice), on the A1 label, but I don’t have much more info than that. I’ve had this for a while and used to only play Le Spa out at clubs, and only a few months ago did I realise that the song Moscou was just as good, if not better. That’s Tony yelling “hey!” at the beginning of Le Spa.

Les P’tites souris du Père-Noël – Le Spa
Les P’tites souris du Père-Noël – Moscou