What would the summer holidays be without summer hits, those songs that loop on the radio, that we sing at the top of our lungs and that make us dance until the end of the night? Over the next few weeks, The duty takes you on a musical and temporal journey to (re)discover these “hits” that have marked our holidays.
No doubt it was necessary to live at the bottom of a cave in 2004 so as not to be caught head-on by Hawaiian des Trois Accords, unquestionably the hit of the summer on the radios. The lyrics were so incongruous, the band seemed so out of nowhere that it was long believed that their success was a coincidence. But in fact, a real ambition preceded the release of this hit song.
In the early 2000s, Les Trois Accords still corresponded to the image one might have of them: five childhood friends from Centre-du-Québec who go crazy in their spare time in a garage band . The quintet, which is intended to be a tribute to Paul and Paul, will end up composing its own absurd songs and touring bars in the Sherbrooke area, where three of the boys are finishing their university studies.
Some within the band then begin to think bigger, convinced that there is an audience for their rantings. “Yeah, we knew it wasn’t standard as a proposition, but for us it wasn’t completely left field either. We listened to a lot of Cowboys Fringants, Fred Fortin, Mara Tremblay at the time, and we already found absurd elements in their music, even if they didn’t go as far as we did. We knew it would be a longshot before playing on the radio, but we really believed in it,” recalls singer Simon Proulx.
After finishing his studies in economics at Bishop, he could have landed a 9 to 5 job in the public service or in a bank, but Simon Proulx prefers to devote himself full-time to music in the hope of breaking into the great displeasure of his parents. The other members also put all their energy into the success of the group. With rudimentary means, they recorded a demo in two days, Yellow-Browntoday a real collector’s item on which we find the first version ofHawaiian.
“ Hawaiian, it’s not a song that took long to write. It starts with a very absurd flash in which you imagine a life with someone if they had been born elsewhere. It’s very cerebral. The song is a first draft following this idea that we found funny. But even if we believed in it, I would never have imagined that it would become a sing along. VSit’s fun to see that people have reclaimed the song and that they imagine what they want when they hear it », continues Simon Proulx, who is still not tired of singing it live twenty years later.
Student First Phenomenon
However, in their early days, almost no one — apart from themselves — really believed in this commercial potential. Les Trois Accords sent their demo to dozens of record companies and radio stations Yellow-Brownbut each time they came up against closed doors.
Until a certain Marc-André Robertson, who was hosting an early evening show at the time on the University of Montreal radio, CISM, came across Yellow-Brown. “It was a burned CD, with basement sound. The disc was going to oblivion. At the time, I was into electronic music, it was not my style at all, but when I heard Hawaiian, I couldn’t believe it. I knew right away that the world was going to turn upside down. When I returned to the musical committee the following week, I insisted that we add it to our list”, recalls the one who would later become a friend of the members of the group, but who, at that time there, knows them neither of Eve nor of Adam.
Marc-André Robertson was right: listeners will instantly fall under the spell ofHawaiian in 2003. The song, as absurd as it was, took the airwaves of CISM by storm, which attracted the attention for the first time of some music industry monks, who still for a time judged that it was about a phenomenon limited to the student environment. Convinced that he holds in his hands the next hit of the hour, Marc-André Robertson even talks about the group to his colleagues at Musique Plus, where he works as a project manager during the day.
“I believed in them so much. Hawaiian, it was simple, it was funny. The earworm was there. Parents could sing it as much as children. All the ingredients for a hit were there,” sums up Marc-André Robertson.
Driven by this growing interest, the band recorded new pieces and independently released their first album, Big Mammoth Album, in the fall of 2003. A few months later, Les Trois Accords were picked up by the Indica record company, which gave them the means to remix their songs and release a new version of their opus. the Big Mammoth Album Turbo will arrive in stores in March 2004. This is followed by the release of a first clip for Hawaiian, shot in a ski lodge in the middle of winter to add to the absurdity of the lyrics. The tone is set and the Musique Plus audience is there. The musical radios will not be long in following at the beginning of the summer.
“We really felt the wind pushing us in the back at that time. It was funny because our shows for the summer had been booked beforeHaWaiian starts playing on the radio. This meant that we were playing on stages that were far too small for the number of people who were there. In Woodstock en Beauce, we were in the Discoveries section under a tent that held around 1,000 people, but there must have been 3,000. been intoxicated by the monster success ofHawaiian.
The fear of the one-hit wonder
Even at the peak of the wave, Les Trois Accords never lost sight of the fact thatHawaiian could only be a short-lived success, “a one hit wonder “. They know all too well that comedic songs on the radio are fun when listeners are light-hearted, by the pool or at the campsite, but do not survive the dullness of autumn.
Eager not to fall into oblivion, Les Trois Accords will not be idle during the summer of 2004 and will release the extract Far from here whileHawaiian still enjoys strong radio rotation. Then shortly after it will be the catchy country ballad Saskatchewan which will rise to the top of the charts, enough to convince once and for all the last skeptics that the Drummondvillois group is not just a flash in the pan.
“At the beginning, we were told that we would never go on the radio. Then when Hawaiian started playing on the radio, we were told it would be a one hit wonderful recalls, not without pride, Simon Proulx, joined by the studio where the group is working on its seventh album, scheduled for the fall.