40 years of the Soupir group | Black fun behind metal tears

Forty years after having conquered the radios of the province, Soupir continues to make people dance, even in England, thanks to tears of metal first shed for the camera of the youth program Pumpkin Pop.

The Playmobil punk wig that Normand Brathwaite is wearing on the back coverEclipse, Soupir’s only album, released in December 1983? “Look, I never understood why I put this on my head, exclaims the actor. There’s a lot of stuff we did in the 1980s that we don’t really understand. »

The song Metal (Or metal tears) also belongs to that category of artifacts that only the decade of abundant hair spray and oversized shoulder pads could have produced.

Marie Bernard was still a student at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, where she played ondes Martenot, when she was hired at Radio-Canada by her mentor François Dompierre to sing in the choir of the televised mass, then recorded in the studio. . Following the departure of Dompierre, she will briefly take over the musical direction, until the Sunday meeting is shot in real churches.

“I was 21 or 22 and I had tasted what it was like to have a paycheck by making music, so I went to see 7^e, the youth stage,” recalls the musician, whose Martenot waves can be heard on albums by Harmonium, Beau Dommage and April Wine. From 1976, she collaborated as a composer on several shows, including Pumpkin Pop (1979 to 1983), a variety show for pre-teens served up by an abundant team of authors, such as Jacques Grisé, Robert Gravel and Jean-Pierre Plante.

“Even though it was a children’s show, we took extreme care to create music that we liked too,” explains Normand Brathwaite, who joined the team in 1980. He adds with a laugh: “We agree: in the authors of Pumpkin Pop, there were some that were frosted in tabarnac. »

A potential success

Under the influence or not, the authors of Pumpkin Pop certainly knew how to take the pulse of what made popular culture beat at the time. And in 1982, many hits are strangely obsessed with the links between technology and love, computers and affairs of the heart.

When the author Paule Marier (later behind Bagpipe And Knock Knock knock) gave her the order for music that would pastiche new wave and her processed voices in order to accompany her text dripping with clichés written from the point of view of a grieving robot, Marie Bernard naturally turned to her records of Talking Heads and Devo.

Even before being broadcast on the November 11, 1982 issue of Pumpkin Pop, metal tears caught the ear of the composer’s then-spouse, sound engineer Paul Pagé, who often visited her at work and who played the song for Pro-Culture record label co-founder Serge Trudeau. “Both thought we had a potential hit in our hands, she said, and that we couldn’t let it pass just once at Radio-Canada. »

But since the state company owned the rights, Marie Bernard had to record a new version, albeit with the help of the same musicians, including bassist Claude Arsenault, drummer Richard Provençal and guitarist Jean-Marie Benoit.

“Me, I was feeling solid, because those guys were my idols,” exclaims Brathwaite, who was then in his mid-twenties and who found himself alongside big names heard on classics by Robert Charlebois, Diane Dufresne or Jean-Pierre Ferland.

Launched in January, the 45 laps of Metal quickly climbed the charts and became, according to The Press of April 30, 1983, “the most popular song in Quebec today”. The recording of an album co-produced by Marie Bernard and Paul Pagé, who complete the group Soupir with their fellow actor, is essential.

Like a cartoon

Released in December 1983, Eclipse is meant to be the chronicle of the first night following a breakup. If none of the other songs eclipse (!) the power of his first single, Zigzag And Game Over will look good on the FM airwaves.

The electro-funk of punch and the pop-prog à la Genesis of It’s nothing but a big heartache provide its tastiest moments to a record that has unfortunately never been reissued.

Despite this success and four citations at the ADISQ galas (in 1983 and 1984, including one for Normand in the Performer of the Year category!), Marie Bernard, naturally shy, preferred not to transpose the adventure at the scene. Like so many groups of the 1980s, Soupir will remain a studio affair.

“For me, Soupir was like a caricature. We were playing for the pure pleasure of playing, we had a fun black, but I had something else to go and explore”, confides the one who continued her work as a wave player and composer, in addition to signing the production ofA hole in the clouds (1987) by Michel Rivard (with Paul Pagé) and Major diversion (1993) by Diane Dufresne. Paul Pagé has produced essential albums by Pierre Flynn, Richard Séguin and Laurence Jalbert.

Four decades after their brief existence, the trio with the look of space patrollers was recently echoed in the Enigmas section of the respected English magazine Electronic Sound, which highlights little-known jewels in the history of world music. Journalist Scott Blixen talks aboutEclipse as “a delight for anyone looking for forgotten electro-pop”.

“When I see the clip today, where I’m in kitty boots and tights, chest exposed with a satin coat, I find it funny,” says Normand Brathwaite, who interpreted Metal To Zenith last month and for whom Marie Bernard is nothing less than a genius. “Every time I sing it, I don’t forget that it’s all from a completely fucked up children’s show. »