Jean-Pierre Ferland’s accomplice for his legendary album Yellow, the musician Michel Robidoux died of cancer at the age of 78, several media reported Monday. A man in the shadows, he nevertheless enjoyed a prolific career, as a guitarist on The Osstidcho to composer of the soundtrack of Master key.
We owe to Michel Robidoux many of the cult songs of the youth program, which will have marked an entire generation. But it all started long before for him, in the 1960s, in a Quebec in full cultural turmoil.
In 1968, the guitarist was part of The Osstidcho, flagship show of the Quiet Revolution mixing music and humor in which Robert Charlebois, Yvon Deschamps, Louise Forestier and Mouffe participate. We can also hear Michel Robidoux on guitar on the duo album by Charlebois and Forestier, which notably includes the subversive Lindberg.
At the same time, Jean-Pierre Ferland, until then a rather clean songwriter, returned from Paris, inspired by the psychedelic rock sound in vogue in the United States. It is in this spirit that the album was born in 1970 Yellow, on which Michel Robidoux co-signs eight of the 11 tracks, including When we love we are always twenty years old, The Café des Artistes cat and especially The little king, inducted in 2007 into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Cherish sharing
In 1988, Michel Robidoux collaborates with another giant of the song, Leonard Cohen, who will call on him to finish I’m your man. This opus will allow the illustrious Mile-End poet to return to success after crossing the desert in the early 1980s.
Michel Robidoux, himself, had chosen the shade of his own accord and wanted to stay there, unlike father, Fernand, who had known fame as a charming singer in the 1940s. “It’s not so much of the humility, in my case. I have always been good in this role. If I have to sum up my life and my career, it’s sharing, ”he declared in an interview with To have to in 2017, at the time of the launch of his first and only album in his name, Robidoux first, at the respectable age of 73.
Yet a resolutely modern record, with the participation of Pierre Lapointe, Ariane Moffatt, Daniel Bélanger and many others. Like a composer who has never ceased to renew himself over the ages.