Every day, a personality invites herself into the world of Élodie Suigo. Today, Quebec musician, actor, author, composer and performer, Robert Charlebois. On April 1 and 2, 2023, he is on the stage of the Grand Rex in Paris for his show “Charleboiscope”.
Robert Charlebois is a Quebec artist and like any Quebec artist, he likes to touch everything and not be conditioned, cataloged and put in a box. He is therefore a musician, actor, author, composer and performer all at the same time. To sum up, he is an institution in all French-speaking countries, just like Gilles Vigneault and Félix Leclerc, with whom he started and collaborated. Even in the cinema, he worked with Sergio Leone for the film A genius, two partners, a bell with Miou-Miou and Terence Hill, a star of this spaghetti western. On April 1 and 2, 2023, Robert Charlebois is on the stage of the Grand Rex in Paris for his show: Charleboiscope.
franceinfo: Charleboiscope is a colorful show surrounded by friends, some even say it is one of your finest. Do you honestly think so too?
Robert Charlebois: Yes, yes, it is an apotheosis! We always have something more beautiful. We find our truth once, let’s put Claude Nougaro with his album The Don Juans, jazz and java only masterpieces. And then in the shows, there is one, in any case, which made Quebec stand up for three or four years, and I wanted to do the show as it is, without concession.
‘Charleboiscope’ is the wizard, in front of a screen of ten ‘vusiciens’ and ten ‘musicians’. Everything you see on the screen is done in the service of emotion, just to make the hairs on your arms stand up at the right time.
Robert Charleboisat francinfo
This is not a show where there is room for jokes! And it’s also a gift that people give me to still be here after 60 years, let’s say 50 years for France.
This show is first and foremost a great way to bring to light and in images what has shaped you as an artist, because you are first and foremost a man on the stage. So let’s go back to the beginning. At the start, there is a bourgeois family, you go straight. You will quickly want to make music. It starts with the piano.
Yes, piano. Chopin for children, all that. I learned with nuns that I found very pretty. And when I got out of boarding school, I fell into the American Revolution, rock ‘n’ roll. That’s when I got the idea to buy myself a guitar. In the beginning, we bought amps to play like cowboys and louder. With the 70s came fuzz pedals, saturators and then, perhaps thanks to my friendship, then to my work with Frank Zappa, I made a lot of progress on the electric guitar.
And then Felix Leclerc.
He’s my mentor because the first song of my life, I think I had mumps, I was nine, and somebody came along with this record where he was singing The little happiness, then it ended up whistling and I wondered what it was that cowboy who was whistling like that. And Felix is really perhaps the instigator of my career.
I would like us to talk about the year 1967 and your hairstyle studded with flowers. That’s your eccentric side too, different from the others. You have always been yourself.
Maybe if I never had a Hendrix bump, I wouldn’t have had a career. Me, I always said that I was a singer with hair and the day I lose my hair, I stop singing.
I would like to talk about Lindbergh sung with Louise Forestier. What does it represent for you in this journey?
‘Lindbergh’ is a deconstructed song, completely revolutionary because no two verses have the same number of feet.
Robert Charleboisat franceinfo
AT At the time, I had shown the text to my friend Gilles Vigneault and he said to me: “You’re crazy, it’s impossible to put this to music“And me, you mustn’t tell me that. As soon as someone says to me: “Don’t go there, don’t do that“I’m going! And so it started as a challenge and I started to like it. There’s a kind of madness in there: “A parachute drop kriss“and take God’s name, I was excommunicated for a phrase like that at the time.
I would like to talk about the song Ordinary. It is autobiographical and I have the impression that it is a bit of a summary of all that life.
We sum everyone up with three songs. If you think of Frank Sinatra, it’s My Way, New York, New York And Fly me to the moon. If you think of me, my My way It is OrdinaryMy New York, New York, c‘East I will come back to Montreal And Fly Me to the Moon, c‘East Lindbergh.
What does this career represent?
It’s a miracle. Let’s say that I have the best job in the world and I affirm it and I admit it, I thank synchronicity for having given it to me, not to say the sky! It’s stronger than cinema, it’s stronger than anything for me, music. She is a very demanding mistress. I am not a man of music or a poet, but I am a guy of songs as one could say of a Mbappé that he is not a sportsman, but that he is a football guy, excuse the comparison!