Latest news with #English-Canadians
Montreal Gazette
17 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Montreal Gazette
Kelly: Revered Quebec singer Serge Fiori was loved by both solitudes
Music When Les Cowboys Fringants singer Karl Tremblay died in November 2023, I wrote a column about how the two solitudes were still very much a thing ici — and, yes, they still are today. I vented my frustration about how Tremblay's death was an absolutely huge thing for French Quebec and yet so few English-speaking folks 'round these parts had any idea just how important Tremblay and his band were for their franco neighbours. But that narrative doesn't work nearly as well with Serge Fiori. The Montreal singer-songwriter, who died Tuesday at age 73, was, of course, way better known by French-speaking music fans, but Fiori and Harmonium, the iconic progressive-rock band he founded in the early '70s, had a surprisingly strong following among English-Canadians. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying Fiori's as famous in the ROC (Rest of Canada) as, say, Gord Downie or Gordon Lightfoot. But back in the day, Harmonium was one of the only francophone bands to break out beyond the borders of Quebec. First, a little background for those of you who don't know him. Fiori is positively revered in Quebec for the very good reason that he is one of the greatest musical artists of his generation. If you don't believe me, slap on Pour un instant or L'Exil or Un musicien parmi tant d'autres and tell me those tracks aren't as good as anything else produced by the best British, American or Canadian tunesmiths back in the '70s. Actually, don't tell me. Because you'd be wrong. Fiori, with his falsetto vocals, sang like an angel, and he was an unbelievably gifted composer. There's a tuneful accessibility to most of what he penned, but there's also a rich complexity, with fine-textured guitar lines and, especially as time went on, almost orchestral takes on British progressive rock. Harmonium's third and final album, L'Heptade, released in 1976, is considered their masterpiece, and it's inspired folky prog-rock that can win over a guy like me who loves to hate progsters like Genesis and Gentle Giant. By 1978, the band split up and, astonishingly enough, Fiori never performed on stage again, plagued by anxiety. In fact, he disappeared from sight for much of the 1980s. In the '70s, Harmonium as much as any other group personified the hopes and aspirations of un peuple, a mantle that Fiori was never comfortable with. He was a committed nationalist, but he was also a remarkably down-to-Earth Italian-Montrealer who had difficulty seeing himself as a saviour. He didn't write all that much music in the 40-plus years since L'Heptade, but when he did, like for his very good solo album from 2014, it was as great as ever and became a huge hit. After he died on June 24, the day of La Fête de la Saint-Jean, so many online were talking about the heavy symbolism of him leaving us on Quebec's national holiday. He was as loved as any contemporary Québécois artist and was a tireless defender of the French language and culture here right up to the end of his life. Given all that, it's quite the rich irony that the local French-language music biz here was initially cool to Harmonium. I've met and interviewed Fiori many times over the years and he often told the story of how French radio in Montreal wasn't into the band in the early days. The first station to play Pour un instant was CHOM, and because of that Fiori always had a soft spot for the anglo classic-rock station. The band also signed with a Toronto-based disco label, rather than with any of the Montreal record companies. They often toured Canada to packed venues and even played throughout California, opening for Supertramp. Three years ago, my old friend Geneviève Borne and I did a podcast interviewing local musicians in both of Canada's official languages, and we had a great conversation with Fiori. I asked him how it was that English-Canadians were so into Harmonium. 'I don't know, but it was the first time a (Quebec) band was going there, all through Canada, with nights and nights booked in every city,' Fiori said. 'You'd go on stage and there's like 3,000 people at the Orpheum in Vancouver. And they sing the words in French, and that's very rare.' The record company CBS offered to pay him to re-record the Harmonium songs in the language of Lennon and he turned them down. That day in the fall of 2022, I asked him why he said 'no'. 'Cause I'm nuts,' he said with a laugh. 'First of all, there's something about writing rock 'n' roll in French that is extremely hard. It's pretty easy in English. It sounds good with nothing. Once you get it (in French), it's so profound. The song is so amazing, so even translating that in English, for me it wouldn't work… and I think if I would have done that, Quebec would have turned against me.' He said the reaction in Western Canada was exactly the same as it was here in Quebec — people just adored Harmonium. They told him they didn't care what language the songs were in, 'It was just the music.' He recalled travelling to Toronto with the band to meet with the executives at Quality Records and on the spot the label gave them five grand to make an album in Montreal, something no local label was willing to do. 'We were too weird (for the Montreal record companies),' Fiori said. But so accessible as well, you touched the heart of everyone, said Borne. 'Yeah, but they didn't believe that,' Fiori said. To which I chimed in, 'proving my theory that the vast majority of these record-company people know nothing.' 'Thank you very much,' Fiori said quietly. Then he started laughing. 'You said it!'
Yahoo
20-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Conrad Black: Liberals, not Trump, are the true threat to Canadian sovereignty
With only a little over a week to go before the federal election, and with the debates out of the way, the wheels of the Liberal campaign for a fourth-straight term are finally starting to wobble on their axles. The providential political fantasy land in which the Liberals launched the campaign — the complete fraud that Canada's continued existence was being threatened by the United States — has receded. U.S. President Donald Trump and his senior colleagues are now processing a queue of 130 countries filing into Washington offering concessions to contribute towards the elimination of the completely unnecessary United States trade deficit of around $1 trillion. Another resounding Trump victory is in the making and Canada is not an inordinately large part of it, although there will be challenging negotiations. When former prime minister Justin Trudeau told Trump that 25 per cent American tariffs on Canada would cause the Canadian economy to collapse, Trump put that assertion together with the shameful record of Canada as a freeloading passenger in its own military defence, which in practice is almost entirely outsourced to the great military power of the United States, and concluded that if Canada was afraid of tariffs and couldn't make a serious contribution to its own national defence, it would be better off within the United States. Having uttered a great deal of fatuous nonsense about Canada being a post-national country and a vanguard for the realization of the Beatles' song about a world without nationalities or religions, Trudeau leapt with considerable spontaneity into promoting Trump's comments as a genuine threat to the continued existence of Canada as a sovereign state. As this week's events and exchanges confirmed, it remains the core of the Liberal campaign. Somehow, we are to be persuaded that the United States is threatening Canada's existence, which it is not. Nothing Trump or any other American leader has said or done in nearly 200 years could be plausibly misconstrued to be a threat by the United States against the independence of Canada. It must be said that grasping at this unfeasible straw and waving it around through an election campaign like a bloody shirt has been a historic act of imaginative desperation in the interests of political survival. Trump did us a favour by pointing out the ludicrous anomaly of our agricultural price supports, which should be abolished and replaced, as appropriate, with straight income supplements to some categories of farmers. Beyond that, he seeks only reciprocally equal tariffs with Canada. In Quebec, the issue has been a double-edged sword because Quebec nationalists have tended to regard Canada as an artificial country: a patching together of English Canada with a French Canada that would rather be independent and only joined Confederation because independence was not feasible in 1867 and Confederation with the English-Canadians was preferable to continuing in a colonial status or for Quebec to take its chances as the sole linguistic outsider in an English-speaking continent north of Mexico. In their more narcissistic and grandiose moments, French Quebec nationalists have pretended that English Canada is just a buffer zone of America to anaesthetize Quebec and to delay its rightful destiny as an independent French nation. This fabrication of a counterfeit fear of an American takeover has at least had the virtue of frightening Quebec into a heightened recognition of Canada's virtues. It is galling that this waving about of the Maple Leaf flag has been conducted by the same party that has falsely accused Canada of cultural genocide against its Native people, although cultural genocide is not recognized by the United Nations. What is meant is an assimilation that immigrants to a society speaking a language other than their own voluntarily seek, but which was never attempted to be inflicted upon the Aboriginal peoples of Canada. And this is the same government that has po-facedly acquiesced in the attempted suppression of the English language in Quebec. If cultural genocide existed as a concept, the Government of Quebec under successive political parties has been guilty of attempting it against the principal language of this country and continent. Apart from this slowly departing miasma of a supposed vocation to defend the ramparts of Canada against the American hordes (who are naturally oblivious to these suspicions since they are unfounded), the Liberal campaign is to forget about the innumerable failures and competitive debacle of Canada under 10 years of Liberal government. 'I just arrived,' said Liberal Leader Mark Carney. We are to place our confidence in someone with a confected CV, of no electoral experience, a controversial record in the private sector, a man immensely well-paid and under-taxed, someone who holds himself out as a Davos socialist truckling to the deprived with money taxed from those who've earned it while padding around the country goading the president of the United States as 'the orange man,' as he falsely accuses him of coveting the takeover of this country. In this process, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has emerged as the best candidate. He is young but not too young in the Justin Trudeau manner, is a seasoned seven-term MP and has practical proposals for eliminating the grotesque Liberal deficit and restoring the competitive edge of Canada and its desirability as a place of investment and bootstrapping up its status as a NATO ally. It is no fault of Carney's that his grasp of French is inadequate for the office he seeks. Not everyone has had the privilege of learning two languages. But Canada cannot have a prime minister who sounds in one of the official languages like an Englishman trying to navigate a menu in Romania. Polls indicate that something like 30 per cent of Quebecers and citizens of Saskatchewan and Alberta will entertain the separatist option if the Liberals are reelected. After nearly 160 years as an autonomous state, this country is in sight of dissolution. This is the product of 10 years of Justin Trudeau's assault upon the oil and gas and other natural resources industries, counselled by Mark Carney, who will continue and escalate that war. A vote for the Liberals on April 28 is a vote to play Russian roulette with Canadian Confederation. Don't do it. National Post NP View: What Pierre Poilievre's massive rallies tell us about the election Michael Taube: Are cracks developing in the Liberal strategy to lionize the progressive vote?
