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Someone
Le Magicien / Selon le Bible - 7"
Canuma - 1970
Michael Panontin
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Someone issued two impossibly rare singles around the turn of the decade, 1969's 'Chante et danse avec moi' on Visa and this one the following year on the Canama imprint, which aside from being rather cool in themselves mark the first sides by Quebec singer/songwriter Gilles Valiquette.
The Montreal band actually got their start in early 1967 while the young boys - Valiquette was barely into his teens - were off school because of a teacher strike. "Normann Langlois, our drummer, is the one who organized it all," Valiquette explained to CM. "I was fourteen years old and playing guitar at the time while Langlois was two years older than I. We attended the same secondary school in Villeray."
Someone spent the next year or so gigging around the city, with a set that consisted of "top ten and underground hits, mostly in English". By the tail end of '68, with the heavier fare of Cream and Hendrix starting to find their way onto the lads' record players and with the group whittled down to a trio of Valiquette and Langlois with Yves David Poirier on bass, they were encouraged by a small-time producer named Ronald Grenier to "do something silly and you'll have a hit".
So they entered Stereo Sound's four-track studio and recorded two tracks, 'Chante et danse avec moi' and 'Il est encore temps', which were issued as a seven-inch on the Visa label. "It came out a few weeks later and had only one review: 'This record finds its way to the trash can more easily than others'," Valiquette says half-jokingly. "Needless to say, we ended up with no hit at all and a silly record on our hands."
Undaunted, the guys eventually caught the ear of Michel Cordy, another no-name who had issued a handful of singles in the mid-sixties on his own Cordy label. As Valiquette recalls, "Cordy was a nice guy but knew nothing about producing records and even less about coaching young recording artists." But this time around the band were armed with Valiquette's 'Le Magicien', a track with a driving guitar riff and hook-laden vocals that seemed destined to climb a few charts at least. Someone made two recordings of the song, at the four-track Studio Six and then again at RCA's spanking-new eight-track studio on Rue de la Gauchetiere. Though Valiquette still feels that the first version was the better of the two, it was shelved in favour of the RCA recording. The guys must surely have felt that success was just around the corner. But, as he laments, that was not to be. "The single got light airplay in the areas we used to play but really didn't get anywhere. Overall, an amateur teen effort."
Someone, to abuse a cliche, soldiered on opening for Quebecois chansonnier Robert Chalebois and touring with Montreal heavy-hitters Sex. Valiquette of course would go on to be a best-selling solo artist on the Quebec scene, but not, he notes, without the ghost of his first band coming back to haunt him. "In 1975, while I was on the verge of releasing my third album, some smart-aleck resuscitated a 1971 English demo made by Someone and tried to pass it as my new album, without proper credit or context." The album in question, And Now Valiquette, is still a thorn in the side of the francophone icon, who by his own admission sees himself as "a recordings enthusiast, collector and lover of archival stuff".
Still, Valiquette looks back on that early period with little regret. "I feel very fortunate to have been a music fan when pop music history was being made and to have been a participant while Quebec was coming of age on a cultural level. Nobody could buy that."
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