Wednesday, June 25, 2025

Serge Fiori

It seems to be a month for the passing of our rock and roll heroes. Brian Wilson, Sly Stone, and this week Mick Ralphs the great British guitarist who gained fame with Mott The Hoople and later Bad Company. Millions of teenage basement bands, including my first band, can thank Mick Ralphs for teaching us how to rock on the three chorder Can’t Get Enough. That was the first rock song I ever learned to play, but it took 45 years for me to learn - from an interview with Ralphs I recently watched - that we were playing it wrong. Turns out it was originally played and recorded in an open C tuning, not standard tuning. No wonder it never sounded quite right when we played it. 

But I wanted to pay tribute to another pioneer of rock music with this post. Someone who you probably don’t know, but who was, for anyone growing up in Quebec in the 1970s, absolutely pivotal: Montrealer Serge Fiori, which also passed away this week, fittingly in the early morning hours of La Fête Nationale du Québec (formerly called Saint-Jean Baptiste Day). 

One of the few albums that I have never stopped listening to into my middle age, is the eponymous first album by the Quebec band Harmonium. Fiori was a founder, songwriter, guitarist and lead singer of the band. 

Thanks to new Canadian Content regulations on radio, and the album rock orientation of FM stations, the burgeoning Canadian and Quebec music industries enjoyed a heyday in the 1970s. Along with progressive British rock groups like Supertramp, Genesis, Pink Floyd and Yes, who were just beginning to break into the North American market by way of Quebec FM radio, we also had hugely popular local artists like Michel Pagliaro, Robert Charlebois, Beau Dommage and my favourite Harmonium. I would describe the music of Harmonium as progressive folk, along the lines of the Moody Blues (who were also extremely popular in Quebec). The music had a distinct traditional Quebecois flavour, with lush twelve-string guitars, tempo-changes, and interesting chord voicings. Songs from the first Harmonium album were ubiquitous on the airwaves, especially the single Pour Un Instant, with the deeply resonant opening lines: 

Pour un instant, j'ai oublié mon nom,

Ça m'a permis enfin d'écrire cette chanson.

Pour un instant, j'ai retourné mon miroir,

Ça m'a permis enfin de mieux me voir. 

(translation) 

For a moment, I forgot my name,

It finally allowed me to write this song.

For a moment, I returned my mirror,

It finally allowed me to see myself better.


The explosion of Quebec popular music came at a time when political separatism was coming into the mainstream as well. There was a lot of pressure for Quebec artists to publicly embrace the politics, to be voices of the movement, and many (maybe even most) did. Serge Fiori was no different. The lyrics of Pour un Instant were not only interpreted as an individual's experience of momentarily losing oneself in art and experiencing a sense of spiritual universal transcendence and renewal. It was also seen as an expression of rejecting the identity you have been given (by the powerful, the colonial), and finding a new sense of self, in a nationalist sense. 

Later in the song:    

Des inconnus vivent en roi chez moi,

Moi qui avait accepté leurs lois.

J'ai perdu mon temps à gagner du temps,

J'ai besoin de me trouver une histoire à me conter.

(translation)

Strangers live like kings in my house,

I who had accepted their laws.

I wasted my time stalling,

I need to find a story to tell myself.


As a teenager, anglo-Quebeckers like me who loved the music didn't pay much attention to the political subtext of the lyrics. It's one of those those ironies of growing up in Quebec during that tumultuous period, that the very forces that threatened us politically, inspired a cultural renaissance of the richest, most meaningful art and music that we carry with us forever. 

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