After 14 drummers and countless antics from their death-defying drummer Johnny Maldoror, it’s official: The Breastfeeders are unkillable. The band recounts their 25 years aboard the funny funicular of the Montreal underground.
Like many great stories, this one opens with a shot of a young man trying to heal his heart with the means at hand. At the dawn of the new millennium, Luc Brien reluctantly embraces the existence of a solitary lover.
“After a breakup, I started listening to a lot of sixties garage rock in French, then quietly writing in that style,” he recently recalled on the terrace of the Esco, this teeming rock cave on rue Saint-Denis, the Cavern Club des Breastfeeders. “The lyrics came to me immediately because in this music, there is a lot of cuckold business and poor guys getting beaten up there. »
Two splendid Ostrogoths galore, the bassist Jocelyn Gagné, known as Joe, and the little pest Martin Dubreuil, then lived in the same building as Brien, at the corner of Chateaubriand and Duluth. “It was the time when you could buy an eight and a half for $1,000,” says the man who has since become known as one of the most intense actors of his generation.
They will help their comrade to wake up from his torpor, while he had already begun to sublimate his spleen into a rock’n’roll for boys with long hair and girls in miniskirts, disciples of Baudelaire and worshipers of Françoise Hardy.
“We dreamed of a band project and I had already imagined the character I was going to become before even knowing what instrument I would play,” says Dubreuil, who tried his luck on the drums, but who struggled to keep up. pace.
During the audition of the man who would become the group’s first guitarist, Sunny Duval, the clumsy little boy picked up a tambourine. Brien: “We have the recording of the rehearsal and we can clearly hear Joe say to Martin: “Yeah, it looks like you found your instrument, my Johnny!” »
“For me, Les Breastfeeders is the pinnacle of Montreal French garage. There were other bands in the genre, but it was the one that had the most personality, that was the most incisive,” observes Max Hébert, the group’s 14th (!) drummer, initially recruited to appear in a music video.
“If I play in The Breastfeeders, it’s because of my looks,” he adds, provoking laughter from his colleagues, even if no one denies that it’s the pure truth. The other two most recent additions to the lineup, guitarist David Deïas and singer Karine Roxane Isabel, also have the wardrobe for the job.
But if The Breastfeeders, just as keen to look good as they are, have always been able to chase away the noxious odors of this nasty disease called retro, it is largely thanks to their generous lyrics with hilarious rantings and in wonderfully found formulas, with a finesse of spirit having nothing to do with yéyé or with Budweiser rock.
“I suffered a lot from loneliness in high school and that’s when I started playing with words, writing sentences that taught me about myself,” confides Luc Brien, a reader with palpable culture. classic, who co-signed the majority of the band’s lyrics with his friend Dubreuil, whose pseudonym, Johnny Maldoror, is a borrowing from the legendary work of Lautréamont (Les chants de Maldoror, written in the 19th century), the surrealists’ bedside book .
The Breastfeeders’ stage fame, although a group effort, is of course largely attributable to the reckless antics of Johnny Maldoror who, in 25 years of kohl under his eyes and spitting in the air, has never stopped risking his physical integrity, to mishandle his tambourine and to embody to the core the idea that ridicule does not kill.
His worst escapade? “Oh boy! “, exclaims the man everyone in the Montreal underground calls “Joe des Breast”. Around the table, suggestions flow: the time when Johnny showed himself to be the maldoror in the spotlight of Quebec’s national holiday, the time, at Café Campus, where he threw a pitcher which hit a young woman whose father had a lot of influence in the entertainment industry. Or the time, in Lafayette, where a stage manager let him know that he would not hesitate to use his shotgun if he started climbing the columns on each side of the stage again.
Johnny Maldoror’s stage agitation owes a lot to Axl Rose, Dubreuil being a lifelong fan of Guns N’Roses, to the despair of his too-cool-for-that colleagues, and to GG Allin, that antichrist of 1980s punk, alongside including the bibitte invented by Dubreuil is a character in children’s films.
There is also a bit of Dubreuil’s father in Maldoror, even if he was unaware of it when he gave birth to his alter ego. “I was not raised by my father, I knew him late and when I finally met him, I learned that he had played in a band, Les Chantels,” says he, suddenly moved, about the late Albert Ramaglia.
“And his favorite instrument was the tambourine. It was the only instrument he kept and he left it to me. » We will hear the tambourine in question for the first time in the fall, on the Breastfeeders’ fourth album, another proof that even if life is mortal, baby, rock’n’roll is eternal .
