
This illustration and the accompanying text were my homage to the incendiary anarcho-orchestral Québécois folk-trash troupe Tintamare when they disbanded in 2019
I discovered my favourite band by accident on my very first week in Montréal when I leaned across a random table at an indie press fair and tried to ask a stranger with a dreadhawk if The Coming Insurrection had ever been banned in Québec. Unfortunately my French was perfectly incomprehensible at the time and the guy had no idea what I was saying, but he recognized the book and told me he was the guitarist of a “post-capitalist dirty brass band” that I should definitely check out if I was down to eat the rich.
That band was Tintamare.
When I went to see them perform at the rickety (and now-defunct) Café Chaos a few months later, I watched awestruck as they delved into their dazzlingly elaborate compositions with feverish gusto, radiating a contagious defiance and galvanic swashbuckling energy that swept up the audience like a hot whirlwind. Gab Séguin stroked and slapped his double bass in a furious erotically-charged delirium while Simon “Slinky” Lefebvre knelt at the front of the stage riling up the crowd with claps and hollers and a playful sort of “who, me?” rebellion twinkling in his eyes, as if he was innocently surprised by the dangerous fervour he was igniting in the mosh pit. Bellowing along to the music, the roiling crowd was a sultry mess of punks in overalls sloshing beer all over the floor as they swung each other around in a violently cozy frenzy of drunken camaraderie.
Caught up in the frothing vortex of the bacchanalia, I was overwhelmed by the impression that every show I’d ever been to in my life had been literally dead in comparison to this sexy sweaty maelstrom of downhome joie de vivre!
I went on to spend countless rollicking nights stomping the beer-sticky floorboards at Tintamare’s anarchic hoedowns over the years. Whipped in the face by bone pendants and matted dreadlocks and sometimes pressed so hard against the stage I thought my ribs would crack, I stayed thick in the debauchery from the first bass twang to the last. Not that there was ever really a choice – if you went flying out of the writhing pit, calloused hands caught you and threw ya straight back in! Such was the affectionate mayhem of the whiskey-fuelled Québécois folk-trash scene, and no headliner could incite that exquisite chaos more masterfully than Tintamare.
Perhaps their most memorable performance was the exuberant album release of Théorème du nombre critique with Yiddish cabaret noir ensemble Orkestar Kriminal, where a cloaked Émile Schneider’s dramatic reading of “Contr’un” in the pitch dark suddenly gave way to the surging brass fury of “Moyen-Âge” and coloured lights started shimmering and flashing in Samuel Carrier’s glasses as he massaged shivering moans from his supple accordion. Or maybe it was their theatrical Maîtres de Feu set at the circus arts venue La TOHU, where madhouse acrobats clambered out of a giant papier-mâché head and tumbled around onstage to the mounting crescendo of “Régicide” in a vaudevillian rendition of an asylum escape. Or was it that twilight St-Jean show in Parc du Pélican where Olivier Latulippe and Jonathan Millette whirled around like devil-may-care satyrs behind the flaming orbs of the Carnaval Abraxas fire dancers while the frenzied crowd smashed through the barricades and brawled with city police in an attempt to rush the stage? It’s impossible to choose, because every show seemed to be weirder, wilder, and more carnally chaotic than the last.
Tintamare was not just a band, but a provocative force of nature, a radical political statement, and an absolutely magnetic cult of shit-kicking misfits hollerin’ truth to power.
The explosive impact this group had on the genre will continue to send revolutionary shockwaves out through the scene for years to come, and their fiery magic will rage on forever in the headphones and the hearts of everyone who was brave or crazy enough to leap into the blaze ❤︎
TINTAMARE EST MORT. VIVE TINTAMARE.