À part de d'ça, j'me sens ben / Opéra cirque

Diane Dufresne’s recording career began just before the decade turned, with her early breakthrough coming through François Cousineau’s soundtrack work for the erotic underground film L’Initiation. But Québec’s most eclectic diva was truly born in 1972, when Tiens-toé ben j’arrive! transformed her from singer into phenomenon: flamboyant, theatrical, streetwise, outrageous, and completely unlike anyone else in francophone pop. The album was her first full-scale solo collaboration with François Cousineau and Luc Plamondon, and its success made clear that Dufresne was not simply interpreting songs — she was building a persona. Contemporary summaries note that Tiens-toé ben j’arrive! sold more than 100,000 copies in Québec and spent more than six weeks at the top of the sales chart.

Her second long play, À part de d’ça, j’me sens ben / Opéra-Cirque, pushed that metamorphosis into stranger and more dangerous territory. Released in 1973, recorded at Studio Tempo in Montréal, and produced by François Cousineau, the album is split between the joual-rock bite of À part de d’ça, j’me sens ben and the apocalyptic mini-theatre of Opéra-Cirque. It is wild, eccentric, fiercely theatrical, politically charged, and superbly original — a carnival at the end of the world, sung by an artist already years ahead of the audience trying to catch up with her.

Everything about it feels oversized: the arrangements, the vocal attack, the circus imagery, the street language, the nationalist current, the end-times humour, and the now-famous cover image, with Dufresne’s body-painted nude upper torso photographed in a Montréal back lane. Long before pop stardom routinely rewarded provocation, Dufresne understood image, theatre, shock, and control. The comparison to later flamboyant pop icons is tempting, but Dufresne was already operating on that level in Québec in the early 1970s — not as costume alone, but as identity, performance, and cultural rupture.

The record was apparently too advanced for the wider French market: because of its lack of success, Barclay refused to release it in France. Yet time has been very kind to it. In 2008, La Presse ranked À part de d’ça, j’me sens ben / Opéra-Cirque among the 50 best Québec albums of the century, a delayed recognition for one of the boldest albums in Diane Dufresne’s catalogue.

The album has long been a favourite of Robert Williston and ranks in his MoCM Top 100 Canadian albums of all time. It is not background music. It is not polite chanson. It is not merely theatrical pop. It is a full-contact Québec art-rock spectacle — and it must be played loud, on vinyl, for full effect.

-Robert Williston