Jean Leloup

08-03-03 LISTN Jean LeloupI’m lis­ten­ing again, with plea­sure, to L’amour est sans pitié, a 1990 album by the inter­est­ing Cana­dian rock­er Jean Leloup. Leloup (“The Wolf”) is a stage name for Jean LeClerc, who was born in Que­bec, but spent his child­hood in Togo and Alge­ria, return­ing home at age fif­teen. After an appren­tice­ship in the Que­bec rock scene, he briefly found some nation­al and inter­na­tional suc­cess with this album, which has songs in both French and Eng­lish. He com­bined rock with rai ele­ments long before any­one else was doing this in North Amer­ica, and his lyrics are clever. I’m told that a sub­se­quent album, Le Dôme, which was not as wide­ly dis­trib­uted, is even bet­ter. I haven’t found a copy yet. I under­stand that he sub­se­quently pub­lished a philo­soph­i­cal nov­el called Noir des­tin que le mien, which I haven’t seen.

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