During the mid-1960s, as the French and Italian neorealist cinemas, led by filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and Michealangelo Antonioni, were amidst a new-wave renaissance, the American director William Asher produced a string of immensely popular movies that rode the waves, literally.
Beach Party, Muscle Beach Party, Bikini Beach, and Beach Blanket Bingo weren’t intellectual, political treatises like Breathless and Band of Outsiders, and they didn’t represent internal emotional turmoil like Red Desert and Blow-Up.
As their names implied, they were about no more than a few sunshiny teenagers’ seaside escapades. But they came to define a time of relative peace and prosperity in the United States following the shocks of World War II, and before the tumultuous Vietnam war era.
Six decades on, as students once again occupy university campuses, and artists of all stripes respond to pressures from every side to politicize their productions, there is something to be said, a new value to be discovered, in music as pure entertainment.
“It’s not politically engaged, and it’s not therapy for me, like it is for some artists,” explains Jules Henry of Super Plage, the Montreal-based Electropop act.
“That’s always been the element that links the projects that I’ve had under various kinds of music: I’ve always wanted it to be catchy and appealing.”
Henry began playing in Pop-Punk bands and mounting intimate gigs with friends in his native Rimouski as a teenager. Coming of age in a distinctly Francophone community, embracing Anglophonic culture might have been Henry’s first real act of rebellion.
“I never heard a song in English that my parents played,” Henry says. “I grew up listening to very local Folk-Pop music. But then I started really having my own records and cassettes. We just watched Blink 182 and Sum 41 on MusiquePlus. That was our school, I guess.”
Henry is a self-taught musician who didn’t respond well to the confines of music lessons. “At ten, I knew that it wasn’t for me, and I never really did it after that,” he confesses. “I took production classes here in Montreal a few years ago, so although I don’t know the theory of music that much, I know the practice of producing.”
After relocating to the city in the summer of 2014, Henry quickly decided to devote his life to musicianship. “Most of the time, I’m alone in front of my computer with my synths and stuff,” he explains, “and I’m trying to come up with cool musical ideas that I could lay down some lyrics on. Lately, like in the past year, I’ve been experimenting a lot more in the studio with other people, in other studios.”
Henry found himself influenced by a certain strain of Electropop with roots in the French Touch sound. “I’m not a big connoisseur of that era, but I love Daft Punk,” says Henry. “I really love La Femme, I’ve been into Channel Tres lately, and all that more house-y stuff that is more bassy, almost Rap. Although I was never into Rap. You know, back home, we had to make a choice: you were either a Punk guy, or a Rap guy.”
Henry began recording under the Super Plage moniker in 2019 and soon became affiliated with Lisbon Lux Records, the Montreal Indie imprint.
“I’ve been following the label for a lot of years before I signed with them,” says Henry. “La Couleur is one of the reasons why I do what I do, and I’ve always been a fan of their career. So, it was very exciting for me to sign with the same label. And we’re really getting along, so hopefully this lasts.”
Almost immediately after Henry launched his new project, the pandemic struck, and he was forced, along with everyone, offstage and indoors. “I was here, man, in my bathrobe just making music,” he recalls of the two-year shutdown. “I would wake up very early, go into the studio, and try not be touched by laziness, and just make the most of this time, that I could just, like, chill at home and make something worthwhile.”
Although it’s ultimately live performance that propels Henry and gives him a sense of purpose as a professional musician.
“I do have a lot of fun at home, producing stuff,” he says. “But sometimes if I don’t play a show for a month or two in the wintertime, I don’t know, I don’t really feel like an artist unless I’m in a situation where people see me doing it. If I’m at home alone, I’m just a guy making music.”
However, there is doubtless genius in simplicity. And with the accolades around his 2023 release, Magie à Minuit, and a slickly produced new video for the single “Rue Dandurand” — a track upon which La Couleur features — Super Plage is setting a new high watermark.
“We’re working on an album that’s going to come out next year,” Henry tells me. “We’re working on some singles that will be coming out in the next few months. And we have a big show coming at Fairmount Theatre in Montreal. It’s going to be pretty amazing, I think. It’s been faster and slower, and simpler and more complicated. But I’m always trying to just make something catchy that makes you feel good.”
A little bit of feel good goes a long way. In the cultural sphere, there has been an attitude for too long that great art needs to challenge and provoke its audiences, that discomfort equates epiphany.
The 1960s American beach movies and their enormous success, despite a spate of serious-minded art cinema, were evidence that not everything need be some didactic statement, that sometimes it’s advantageous to just let go and enjoy, even — especially — if it feels like the surrounding world is falling apart.
“I like to think that some parts are clever, and there’s a bit of nostalgia added to it, but mostly it’s just to listen and have fun.” says Henry.
“It’s not intended to be a lot more than that.”◼︎
Super Plage performs 23 May 2024 at Fairmount Theatre, 5240 Avenue du Parc.
Cover image: Jules Henry photographed by Marie Michele Bouchard.
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