Charles in Charge

Walk this way: Montreal singer Gregory Charles. (Sony Music Canada)

Former Quebec premier Lucien Bouchard caused an uproar recently when he implied that Quebecers don’t work hard enough. A columnist in Montreal’s French-language daily La Presse suggested that the province might improve its productivity by following the path of Gregory Charles. 

In Quebec, he is known as “Super Gregory.” Last month, the Montreal crooner’s soulful and romantic collection of love songs, I Think of You, hit the top of the charts after selling an extraordinary 93,000 copies in its first week in stores. It was only when I Think of You sold three times as many copies as new discs by Canadian icons Sarah McLachlan and The Tragically Hip that the music industry finally took notice of Charles. But in Quebec, where 90 per cent of his albums have been sold, fans regard the 38-year-old musician as much more than a pop star in waiting. Charles is a showman, a TV actor, a radio host and a renowned choir director. To label him a Quebec vedette (star) would be an understatement. He’s a cultural phenomenon.

Charles seems star-struck by the album’s success. “I feel like a kid. I know it’s corny and vain, but the few times I’ve sung the songs, and I see women singing along, I feel like what I desperately wanted to happen when I was a teenager is finally happening,” says Charles by telephone from his Montreal loft. “I mean, they could learn so many other things — the names of planets or whatever — but they picked my songs.”

The only son of a jazz-loving Trinidadian father and a French-Canadian piano teacher, Charles started playing with symphonies as a child. While completing a law degree in the 1980s, he launched his TV career with a starring role in the legendarily popular Quebec téléroman Chambres en ville. Since then, he has been involved in a dizzying number of TV and radio shows, including CBC-TV’s Culture Shock. A former backup singer for Céline Dion, Charles is a semi-permanent fixture at Montreal’s Bell Centre, where he regularly performs his autobiographical one-man show, Noir et blanc (Black and White), to sold-out crowds. A compilation of spirituals spun off from his live show Gospel Live en Noir et Blanc has sold 75,000 copies. In 2004, he took an English version of the show to New York and Toronto.

These days, Charles hosts a three-hour Saturday-afternoon radio show on Radio-Canada, a sort of stream-of-consciousness program where he tinkles the piano keys, sings and imparts his encyclopedic knowledge of music; he is also completing work on a French-language album. The Montrealer is a passionate promoter of choral music; during our interview, Charles not only serenaded me with live cuts from I Think of You but also a few bars from Gabriel Fauré’s famous choral piece Cantique de Jean Racine. Charles travels the world as the director of the New World Youth Choir, which he founded 20 years ago, and is also the artistic director of the summer festival Mondial Choral Loto-Québec. Besides breaking into the English market, one of Charles’s dreams is to have everyone in Quebec stop and sing together for one minute.

Piano man: Gregory Charles performs at the Governor General's Performing Arts Awards in 1998. (CBC Still Collection)

Perhaps I Think of You will transform the multi-talented musician’s image from wunderkind to heartthrob. He has already undergone a bit of a makeover for his leap into the English market. He’s usually photographed bespectacled, with a wide, earnest smile; on the cover of the album, the glasses are gone and so is the grin. While still clean-cut, the husky-voiced Charles now comes across as gently sexy, much like the album’s songs, which are infused with Motown sensuality and the pulsating rhythms of the Caribbean and Latin America. The album is almost entirely in English, except for one Spanish cut. Although there’s a Cole Porter-type melancholy to some of the ballads, others are hot in a Me and Mrs. Jones kind of way. Charles names Leon Russell, Harry Nilsson, Otis Redding, Joe Cocker, Lionel Richie and Lou Rawls as artists who inspired him.

Until this album, Gregory’s reputation was largely based on his uncanny ability to cover other people’s love songs; during the second half of his one-man show Black and White, he and his band perform requests from the audience.

To write the songs on I Think of You, Charles says he drew on his “experience of dramatic loss and love.” Exposing his inner emotions is a big step for the long-time entertainer; unlike many Quebec vedettes, he never talks about his private life. But after a fall on stage at the Bell Centre last December, which broke his elbow in multiple places, Super Gregory was forced to stop performing. Physicians initially predicted the worst.

(Sony Music Canada)

"The first doctor who looked at the injury said, ‘I sure hope you don’t play the piano,’ ” Charles recalls, adding that it was the first time in his life he felt really vulnerable. “I tend to deal with pain by planning projects. When I had to stop working, things from my past came back to the surface.” It ultimately led to a period of self-reflection.

Why did he decide to express himself in English and not French, the language he usually performs in? “It felt natural. We are, after all, so far from God and so close to the U.S.,” says Charles, laughing. Besides breaking into the wider North American market, the R&B sound he wanted to explore fit better with English, says Charles. “I’m a product of a bilingual culture. I felt I had stuff to say in both languages.”

The fact that Quebec music lovers, renowned for supporting homegrown French talent, are snapping up this English album makes Charles’s latest success even sweeter, he says. “It’s incredible. I feel lots of love. I feel like my fellow citizens want me to succeed. I feel that this isn’t my project anymore, it’s theirs, too,” he says. “If we do find success elsewhere in Canada, that will be great, but the relationship that I have with Quebecers means a lot.”

Will I Think of You help bridge Canada’s two cultural solitudes? Charles has certainly got major star-making muscle behind him. He counts Céline Dion and her manager/husband René Angélil among his advisers. Julie Snyder, host and producer of Star Académie and an all-around powerhouse in the Quebec entertainment industry, helped produce the DVD of Black and White, which was released this week. While Snyder and Dion have made millions transforming Quebec talent into glitzy American-style products, we can only hope that Super Gregory sticks to his own path.

Patricia Bailey is a writer and broadcaster based in Montreal.

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