Idée Fixe? You’ve never been? That place over there, with the for-sale sign? Yeah, the red and yellow patio. Idée Fixe? Oh man, you missed out! Named after the dog from that french comic strip, the little white one. Oh, that was a great place back in the day! Great dive. Big bottles of 50. Yeah, for sure, an old man bar with twenty-year-old babes invading in a flock once the neighbourhood became trendy to the university students. It wasn’t like that when I first came here for school. The internet wasn’t like that, I didn’t know about the Mile-End or barely. We’d come to St-Laurent on the weekends and hit the bars but that would rarely go north of Monty-Royal. Tighter circles because there weren’t blogs or anything that told you about bars, and there weren’t influencers. Word got out differently so even Saint-Laurent seemed like the frontier and when you took a cab, you’d go over this weird overpass, it’s not there any more but it really made you feel like you were in a whole other quadrant of the city and it was weird. When I moved back, I didn’t have a job for a while and would walk from the Mile-End to my friends place in St-Henri and the overpass had been torn down and i was amazed at how it had warped my sense of the city, a colossal waste of space. So I don’t know how long Idée Fixe has been there but i used to live on top of the pizza place a few doors down from it and we could see people on the patio from our front balcony, they’d just wave to us and we’d come down for a big bottle of 50 or two then before you knew it, the neon signs would be on and the night would come down and you had a good spot on the front patio so why quit while we’re ahead? There were two older gentlemen behind the bar, one was a bald Belgian, nice enough guy but kind of looked like a bond henchman but the main guy, I think he own the bar, his name was Ghislaine and man, I wish you could have met him, I’ve never seen a more French looking dude in my life, y’know? He had this very gruff exterior, would bark at you in french but was actually a nice enough guy, he’s just seen it all and didn’t have too much extra time to lay down the bedside manner but he had this prodigious gut, a big beautiful red-wine and cheese fuel tank, he was skinny everywhere else except for his amazing gut. Real nice guy after he saw you come in a few times and he would secretly smoke his cigarette under the bar, not exactly secret, he kept it hidden but wouldn’t give a shit if you saw or smelled the smoke. His bar, his rules. Yeah, you had the usual lottery machine crowd in the back like a lot of bars and the jukebox was free. That was one of the best parts, it was free and it was overflowing with incredible 80s and 90s music: Tom Petty, Peter Gabriel, Fleetwood Mac and REM and y’know what? Speaking of REM, I almost got into a fight with this dude in his 20s, I was exactly that much holder than, a skater hipster dick-smack and I don’t know how we started talking about REM but he started mouthing off saying they were a dad-rock band because of the 90s album that was playing at the time and I’m sure you can guess the first song that came on? Yeah, exactly, that one! So he’s going off because he’s got such impeccable taste and I politely suggest to him that he goes back to the first albums in the 80s because they’re incredible. Arguably some of the year zero of that precious genre we now call ‘indie music’ but let’s be clear, it was a method of distribution, right? The labels were actually independent, it was before it became a weird catch-all for a sound that meant the band had beards and eighteen members and master’s degrees in some obscure historical period. Yeah yeah, exactly! A tall woman who looks like Velma from Scooby Doo behind the keys and they’re playing some janky wiry African-inspired rhythm and they’re all white as milk, that kind of shit. So, he says they’re dad-rock and I ask him if he’s listened to any of the first albums and he says no but fuck that shit and I tell him to fuck off and we started yelling at each other and I can’t remember how it ended but he knew he wasn’t sure and it wasn’t ever going to go that way but yeah, fuck that guy. So, here’s what I remembered, this one time I was there with a couple friends from the video game place and we were there on a quiet night, probably mid-week and there weren’t many people around and we sat at the high table with our bottles of 50 in front of us and the jukebox was broken or something and they were just playing their mixed CDs, they had multiple shelves of these CDs all in a row, like an arsenal and this song comes on and I recognise it from fifteen, maybe twenty years before. I had no idea who it was but when I was maybe eighteen back in Toronto, I was at a pool hall at Yonge and Eglinton and we were hanging out and this song comes on and it’s super catchy, has this kind of stair-step melodic synth line and it just keeps drilling it into you. No shame. It’s got a hook and it wants to show it off and I went to the guy behind the desk at the pool hall and asked him if he knew what the song was and he just shrugged and said it’s the radio, I can’t help you, kid. So I’m disappointed but I forget about it. There was no Google or Shazam or anything and that was that. I lost the song and if I was lucky, it would show up again. And sure enough, fifteen years later at Idée fixe, they’re playing a burnt cd mix because the jukebox is broken and the lost song comes on. What did I do? I freaked out and told my friends to shut up for a second and listened as hard as I could to see if I could pick out any lyrics, I concentrated really hard and got a few lines and ran out of the bar back to my apartment on top of the pizza place just basically next door and hurried up the stairs, repeating the lines to I didn’t forget them and ran down the hallway probably scaring my roommates half to death and I get into my room and I type the lines into google as fast as I can and press enter and you know what? I hit enter and boom this weird half-remembered title came up from the 80s and I knew the band and I clicked on the youtube icon that came up and it was almost instant. Five seconds and that hook came in and there was no doubt in my mind. It’s like knowing in the body. Yeah man I found it! After fifteen years I found the lost song? Oh you’ll never guess. Try and guess. No no, really? Anyways, boom! It comes up in all of its cheesy elegant glory, an 80s masterpiece that waited fifteen years to reveal itself to me and there it is in black and white: A Flock of Fucking Seagulls.
Oliver Sullivan 