Les Foufounes Électriques: four decades of electric buttocks

Every city has a venue that respectable people warn you about and everyone interesting eventually walks into. In Montreal it sits at 87 Sainte-Catherine Est, in the Quartier Latin, and its name translates — there is no way to soften this — to The Electric Buttocks.

Born from painted backsides

Les Foufounes Électriques opened in 1983, founded by Norman Boileau, François Gourd and Bernard Paquet, three friends who came out of a musical theatre troupe with the idea of building something the city did not have: part nightclub, part art space, part launchpad for underground music. The name was not a marketing decision. It came, as the founders later told The Guardian, from their habit of exhibiting painted buttocks inside old television sets at performance-art happenings. They named the bar after the bit. The bit stuck for forty years.

The clubhouse the underground needed

Through the eighties and nineties, Foufs — nobody says the full name — became the headquarters of everything Montreal's mainstream nightlife had no room for: punk, goth, metal, new wave, skate kids, art freaks. The building grew into a multi-level cavern of concert rooms, bars and a dance floor, its walls disappearing under graffiti, posters and welded sculptures — a space that looked the way the music sounded, and never once renovated its way to respectability. Quebec underground pioneers like Grim Skunk and Groovy Aardvark came up through its stages, and local heroes Me Mom and Morgentaler treated it as a home field.

The nights the world showed up

The booking policy — take the bands nobody else would, before anybody knew better — aged into legend. Nirvana played Foufs on the way up, including a stop on the 1991 Nevermind tour, months before they were the biggest band on the planet. Green Day passed through. So did Queens of the Stone Age and Mano Negra — and, in the venue's most on-brand booking, beat writer William S. Burroughs appeared in a room that treated literature as another form of noise. Tourisme Montréal now lists the Nirvana show among the legendary concerts in the city's history: the tourist board eventually endorsing the electric buttocks is its own kind of victory.

Dying once, twice, never

The venue's history is not clean. In December 1994 it lost its liquor licence and collapsed into bankruptcy, closing its doors in the mid-nineties before clawing its way back. In 2018 it was shut for ten days over complaints about violence involving its security staff. Every crisis produced the same eulogy drafts and the same result: Foufs reopened, unpolished, unmoved, still loud. Survival, in this business, is the rarest trick there is — most of the venues it came up with are condos now.

Why it matters

Forty-plus years on, Les Foufounes Électriques is one of the best-known symbols of Montreal underground nightlife — a place that proved a city famous for jazz festivals and symphony halls also needed somewhere with stickers on the ceiling where a nobody band could be two years from famous. Go on any night: the graffiti has changed again, and somewhere a band you have never heard of is playing too loud. That is the whole point, and it always was. no te limites.