Fiori-Séguin -

Fiori-Séguin were a Québécois symphonic-folk duo of ex-Harmonium guitarist/singer Serge Fiori and erstwhile Les Séguin brother Richard Séguin. The pair made the 1978 CBS album Deux cents nuits à l’heure.

Background

Fiori-Séguin formed in 1977 at Saint-Venant-de-Paquette, Quebec, when singer-guitarists Serge Fiori and Richard Séguin continued as a duo after an aborted three-man album project with Beau Dommage guitarist Michel Rivard. Fiori and Séguin first met four years earlier at the Café du Quai in Magog, where Harmonium and Les Séguin moved through the same singer-songwriter circuit.

Fiori grew up in Montreal’s Little Italy and sang from childhood in the dance orchestra led by his father, Georges Fiori. He learned guitar by ear at age twelve and played clubs with the orchestra in his mid-teens. Fiori joined Les Comtes Harbourg for the 1968 single “Jeune fille de couvent” (b/w “L’Humanité”) on Franco-Élite, then played guitar with Morphus on the 1971 self-titled album by Guy Trépanier. Fiori co-founded Harmonium with Michel Normandeau and Louis Valois in the early 1970s.

Séguin was born March 27, 1952, in Pointe-aux-Trembles, Quebec, alongside twin sister Marie-Claire Séguin. Their father gave Richard a guitar at age fourteen. The siblings formed La Nouvelle Frontière in 1969 and recorded two albums for Gamma. Richard and Marie-Claire became Les Séguin in 1972 and made four albums through the CBS release Festin d’amour.

Fiori brought Séguin into the choir on the 1976 Harmonium double-album L’Heptade. Both singers also sang backing vocals on three songs by Gilles Valiquette on Valiquette est en ville. Fiori spent breaks from Harmonium engagements at Séguin’s home in Saint-Venant-de-Paquette, where the pair played together among the local circle of musicians.

Michel Rivard joined one of the Saint-Venant sessions and discussed an album with Fiori and Séguin under the working name Trois hommes noirs. Rivard left the project for Belgium in 1977 and encouraged the other two musicians to continue as a duo. Fiori and Séguin wrote “Ça fait du bien” in a single afternoon and used the song as the basis for a larger album project.

A friend loaned Fiori and Séguin a mountain house near Magog for a month, where the pair developed material with guitars and pianos. Fiori brought a newly acquired Fender Rhodes into the house and incorporated the instrument into the compositions. The pair then shifted the project to the former Club Playboy in Sainte-Adèle in the winter of 1977–78. Engineer Guy Charbonneau installed a mobile recording unit in the building for the sessions that produced Deux cents nuits à l’heure.

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