February 3, 1999
By BRENDAN KELLY
The guys from Sky are in seventh heaven.
The Montreal musical duo seems to be hitting
all the right notes these days and, in a recent
interview James Renald and Antoine Sicotte
both readily admitted they're still having a hard
time coming to grips with their recent good
fortune.
Sky's first major-label single,
the funky urban pop ditty
Some Kinda Wonderful, has
been in the Top 10 in Canada
for the past few months, and
the group's first album, Piece of Paradise, is a
top priority for EMI Music Canada.
The 10-track collection of groove-tinged tunes
hit stores across Canada yesterday. The
British-owned multinational record company is
set to launch the album throughout Southeast
Asia at the end of the month, and Some Kinda
Wonderful is already a No. 1 hit in Thailand.
The two musicians, both in their mid-20s, I
know all too well that success doesn't come
easily in the cutthroat music biz, which is why
they're marveling at suddenly finding
themselves on the industry fast-track.
Renald and Sicotte first met at a
music-engineering school in Montreal seven
years ago and, like every other budding pop
outfit, they spent a good number of years
penning tunes and jamming in their living
room.
They finally decided to go it alone, creating
their own record label (Phat Royale), and
releas-ing a self-produced five-song EP. No
one was more surprised than the folks in Sky
when one of the tunes from the indie disc,
America, nabbed heavy-duty radio and video
rotation in Quebec. Before you could say
"overnight sensation," EMI stepped-in and
signed Sky.
The major label, whisked Renald and Sicotte
out of their Outremont digs and soon enough
had them recording in Los Angeles with
seasoned producer Peter Mokran, who has
worked with R. Kelly and Michael Jackson,
among others.
During the West Coast sessions, the young
Montrealers Bumped into folks like Ray
Charles, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Natalie
Imbruglia, and sultry Ally McBeal songstress
Vonda Shepard.
It was an even bigger thrill for these two avid
music-lovers to be able to record a couple of
tunes with legendary sidemen like Motown
guitarist Wah Wah Watson, who played on
Papa Was a Rolling Stone, and the famed
Tower of Power horn section.
"It was really fun, especially after six years in
the living room," said Sicotte. "To play with
those guys was just ecstasy. It was totally
mind-blowing. It sent shivers down my spine."
In Sky, Renald provides the soulful lead
vocals, most of the melodies and virtually all of
the lyrics, while Sicotte - a well-known figure
on the St. Laurent Blvd. late-night club scene -
chips-in with the chunky bass-and-drum
rhythms. What sets Sky apart is the band's
hip but not hip-hop melange of urban groove
and melodic pop. It's accessible and
mainstream without stoopimg to the
lowest-common-radio-denominator.
"Our influences are very diverse," said
Renald, a francophone Quebecer who grew
up in Vancouver. "We wanted to take the best
elements of all kinds of music and fuse them
together. It's uncharted territory for the music
industry to have a record that's so diverse. But
just the fact that it all comes out of our heads,
it somehow holds together. It was done back
in the days of the Beatles, where you bid
records that were just completely all over the
board stylistically. So we thought: Why not?'
We thought people will be able to see through
those boundaries and see the quality of the
songs.
"The business has taken more control of the
music but, at the end of the day, it's still the
public that decides, said Sicotte, whose father
is the wellknown Quebec actor Gilbert Sicotte.
"People don't like it when they,get to the sixth
song on the record and they say: 'Damn, I've
been listening to the same song six times in a
row and the only thing that's different is the
arrangement.'We didn't want to have that. We
wanted to bring people into a different world in
every song."
back to the articles
back to the mainpage