Pierre Perpall loves to dance with you
Disco king sets out to reclaim throne with help from new Montreal audience
To Montreal music fans from the disco era, Pierre Perpall is a legend. To the much younger audience expected in full disco regalia at his Pop Montreal concert on Friday, he’s a myth.
At 64, Perpall still keeps his nose to the grindstone, performing weekly at dinner clubs and corporate functions, and he spends three months a year in Florida doing the odd show. He also continues to release music, although his most recent works are more of the crooning, bigband variety.
The thing is, Pop Montreal showgoers aren’t expecting modern-day, afro-less Pierre Perpall to take the stage on Friday — they want Purple Flash, his disco doppelgänger from 1978 to 1984. He has a new generation of listeners, born after Montreal’s disco heyday, who only know his older hits, or even just his 1978 single J’aime danser avec toi, now more famously known as Track 2 on a DJ-Kicks compilation by Chromeo.
Those songs sound the same today as they did the moment they were recorded, and the svelte and perpetually smiling Perpall, who Rollerblades daily and can still cut a rug better than most 20-somethings, is relishing the challenge of turning back the clock with his newfound youthful audience. He intends to give them the explosive disco club night — complete with seasoned live band — they’ve never experienced before.
“There are going to be a lot of young people there expecting the show to be like how it was back in those days,” he says. “I have to be top-notch; I want to give people a little bit of that nostalgia. The show is going to touch most of my eras, and I’m preparing costume changes for each. I still have the space captain jacket I wore as Purple Flash. I hope it still fits.”
Perpall’s five decades of performing have covered every trend from British Invasion to AOR rock, to disco, to synth-pop; today he can cover everything from old soul hits to current Top 40, depending on the gig. Like many of his new fans, he has a soft spot for disco. If this Pop Montreal show is a success, Perpall hopes to perform more as his alter ego, and possibly even record again as Purple Flash.
“I loved it because there was a lot of funk music in it that mixed with the disco beats,” he says.
Perpall was still in his rock phase when he was cajoled by his record label into writing disco tunes. “They knew I was a good dancer,” he recalls.
“We did all the discos in Montreal. The scene here was as big as New York. We’d go down to New York, too, and play two clubs a night, two songs at each club, and get paid $1,000.
We were making money fast, but we were spending it just as quickly.”
Perpall has another identity, Pluton & Humanoids, which he used to release the single World Invaders in 1981. The Giorgio Moroder-meetsMichael McDonald Italodisco hybrid was ignored upon release, but has grown in stature, and record collectors have reached out to Perpall, offering big bucks for original vinyl copies.
“I’ve sold almost everything,” he says. “The last record I sold for $850, and before that I sold one for $1,300. It’s incredible. The record company that released World Invaders (V.S. Records) couldn’t get them to go, so they only pressed 500. Now it’s a rare item.”
Perpall has a theory as to why his music has found a new audience. “At a certain point, you sing for so long that you create your own natural essence,” he says. “I think young people are discovering that; they feel that raw sound.”