Surviving four decades in Québec’s music industry is already a feat. Reaching that milestone without ever compromising is nothing short of a miracle. This is the story of Groovy Aardvark.
“Forty years… Ii’s like I don’t fully realize it yet,” muses Vincent Peake, the band’s frontman and one of only two founding members still there—the other being his brother Danny. “Actually, it’s like time is more elastic for us. Think about it: if you take those 40 years in the other direction, it’s like we started in 1946. It just makes no sense!”
The origins of Groovy Aardvark, the iconic band from Québec’s ’90s alternative rock scene, begin on the South Shore of Montréal. Born in Belœil, Vincent Peake first cut his teeth on guitar in the family basement while his brother Danny banged the drums. As teenagers, the brothers honed their chops in two separate local bands, Ablaze and Outrage. Meanwhile, a 17-year-old guitar prodigy, Marc-André Thibert, was already making waves in Saint-Lambert with his speedcore band, Bad Results. The Peake brothers admired Thibert, a bona fide local star who was already playing shows in Montréal.
But one particularly brutal event would seal their shared fate. In October 1986, at an underground concert put together DIY-style on Saint-Timothée Street in Montréal, a gang of skinheads stormed the event and Thibert was savagely beaten. Traumatized, the Peake brothers hid in an adjacent commercial space to avoid the worst, then rushed to the hospital to be with their friend and stay by his side. An unbreakable bond was forged between them, eventually bringing everyone together in the same band, along with Stéphane Vigeant.
The fledgling band had many guitarists, however, so Vincent Peake naturally gravitated to bass. A few years earlier, he had been forced to set the guitar aside after a nasty accident that had nearly cost him his thumb. “I was chopping wood with my stepfather and he caught me with his axe. Blood was running down my arms, and I fell to my knees,” he recalls, still shaken by the memory. “My mother gave me gin. It got me back on my feet right away.”
First known by the less-than-glamorous name Schizophrenic Muff Divers, the band eventually settled on Groovy Aardvark, as a nod to the cartoon The Ant and the Aardvark, which aired during several episodes of The Pink Panther in the ’70s. In the series, the aardvark—an ant-eating mammal native to Africa—hunts ants. The band adopted the parallel: “The ants were organized society and the aardvark was the free spirit. He does what he wants and follows his own path.”
The band’s work ethic took shape in the second half of the ’80s. After fleeing their first Montréal rehearsal space, where drugs and theft were rampant, the young band found an unexpected sanctuary in Longueuil, above a doughnut shop on Chambly Road. The owner, a Greek man named George, rented them the vast space for $450 a month, with access day and night. From 1988 to 1994, the guys held jams there every week, naturally attracting the local scene. Peake established a strict code of conduct: “I had one rule: respect people, respect the girls, respect the environment… And no heroin. Do whatever you want, but not that.”
Over the course of some 250 events, the band turned into formidable machine. “We played three one-hour sets every Friday, and we played non-stop,” Peake explains. “That was how we learned, and when we started playing shows elsewhere, we were already battle-ready.” It was also in that space that a dedicated young fan named Martin Dupuis was introduced to Groovy Aardvark’s music—the very band he would join a few years later, after obsessively learning its entire repertoire in his bedroom.
A First Reincarnation
During the early ’90s, grunge’s massive impact lit a fire under Vincent Peake and his bandmates. Known mostly for blending punk, hardcore, metal, and prog, the band began tightening up its songs. Peake, who’d recently discovered the work of Robert Charlebois, tried writing in French for the first time and came up with the hard-hitting anthem Y’a tu kelkun?, the driving force behind their debut album, Eater’s Digest, released in 1994, nearly a decade after the band was born.
They ended up on the industry’s radar and giants like BMG Québec tried to reel in Groovy Aardvark, on the condition that the band trade its name for something more marketable: The Groove. Unsurprisingly, the band passed. Sony would also come sniffing around a few years later, but the band stubbornly refused to polish up its guitars or betray its underground roots. “We were self-producing and fiercely independent in our approach,” the frontman points out.
Towards Popular Acclaim (Without Selling Their Souls)
Everything took off in 1996 with the album Vacuum. The song Dérangeant, a full-frontal attack on a shady former collaborator, went into heavy rotation on commercial radio. The band’s punk take on the trad tune Boisson d’avril also became a phenomenon, leading them to open the 1996 ADISQ Gala, which, that year, was held at the brand-new Molson Centre (now known as the Bell Centre). The band also toured almost non-stop all over Québec. Generally speaking, Québec’s alt rock movement was coming into its own, with several other hard-hitting bands rising in popularity, including Grimskunk, B. A. R. F., Anonymus, and Overbass.
And yet, that apparent fairy tale turned out to be a cruel illusion.
Sales were strong, but, according to the band, they still had to put money back into the project, notably to pay off the cost of producing the videos.
The contrast is brutally absurd: the man getting crowds chanting all over Québec at night still had to work by day to survive. “I was doing landscaping work… I had to keep my day job even in 1996!” he says.
Despite their passion, that mix of exhaustion, shady dealings, and pressure eventually ran the band dry, and they took a long, open-ended break. The compilation Sévices rendus brought this first chapter of the band to a close in 2005.
Far from being an end, this hiatus allowed Vincent Peake to broaden his horizons. He toured with Galaxie and Grimskunk and threw himself into other projects, including Floating Widget and Aut’Chose. He even spent four years studying traditional Balinese music—gamelan—at university.
And above all, he made sure the band could move on to the next chapter. “We got out of our record deal,” he says, without going into too much detail. The members of Groovy Aardvark resurfaced on their own terms in the 2010s, this time with support from Slam Disques. “Slam Disques is the best record company […] because it’s run by people who know their stuff, people who come from the same place we do,” says the musician.
The current lineup features François Legendre on guitar, Pierre Koch and Danny Peake on drums and percussion, Martin Dupuis on guitar, and, of course, Vincent Peake on bass and vocals. For its 40th anniversary, Groovy Aardvark has lined up several major shows. After rocking Les Francos de Montréal in June, they appeared at La Noce and the aptly named Festival St-Marc Pardu Dans L’Bois. They will also play at the Festival d’été de Québec on July 18. A fifth album—their first after nearly 25 years away from the studio—is also in the works.
One question remains, however: just how did Vincent Peake manage to survive four decades without ever losing the spark, even if he wanted to throw in the towel more than once? His answer is unequivocal. “I never did heroin… and I kept my sense of humour.”
The aardvark is still standing, free and loud, four decades on, and the ants had better watch out.