(Toronto) The funeral of producer and composer Denis LePage will be celebrated on September 4. He died last Monday of generalized cancer.
A disco music producer, LePage had a knack for bringing revelers to the dance floor. He was at the heart of Montreal’s bustling nightlife in the 1980s and his musical skills were second to none.
Thanks to a flood of Billboard chart success, Denis LePage helped define the Canadian nightclub era by forming the duo Lime with his wife Denyse.
In the early 2010s, he identified as non-binary and took the name Nini Nobless.
Although Denis LePage isn’t exactly a household name, the sound of LePage’s synthesizers has made Lime’s songs a favorite of dance clubs around the world. He notably composed the song Dancin’ the Night Away in 1981, still heard on dance floors today.
“He was a genius,” says Claude Chalifoux, co-owner of Lime Light, a legendary Montreal nightclub that regularly played Lime music. “All of Denis’ music has been a smash hit. People went crazy playing Your Love, You’re My Magician and Guilty. »
Years before these electronic disco favorites, LePage was already pursuing a musical career.
As a teenager, he found himself in the group The Persuaders and in the mid-1970s, he formed the jazz-fusion group Le Puls with his then wife Denyse LePage, also a singer-songwriter.
A few years later, LePage got his first hit with the funky 1979 single The Break, released as Kat Mandu. The song rose to number three on the US Billboard charts.
The success put wind in the sails of LePage’s second project with Denyse, which caught the wave of the synthesizer revolution sweeping the industry.
Inspired by the sounds of Giorgio Moroder and Kraftwerk, the LePage duo had recorded an electro-disco project.
The Lime Light club, a nightclub in downtown Montreal that welcomed both gays and straights, turned out to be a place that greatly inspired Denis LePage and where his music was played regularly. And so an abbreviated version of the club’s name stuck to the couple.
Opened in 1973, the venue began catering to an avant-garde clientele four years before New York’s Studio 54 catered to a similar crowd.
When DJ Michel Simard played Lime’s first single in 1981, Your Love, for the first time, he was immediately convinced he had a hit on his hands, recalls Mr. Chalifoux.
As the disco duo chatted with Michel Simard, it became apparent that they were somehow connected to the venue in a special way.
A night at the Lime Light quickly became synonymous with hearing Lime hits over the sound channels on one of the venue’s two levels of dance floors.
By the end of 1981, “Your Love” had spread beyond Canada’s borders and landed at the top of the US Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart for a week.
Lime delivered another hit in 1982 “Babe, We’re Gonna Love Tonight”, which reached No. 6 on the chart.
The duo continued to make music under the name Lime into the 1990s, although friends said financial problems led LePage to sell copyrights to Unidisc, a Montreal record label specializing in sounds of the time.
“My parents’ relationship has not been easy,” said Claudine LePage, the couple’s child.
“They continued to make music together, and then my dad continued to produce music with other singers.”
Around the start of the 2010s, LePage began to publicly identify as a woman, taking the name Nini Nobless and recording new material. The music struggled to find an audience for a variety of reasons.
“I felt people didn’t like Denis going from male to female,” Mr. Chalifoux said. His music was good, he had the same voice as when he sang with Lime, it was just a physical change… (but) the sound was too 1980s.”
Still, Lime’s sound resonated in contemporary circles with the help of Unidisc. Ownership of Lime’s catalog allowed the record company to reissue and rework earlier recordings.
In recent years, he has notably recruited Canadian dance producers Jacques Greene and Tiga to produce remixes of the duo’s classics.
Francis Cucuzzella, who manages artist relations at Unidisc, said a documentary about Lime was made in cooperation with the late Denis LePage. While the project is now in limbo, he hopes it will one day be finished and released.
