Fluo-renascent fling

The Lost Fingers give the ’80s
a manouche makeover

GYPSIFIED JAMS: The Lost Fingers

by ERIK LEIJON

“I discovered Twisted Sister and it all went haywire,” recalls Lost Fingers guitarist Byron Mikaloff, a child of the ’80s who has translated his love of leg-warmers into one of the province’s hottest musical acts. His band the Lost Fingers is not just a typical cover band. As trained classical guitarists, Mikaloff and vocalist/guitarist Christian Roberge have converted the decade’s most cherished hits into complex Gypsy jazz tunes on Lost in the 80s. Musically, it’s a combination as explosive as watching a Canadiens-Nordiques match-up on CF Cable.

Rounded out by double bass player Alex Morisette, the trio stumbled on their winning formula accidentally. Formerly a member of the electropop collective One Ton, Mikaloff teamed up with Roberge to play South American classical music. “People didn’t really care for it, they wanted something a little more upbeat,” says Mikaloff. “So we started to play Sade and Stevie Wonder’s ‘Part-Time Lover.’”

Mikaloff eventually got into manouche, or Gypsy swing, starting with French guitarist Angelo Debarre. Roberge had also taken up vocal duties on the ever-changing project, singing works by Freddy Taylor—a cohort of Belgian guitarist Django Reinhardt, the first name in 1930s Gypsy jazz. It wasn’t until Mikaloff heard Samantha Fox’s “Touch Me” on a gas-station radio in Quebec City that the idea of performing ’80s standards came about. “When I got back to the car,” he says, “Christian already had this little arranged version of ‘Touch Me,’ and we thought it was hilarious. We said we would do a tribute to the ’80s jokingly, but we added a few songs to our setlist and people were going crazy, so we started to take it more seriously.”

A year and a half after they added Morisette to the fold, the group—named after the digits Reinhardt famously lost in a fire (the key to his distinctive style)—is prepping for their debut album to go gold in Quebec. Just hop into any unfashionable bar on a Saturday night and chances are a Bon Jovi or AC/DC cover band will be tugging on people’s nostalgic heartstrings, so the Lost Fingers’ success is unsurprising. The obvious care that went into reconstructing the likes of Michael Jackson and Technotronic couldn’t hurt.

Growing up in the ’80s, Roberge and Mikaloff (Morrisette is a ’90s grunge kid) remember what made the songs memorable, and are continuously adapting their covers based on crowd reactions, recommendations and their own tinkering. “Everything is done to bring back the memory of what it was like,” says Mikaloff. “The vocal melodies we do are very exact because everything else is deformed. If people know ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’ by AC/CD, even if they’ve never heard our version, they can still sing along to it.”

Even though all the covers except for Dion’s “Incognito” are in English, the group’s success has been exclusively among francophones. Negotiations are currently in place to release Lost in the 80s in the rest of Canada, and the trio is working on the next album in the hopes that the Lost Fingers become a yearly occurrence. Expect to hear Gypsified covers of Mötley Crüe’s “Dr. Feelgood” and Metallica’s “One” in the future. “There are a lot of tunes we could do,” Mikaloff says. “We like the odd ones. I’d love to get into the one-hit wonders, like Matthew Wilder’s ‘Break My Stride,’ eventually.”

At Pavillon Heineken (De Maisonneuve and Bleury),
Friday to Sunday, June 27-July 6, 5:30 p.m., free