There’s room for everyone at Festival d’été de Québec

Scène Bell is the biggie. It imposes on one end of the city’s answer to Central Park, Plaines D’Abraham, after a farmer and early settler in New France named Abraham Martin. Abraham liked to feed cows on these plains back in the 1600s before the British and French armies used them as a battlefield on which to vie bloodily for control of Canada’s oldest city – before Canada was Canada – making the place infamous. (Spoiler alert: Abraham was the true winner; he never even owned the land that still bears his name 400 years later!)

Bell has screens the size of cruise ships and is where you’ll see the varied big-ticket legends FEQ (Québec City Summer Festival) has on offer: Shania Twain, Slayer, Avril Lavigne, and so on – 11 days’ worth. Each headliner is supported by acts in the same genre – Nova Scotia’s Goldie Boutilier warms us up before Shania, for example – and the siloing of genres means that the demographics of the crowd differ from day to day. Faded metal band tees on Friday (“metal day”) morph into a sea of cowboy hats and thigh-high boots with steers on Saturday (“country day”).

Then there are the twin stages of Loto-Québec and SiriusXM, locked shoulder to shoulder to enable seamless changeovers between acts. Place George-V, a cobbled square cloistered by gothic buildings, is their romantic host. The Armoury building looms behind the stages, its black-dagger spires and ornate dormers cast in a mystical purple hue each night. If you look behind you, the flag of Québec ruffles in the wind atop the Place de l’Assemblée-Nationale, Québec’s Parliament building, poking above the trees. To the right, the rotating UFO-like top floor of Hôtel Le Concorde gets involved: like something from the World’s Fair Expo, its best-guess-at-the-future architecture adopts different colours each night (red for Slayer, of course; blue for Shania).

Each stage is special in its own way and makes you feel like you’re at the centre of the festivities. But forced to pick one that is the true heart of FEQ, it would be Scène Crave. You have to ditch the bustle of the main drag to get there, hustling downhill in the direction of the refinery’s distant smokestacks, which pump puffy, billowy trails into the sky. The smudged outlines of the Appalachian Mountains run behind the slanted copper roofs of the train station and lookout towers of the Citadelle, rusted Statue-of-Liberty green. Come wintertime, Crave’s adopted home of Place D’Youville transforms into an ice rink, but while FEQ commandeers the city for the first two weeks of July, the square feels more like a street party or neighbourhood picnic.

Totally free, Crave allows curious bystanders to wander in, sans wristband, and plop down on a beer garden bench or laze atop the old Citadelle walls, absent-mindedly bouncing legs against its medieval-looking fortifications while taking in the show. A good mile or so from the action that unfolds on Abraham’s farmland today, Crave was actually the original epicentre of FEQ when it was founded all the way back in 1968. “It’s magical there ‘cos there’s such history. The festival started there. Celine Dion played on that stage at some point in the eighties,” Oli Lépine, one of the dedicated booking team behind FEQ, tells me on the penultimate day of an 11-day shift.

With 1.5 million people passing through from start to finish, FEQ is not only Canada’s largest festival, it’s older and bigger than Glastonbury – so why hasn’t everyone heard of it? I’d wager that Canada’s quietly progressive and unassuming approach to culture (and therefore the export of that culture) could play a part – my tour guide says Québecers have more in common with Scandinavians than they do with Americans (the Maine border is only an hour’s drive away) or even folks from neighbouring Ontario. But it could also have to do with the festival’s commitment to local artists – a rough quota of around 60 to 70% of the lineup, Lépine says, with many of those from Indigenous communities. In other words, FEQ hasn’t gone all-in on the tactics of other large, region-agnostic festivals like Glastonbury, Primavera, or Lollapalooza.

“It’s still growing. That’s the big difference now. People are starting to notice us: ‘What is this festival? They got Slayer, Avril Lavigne, Hozier, Benson Boone. What the fuck is going on?’” Lépine effuses. “When I travel around anywhere, I’m like, ‘I’m from FEQ, Québec City.’ They’re like, ‘Yeah, whatever.’ Then I show them the lineup and they’re like, ‘What?! What is this festival?’ I think that’s the big difference from eight years ago” – eight years ago was when Lépine joined the team and began working his way up to his current role.

“People know us now, more and more,” he continues, before making a crucial caveat: “But, it’s still a local festival. Everybody in the city bought tickets, even if they didn’t need one. It’s important for us, the French connection that we have with people. We’re in a French city. It’s important to us to put the language out there.”

The very first show that greets me off the plane is Anyma Ora’, an electro artist from the nearby Wendat First Nation. She beams throughout her set, gesticulating into a hand-carved mic stand adorned with beads and feathers while her band let off metallic pop sounds and some seriously dirty synth breakdowns, the drums going haywire. The show is bookended by the Wendat Nation’s traditional grass dance: a male dancer comes onstage for the first and last songs, spinning and stomping in vibrant-coloured dress. The dance is said to emulate how one would stamp down the grass before setting up camp, and is performed to bless the ground before a communal gathering – an especially warm welcome on my first day.

Crave is a real hub for the grassroots stuff the wider province has up its sleeve. Take the band Douance, a hidden gem from Saguenay, 100 miles north. Led by Alexandrine Rodrigue, they draw from the “non-male music” of the nineties, giving sunburnt edges to their snoozy, folky songs. If you dig Julia Jacklin and scrappier, slacker bands like Swearin’, don’t procrastinate on this potential new fave.

Bibi Club, a two-piece out of Montréal, give the most striking Crave performance during my five-day stint in town, their hypnotic pulses and cool, detached aura elevated by an after-dark light show that swallows up the place. Adèle Trottier-Rivard wallops a small crash cymbal in quick, staccato bursts while taking lead vocals – almost exclusively in French – and presides over a workshop of synthesisers and chest-invading drum machines while her partner, Nicolas Basque, lets loose with gnarly, tone-perfect guitar parts. Their own songs are exciting enough, but there’s also a rendition of Stereolab’s “Orgiastic”, a deep cut from the trailblazing Anglo-French band.

The cover has been in Bibi’s set for a while and comes with a special origin story. “When Adele was pregnant, she made a playlist for the birth. It kept looping during the birth, and our kid was born to that song,” Basque tells me. “Adele doesn’t remember, but I remember, and at some point we were like, ‘It’d be nice to incorporate a song that we can make our own in the set and make an homage.’”

It’s the morning after their show and we’re getting coffee in Québec City’s working-class-turned-hipster neighbourhood of Saint-Roch. Our meeting is peppered with cute moments of kismet, like when one of their songs, “Bellini”, a slowly building, shapeshifting instrumental, starts playing over the cafe’s sound system, something they say has only happened once before – in France.

“We bought a few drinks in the room and our son was sleeping in his bed. We had these huge windows at the hotel, it’s so cool, Trottier-Rivard tells me of last night's low-key two-person after party. “We just chat in the dark with our drinks – quiet in the dark.”

Speaking of their son – who is impressively patient while we chat about boring grown-up stuff like border crossings – Trottier-Rivard explains that Bibi is an Arabic word people use for their “little loved ones.” It’s an apt name for a band that places family and community at the centre of its world. The duo has a tight-knit immediate circle that makes it logistically possible to be parents as well as musicians, for example being able to bring Trottier-Rivard’s sister on tour. That was possible because of grants the Canadian government has available to touring mothers. One of these gives out funding so that bands can bring a babysitter or family member with them on the road, the government footing the cost of their hotels and flights – something we can only applaud from afar in nations with less progressive approaches to the arts, like the UK and US.

“It’s a way to encourage women to be able to do both,” Trottier-Rivard elaborates. “You can be a man and still leave for three weeks, but if you’re a woman and you need to breastfeed your child, then you can’t leave if you don’t have the money to do it. It’s really progressive and we have to use it. For me, my music life and my other life, it’s all the same – everything coexists.”

The last time Bibi Club played FEQ, it was an early-in-the-day slot to a crowd of lawn chair-sitters. Anyone who’s seen or heard them before will agree, they’re a band to experience after the sun has gone down. “We prefer the night shift,” Trottier-Rivard says. “I don’t personally dig going to festivals and seeing bands I really love in the daylight. It’s not the same experience. Lights are so important.” The mystery and allure of the twilight coincides with their sound. “We’re trying to create some sort of a tension without any violence,” she continues. “We want to create this density of sound, but we still want to give people this hope, to feel good.”

It’s part of the FEQ gamble – the crowd. “With the free stage, sometimes it’s a weird thing where, if you didn’t pay, you don’t commit as much, so you get people that just pass by,” Basque says. “You never know, is it gonna be a sit-down thing and people just observe what’s happening, or are they gonna get more involved?” It’s also part of the fun – the spontaneity and unpredictability of each show, but at the same time, Basque continues, Québec is “a city that has a strong connection with their local scene. Even if you’re from Montréal, it’s not guaranteed that people will know you or come to your show.”

Bibi Club embody the best qualities of FEQ: they’re humble, open, progressive people who do their thing with love and patience. They’re motivated by community, and they merge the different parts of their life seamlessly. Parenthood with touring in their case, just as FEQ merges renowned main-stage acts with underground and Indigenous music from its home province.

The duo also proves that those qualities can be retained or even scaled up when you grow your band – or festival, as FEQ continues to expand its roster of artists from Québec to the rest of North America to the rest of the world. It’s taken an increased international focus since Louis Bellavance joined as director in 2011, but hasn’t compromised its commitment to the local community. As Lépine said before, everybody who lives in Québec City buys a ticket – or rather, has access to one.

“The way the festival works is we have passes that you buy for 11 days and you can pass it along to a friend,” he clarifies. “So if you like Slayer and I don’t, and I like Kygo, for example, you can pass me your wristband and everybody’s happy.” An 11-day pass costs only 160 Canadian dollars, a little under £90. It’s a bafflingly generous deal for almost two weeks of music at a world-class festival, including acts you’d have to pay that much to see at their own stadium gig. FEQ is doing so much to enable access to great music, its priorities refreshing and rare in a musical ecosystem moving increasingly in the wrong direction.

The trading-wristbands approach might go some way to helping maintain the festival’s stamina, too. Many people I speak to confirm that the second half is always busier than the first. And when I arrive seven days in, the city doesn’t feel weary – it’s alive and buzzing. On my first proper night, the twin-stage is headlined by the Pixies, and the medieval setting (and stormy weather) aligns perfectly with their haunting, powerful, crawl-inside-of-you songs, even all these years later.

Black Francis still gives it everything, eyes closed, sweat raining down his face, his “Gouge Away” bellow putting the fear of God into you. The guitars still sound outrageously crisp and hairy. And you forget the sheer quantity of bangers the Pixies have. They come one after the other and don’t stop: the carnage-pop of “Debaser” into warped singalong “Hey” into herky-jerky full-throttler “Wave of Mutilation”. The stark simplicity of Kim Deal’s bass riffs really hits you live, too – that and the harmony parts, both of which are delivered expertly by Emma Richardson, the band’s newest bassist, who joined only last year but seems right at home.

The acts that play on the same stage before the Pixies are almost as brilliant. It’s not until you see Kurt Vile live that you remember/realise he’s basically the OG MJ Lenderman, offering a controlled yet languorous slump through rust-belt alt-country, guitars and flannel shirts road-worn and seen-it-all. The Glorious Sons before him, out of Kingston, Ontario, radiate uncomplicated, spit-and-sawdust, rock-and-roll fun – with a capital F – as frontman Brett Emmons charges around barefoot like a slightly more earnest Jack Black character, totally winning us over in a role he was born for. As for Montréal band Corridor, their tight, minimal, bass-forward indie pop jingle-jangles as much as it struts and thumps, bridging the gap between Real Estate and Tame Impala.

But let’s be honest, the reason most people are in town is for the Queen of Country: Shania Fucking Twain (as one shirt at the merch stall puts it). Her main support, Maren Morris, introduces platitudinal songs about one-night stands in your thirties as though divulging profound secrets about the meaning of life. She isn’t. They lack substance and do nothing for me. However, a forebear of that same genre – Twain – proves what those kinds of songs can do. She flies out to the sugar rush of “Rock This Country!”, a blitz of maple leaf flags flashing on the Bell Stage screens behind her.

Twain is effortlessly brilliant. Or brilliantly effortless. All she has to do is cup her hand to her brow, like a sailor assessing the seas, and the crowd screams with glee. She makes someone in the front row cry their eyes out by signing their cowgirl hat. She wears a Québec flag like a neckerchief, knowing her audience and playing to them in a way that doesn’t feel like pandering – because it isn’t, Twain having grown up in one of Ontario’s Francophone communities.

And the songs: man! The songs can be ecstatic and they can be delicately blissful. After a mid-set acoustic breather, Twain pulls on the cowgirl hat and shit gets real. “Giddy up, eh?” she smirks, knowing we’ve all been waiting for that costume alteration, and the energy rockets even higher from there. The fiddle sounds like it’ll catch on fire. The guitar solos are whizzy and colourful. And the humongous finish, “Man! I Feel Like a Woman”, gets the crowd square dancing and hollering off into the night.

I appreciate how go-with-it the crowds are all week. The next day – Sunday, the festival’s final night – is meant to be “Latin night” with Farruko headlining, but we’re hit with a proper summer storm that means business, raining off more than half of the performances. The flashes of yellow and accompanying timpani of thunder prompt whoops and jeers from crowds as they splat through the streets in dollar ponchos. I hide under a door arch of Place de l’Assemblée-Nationale for a good half hour, watching the jet-washer downpour, everyone scattering like woodlice when you pick up a plant pot. No one joins me, so I guess I’m the only one who remembers that the Canadian government will be there to put a roof over your head.

When the storm passes and performances resume around 9 pm, it’s for Farruko on the Bell stage and a celebration of 30 years of Celine Dion – D’eux, 30 ans déjà: Célébrons Céline! – back in the Place George-V square near my rotating UFO hotel, which I’ve come to love dearly. I am reminded that Celine herself isn’t playing. Instead, it’s a rotating lineup of professional admirers, including Safia Nolin, whose own set was rained off earlier, and other Quebecers like Lou-Adriane Cassidy, Ariane Roy, and drag queen Rita Baga – plus a four-piece backing choir and a large band of both rock and orchestral instruments.

If you’re like me, you might not usually go out of your way to see a Celine Dion tribute show, but the way these huge, lung-emptying ballads are performed blows me away. Fully grown, beer-bellied men literally wail themselves hoarse in excitement. Everyone knows every word. It’s a jubilant moment of release after hours of rain and cancelled shows.

It’s also an unexpectedly lovely conclusion to FEQ 2025 on its final night. After all, Celine is one of Canada’s most famous exports, but having her beloved songs adapted by a supergroup of local artists – some up-and-coming, some well established, different backgrounds and genres and attitudes and aesthetics – is a nice parallel with the diverse Québec festival that has one eye on the rest of the world and the other fixed firmly on the magic at home.