2023-07-15 20:30:00
If Alicia Deschênes is alive today and preparing to release a third album since the beginning of her career as a singer-songwriter, she owes it to Green Day and, above all, to her idol Billie Joe Armstrong.
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“I really went through hell in high school,” says the 27-year-old Quebec artist.
“I was being bullied a lot. At a certain point, I wanted everything to stop. It is in the songs of Green Day, the writing and the composition that I found comfort and that I managed to cling to life”, continues Alicia Deschênes.
She will obviously be on the Plains of Abraham on Sunday evening, her heart filled with the hope of spending some time on stage, nothing less, with Billie Joe Armstrong.
«My dream… let me play with you“, she wrote on a poster that she will hold up high so that the singer can see her.
“I dream one day of being able to thank him,” she says.
Photo provided by Alicia Deschênes
Heartbreak at the Agora
Alicia Deschênes discovered Green Day at age eight, when her father bought the album American Idiot. “My first musical crush,” she says.
Since then, she tries by all means to play with him on stage or simply to talk to him. She almost got there at the Agora de Québec, during a concert by the punk-rock group in 2010.
“It’s the most heartbreaking,” says the musician.
She had first won a competition fan club. The prize: special tickets delivered by Billie Joe in person, but not in person as she had hoped.
First disappointment.
Then, during the concert, a fan was invited to join them on stage for the song Longview.
“I had a big poster to go sing. I was in the second row of seated benches, I stood up, everyone started shouting. Billie Joe saw me and told me to come over. Finally, I don’t know if because of my age or the fact that I was in the stands, but the guards didn’t let me through. I mightn’t go. They took someone else.”
A photo on the run
She still has a photo with her Billie Joe, a moment almost stolen from life, at the exit of a show at Les Foufounes Electriques de Montréal.
Hit with a guitar by a too-bold admirer, the singer was hurrying towards his vehicle surrounded by his security guards when Alicia Deschênes shouted “Please Billie Joe, I’ve been waiting for this moment for 14 years!”
“He said to me: ’14? come here.’ We took a picture and he left. It’s a memory that I cherish.”
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