“I regret absolutely nothing, apart from the five seconds that have changed my life,” says Éric Lapointe. As television doors open for him again and he celebrates the 30th anniversary of his first album, we meet the man who, despite his sobriety, still has to sing the virtues of drunkenness.

“I have already drank too much coffee today. I think I’m going to take a Bubly,” is a sentence that we never imagine hearing from Éric Lapointe. Yet, the singer did indeed pronounce these words in front of us in the kitchen of the Showmedia studios. This is where the rehearsals were underway on Monday afternoon for the launch of the 30th anniversary of Obsession, his first album, which allowed him to reach the promised land of his rock star dreams.

A disc of which he does not have the mistresses, which largely explains this project, which could also have been called Obsession (Eric’s Version).

Thirty years ago, Éric Lapointe wanted to live, still living. And above all, not to know the same alienating daily routine as the workers of the snow fence factory where he worked for a month and a half in Sherbrooke. An experience that then inspired him to write the song Misery, in which he laments the “without history” destiny of a poor guy handcuffed to his punch card.

“I saw these men, in the break room, with the pin-up calendars, eat the same lunch every day, and wait for the mermaid to sound,” he said between two sips of his sparkling orange drink. “They looked dead, sad like rocks. I did everything not to become that.”

From this strict point of view, Éric Lapointe’s career is an undeniable success. And if he sometimes looked dead, it was always because he had lived too much.

Excess? The musician has already recognized in a song (Guilty) to have “abused all the vices,” which sheds light on a part of his success. He who allowed so many ordinary Quebecers to taste by proxy the existence of a bum having his own boss his desires and his instinct.

“To describe hell, you have to go there,” he explains. “If you want to describe nightlife, you can’t pretend. I do not consider that it is a sacrifice that I made, because I have always been afraid to miss something. I have always been intense and passionate and I had a wonderful life for that.”

This wonderful life took a violent turn on September 30, 2019, when Éric Lapointe laid his hand against a woman’s neck, before giving it to a pantry, a gesture for which he pleaded guilty and obtained conditional absolution in October 2020, a trial from which he emerged without a criminal record.

During all the interviews he has granted since, including a large interview with Sophie Durocher broadcast at TVA in January 2024, the 55-year-old spoke abundantly about his relationship as legendary as alcohol trouble, without asking to attribute his gestures to the bottle.

Éric Lapointe has said it has been sober for 14 months now, following a medical protocol to which he submitted under the supervision of a nurse, so as not to be swept away in a Delirium Tremens, as has already happened to him.

But he finds himself on his new version of Obsession to scream songs like The Rock’n’Roll school which celebrates without nuance the beauty of self-destruction (“even if alcohol devours us / like eternal thugs / trinquant to death”).

“My relationship to alcohol has changed a lot compared to that time,” swears the songwriter by playing nervously with his vapoteuse. “At 18, I glorified drunkenness, but over time, I became a slave to alcohol. It quickly became my daily lot, in the morning. Alcohol was my companion, my wife, my main love.”

Éric Lapointe is therefore to invent the artist whom he can now become that he has turned his back on his vultures. An approach that smiles: he was able to obtain a quote to the most recent ADISQ gala following a reintegration process, participated in October 2024 in the Live from the universe of his friend Ludovick Bourgeois, then to Star Academy last January.

Unlike other artists always in Ban following denunciations of different natures, Ti-Cuir visibly makes its comeback and its degree of infrequentibility falls as a TV presence.

These are the breaking productions, the box of the pilot of Star Academy, Jean-Philippe Dion, who were behind her interview with Sophie Durocher. “And it had been important to me as a producer to ask him upstream all the questions I needed to ask him on his journey,” he recalls.

Then last fall, hearing the rocker at the microphone of Anything can happen on here first, the host and producer felt that for Lapointe, the wind turned.

“I perceived in the tone of Marie-Louise [Arsenault] and it was my interpretation, that he had convinced it. Then I went to read the comments and even on a platform like Radio-Canada, it was extremely positive. Some had even found Marie-Louise a little too hard. There was no negative comment after Live from the universe neither. That’s why we went ahead to Star Academy. And because his presence, in a tribute to Richard Desjardins, seemed essential.”

“It feels good to be back, because I said everything I had to say. I can’t make a better mea culpa than the one I made.”

Éric Lapointe

“But it is certain that the social courts are ruthless,” he adds. If he is delighted to have never felt too much of a change in the audience’s gaze, he is slow to be reintegrated in a spectacle of the national holiday, a kind of event held at a distance from his mouth.

“The cultivation of cancellation, I paid the price. We live such a bizarre era, when three posts on the Internet can have much more impact than a front page of The press. There will be a return of a pendulum at some point, I hope. For me, things are placed, quietly not quickly. I have to thank the sky that the public did not let me go.”

Its calendar until the end of the year actually has more than 25 dates, including several performances of a new acoustic show.

“All faults combined, one thing is certain, it is that I have never lied to the public,” he said, trying to explain the fidelity of his fans. “Often, in the short term, it didn’t help me, but in the long term, yes. Then, I did not lie to justice either. I did what I had to do, as a man.”

If he keeps his eternal leather coat, Éric Lapointe will have to learn to create without the mask of alcohol. But what remains of his character, if he is stripped of his excesses?

“I think I’m always going to be a rebel, fundamentally. But at the same time, I may have gone to the end of it all. I am in a period of transition, learning. I am a homebody like that cannot be. I clean up, cakes, sport. And physically, I feel much better, that’s for sure.”

But as in his 1999 song, Éric Lapointe maintains that no nothing, no nothing, he has nothing to regret. “I regret absolutely nothing, apart from the five seconds that have changed my life. I do not regret anything of my choices and my journey, because I had so much an intense life.”

Launch of Obsession 30 ans at Olympia on February 27.