Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:33:00

The Electric Buttocks has been Montreal's temple of the underground for four decades. Les Foufounes Electriques - Cabaret Fouf or simply Foufs to the city - opened in spring 1983 at 87 Rue Sainte-Catherine Est in the Quartier Latin, founded by Norman Boileau, Francois Gourd and Bernard Paquet, three friends from a musical theatre troupe who took over the former Zoobar and turned it into a hybrid nightclub, performance-art laboratory and stage for emerging musicians. The provocative name came from a founding stunt in which the owners printed their painted backsides onto old television screens - a carnival aesthetic the venue never abandoned. Through the 1980s and 1990s Foufs became the principal gathering place for Montreal's punk, goth, industrial, grunge and alternative communities, drawing comparisons to New York's CBGB. The booking history is extraordinary: Nirvana, Green Day, the Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails, Primus, Queens of the Stone Age, the Misfits and Marianne Faithfull all played the room, while Quebec acts from Grim Skunk and Groovy Aardvark to Jean Leloup and the Tragically Hip used its stages as a launching pad. Live painting sessions dripped art down the walls - literally - during the legendary Peinture en Direct events. The building itself is part of the mythology: multiple levels connected by industrial stairwells, two concert spaces and a dance floor accommodating up to 615 people across a night, graffiti-saturated surfaces, a mechanical spider over the terrace, and a sci-fi-meets-dive-bar aesthetic that repeated renovations have expanded without sanitising. Cheap pitchers and an unbothered door policy keep the crowd genuinely mixed - moshers, students, tourists and lifers. Still independent and still loud, Foufs programs punk, metal, hardcore, hip-hop and electronic nights weekly, with afternoon terrace service easing into shows that run past 3 AM. Metro stops at Saint-Laurent and Berri-UQAM bracket the block, and the venue remains what it was built to be in 1983: the safest place in Montreal to be strange.