Jean Leloup's Dôme turns 30—but will the King Ponpon show?

Jean Leloup's album Le Dôme turns 30 this year, and the Francos de Montréal are throwing a major party Sunday featuring a full-scale concert honouring the 1996 record. A Cirque du Soleil creation based on the album opens in Trois-Rivières in July. But according to all signs, the Roi Ponpon himself will not attend either celebration.

Leloup, now 65, has become increasingly elusive since releasing L'étrange pays in 2019. His last performances were in 2015. Sightings in Mile End or Plateau cafés, once routine, have dwindled to near-mythology. In August 2025, a brief appearance at Le Vacarme record shop on Plaza St-Hubert—where he signed vinyl for half an hour—became local legend. One customer's breathless report of the encounter landed the store a radio interview.

Jean-François Lemieux, bassist who collaborated on Le Dôme and will play the Francos tribute, offers reassurance: "Jean va super bien. We don't see him for two reasons outside the showbiz: he takes care of his mother, who is 91 and lives in Sainte-Foy, and he is almost completely deaf in one ear because of labyrinthitis that wasn't treated properly."

Lemieux adds that Leloup still composes constantly and has recently become obsessed with the oud and just bought a contrabass. The music remains central to his life.

Olivier Boisvert-Magnen, author of Jean Leloup—Des grands instants de lucidité, notes that Leloup's current absence is his longest in a career marked by strategic withdrawals. "He's our only artist who is so free. After Paradis City in 2015, he could have re-engaged the same team and tried to remake a similar album. But I think that's what people admire—our star system is so small that everyone ends up playing the game a little, except him."