Gord Downie

Rock singer and lyricist for Canadian band The Tragically Hip

Gord Downie, rock singer. Born 6 February, 1964, in Amherstview, Ontario. Died 17 October, 2017, in Toronto, aged 53

Gord Downie, lead singer and lyricist of the Tragic ally Hip and one of Canada’s most revered rock stars, has died in Toronto. He was 53 and had announced last year that he had terminal brain cancer.

The band announced the death on its website. Downi ehad recently been workingo na solo album, Introduce Yerself, scheduled to be released later this month.

“Ever y Canadian musician just lost their cooler older brother ,” the members of Bare nakedLadies, another Canadian rock group, tweeted on Wednesday.

The Hip,as the band was generally called, star ted as a bar band in the 1980s but grew into a phenomenon, fueled by Downie’s lyrics, which were full of Canadian history and culture. Fifty Mission Cap involves a hockey player, Bill Barilko of the Toronto Maple Leafs, who died in a plane crash. Wheat Kings refere nces David Milgaard , who was wrongly convicted of the murder of a nurse in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

“Gord and the Tragically Hip are an inevitable and essential part of what we are and who we areas a country ,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on the occasion of at our by the band last year. The final show, in August in Kingston, Ontario, the band’s home base, turned into a national event.

Gordon Edgar Downie was born to Edgar and Lorn a Downi ea nd grew up in Amherstview, Ontario, on the north shore of Lake Ontario. He was a student at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, in the mid- 80s when he formed the Hip with guitarist Rob Baker, the bassist Gord Sinclair, percussionist Johnny Fay and saxophonist Davis Manning ( who was replaced in 1986 by Paul Langlois).

“We began as aun iv ersity party band, doing Stones covers,” Sinclair once recounted in an interview. “We’d do it for fun and play for free beer.”

The band would go onto record more than a dozen albums, beginning with Up to Here in 1989. Its latest, Man Machine Poem, was released last year. Downie also pursued solo projects, beginning with Coke Machine Glow in 2001. Introduce Yerself is his sixth solo album.

Reviewing a 1998 New York show by t he Tragically Hip, Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote that the group “harks back to 1960 s rock, building songs on guitar riffs that look back to the Rolling Stones, the Byrds, Neil Young and the blues.” Downie’s lyrics, he wrote, “are about endless varieties of disillusionment.”

Among Downie’ s most recent efforts was Secret Path, a multimedia project — including an album, a graphic novel by Dow ni ea nd Jeff Lemire, and an animated film — based on the true story of an indigenous boy who died of exposure after running away from a residential school in northern Ontario and trying to make his way 400 miles back to his home. Downie was concerned about his country’s reluctance to deal with its past and its treatment of its indigenous peoples.

“His story is Canada’s story,” he said of the boy, Cha nie Wenjack. “This is about Canada. We are not the country we thought we were.”

Environmentalism was another cause Downie championed, through work with organisations like Lake Ontario Water keeper, on whose board he served. Since last year, his causes included the one that affected him personally: The Go rd Downie Fund for Brain Cancer Research was established when he announced his diagnosis.

Downie is survived by his wife, Laura Leigh Usher, from whom he was separated; four children; his mother; two brothers; and two sisters.

In an interview last year, Downieexpressed f rust rati on withnot being able to remember names and lyrics because of his illness, but he also showed that he could joke about it. He said that both he and the Hip were still working on new material.

“So we could hear more from the Hip?” he was asked.

“Yeah,” he said, “to the point where it would be like, ‘ Jesus, is that guy not dead yet?’ Canadians can be funny.” ©New York Times 2017. Distributed by NY T Syndication Service