12/4/2023 0 Comments Gord downie funeral![]() ![]() "I started calling the other guys, saying: ‘Gord’s asking me if we’re touring this record.’ He was so fucking determined. Yet Downie insisted the band should still tour their latest – and last – album, Man Machine Poem, despite his illness. “It didn’t sound like the same Gord,” he says. Langlois stayed with Downie in Toronto during his treatment, saw him losing much of his memory and get “beat up from the radiation and chemo”. So we didn’t think we were gonna handle it in any other way than to be friends and support.” He got diagnosed in early November, and by February he’d had two brain surgeries and we knew the diagnosis. ![]() It turned out to be something that, unfortunately, is quite common these days, glioblastoma. There were a lot of people talking with hope that it wasn’t anything terminal. “At first it was a rare form of a rare form. “We were all shocked,” says guitarist Paul Langlois, recalling the diagnosis Gord received after collapsing at his father’s funeral in 2015. Gathering on Zoom today, the surviving members of The Tragically Hip are understandably muted when discussion turns to their late singer’s final months. Silences were held at ice-hockey games, and a candlelit vigil gathered in the small town of Bobcaygeon, made famous as the archetypal Canadian village idyll by The Tragically Hip classic that borrowed its name. Radio stations played nothing but Tragically Hip songs or renamed themselves ‘Gord FM’ for 24 hours. Trudeau, weeping on TV, called Downie “our buddy Gord, who loved this country with everything he had”. As a national hero widely adored for distilling the Canadian psyche, celebrating the country’s history, championing its culture and encapsulating its nebulous identity in songs that were a mainstay of Canada’s rock radio for 32 years – earning the band nine No.1 albums and eight million sales – mourning was nationwide, tributes effusive. Fourteen months later, on October 17, 2017, Downie passed away from the terminal brain cancer he’d been battling for almost two years, aged 53. ![]()
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