Also read: Feeling nostalgia for the Hip? So was Donovan Woods and we got him to write about why he will always be a fan.
Canada is coping with the news that Gord Downie, The Tragically Hip’s enigmatic singer, has been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Yet the band — on the cusp of releasing a new studio album, Man Machine Poem — is still planning to forge ahead with summer tour dates.
Here are a few interesting tidbits about Gord Downie you might not have known.
1. Downie has over 10,000 Twitter followers but is following just one account: @Shazam, an app designed to identify songs.
2. According to the book Have Not Been The Same Since: The CanRock Renaissance, 1985-1995, Downie’s godfather is Harry Sinden, former coach of the Boston Bruins. Sinden was also a real estate developer who helped Downie’s parents find their home in Amherstview, Ont.
3. During a 2003 session of MuchMusic’s Intimate and Interactive, Downie revealed his favourite band at the age of 13 was Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. “I bought that record but I thought they were kind of New Wave-y but all the way New Wave,” he said.
4. He appeared in two episodes of Trailer Park Boys as well as in their self-titled film. The show’s characters appeared in the Hip video for “The Darkest One,” with Downie negotiating a deal: a stolen car in exchange for “two buckets of chicken and a drive to the liquor store.”
5. Downie has been a proponent and spokesperson for Lake Ontario Waterkeeper, a charity aimed at protecting the Great Lakes. “They’re not asking people to use different light bulbs or drive different cars,” Downie told Denise Donlon in a 2013 interview on YouTube. “They’re just trying to remind people there are laws on the books that are perfectly good and that say that if you pollute that you have to clean it up.” Later on Downie revealed he learned how to swim by being thrown from a dock in Bath, Ont., “by an only slightly older instructor… Jesus.”
6. “I didn’t have an iPhone for a long time and I still don’t,” Downie told Donlon in the same interview.
7. During a performance of “At The Hundredth Meridian” at The Tragically Hip’s millennium eve show at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, Downie proceeded to stomp on hundreds of balloons that had descended after midnight. “This is genocide,” Downie quipped during the stomping.
8. Back in 2005, Downie became an early customer of Bullfrog Power, a renewable energy company. According to a 2015 Canadian Manufacturing article, Bullfrog has provided power to The Tragically Hip since 2007.
9. Downie’s birthday of Feb. 6 is shared by the legendary Bob Marley, Guns N’ Roses (and now AC/DC) singer Axl Rose and the immortal Rick Astley.
