No other act of the day was embraced with the fervour and frenzy that Hip fans displayed toward Downie as a performer, but it was his lyrics that set him apart. The ascent was dramatic, but the band’s very first hit single had this prescient line, written by Downie, in its chorus: “Sometimes the faster it gets, the less you need to know / But you gotta remember: the smarter it gets, the further it’s going to go.” The Tragically Hip were smart. The third, in 1992, became one of the few Canadian albums to sell more than one million copies domestically. The second album, in 1991, went platinum in just 10 days. Their first EP came out in December 1987 the debut album, Up to Here, in 1989.

For the next three years they played in every corner of Kingston they could, mixing obscure ’60s covers with original material. The Tragically Hip played their first show in November 1984 on the campus of Queen’s University. His godfather was Harry Sinden, who would go on to coach Team Canada to victory in the 1972 Summit Series against the Soviet Union. Gord played goalie for Amherstview’s hockey team, which won a provincial B-level championship. Gord was the fourth of five children: older siblings Mike, Charlyn and Paula, and younger brother Patrick. 6, 1964, in Amherstview, Ont., just slightly west of Kingston, to Lorna and Edgar, a travelling salesman turned real estate developer.

20, 2016, which reached the second-largest number of viewers in Canadian broadcast history. And of course, as could many of the 11 million people who watched the CBC broadcast of the Hip’s final show on Aug. As could anyone who watched him command 40,000 people at any given outdoor appearance during the 1990s, singing songs that were summer soundtracks for an entire generation. Anyone who managed to catch him fronting the Tragically Hip in 1985, playing covers at a roadhouse in Renfrew, Ont., could tell you that. And yet, it was not the only unprecedented achievement in Downie’s career.ĭownie was one of the most riveting and mystifying performers in rock’n’roll history. No major performer in the history of Western pop music had ever staged a tour of that scale while living with a terminal diagnosis. In the summer of 2016, Downie said goodbye to a nation of fans by doing a final arena tour with his brothers in song-the same four men he met at a Kingston Vocational Collegiate Institute in the early 1980s, the same four men heard on the very first Tragically Hip EP.

He was diagnosed in December 2015 only two per cent of glioblastoma victims live as long as three years after diagnosis. Gord Downie, singer in beloved Canadian rock band the Tragically Hip, has died at age 53 from glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. The frontman of The Tragically Hip was an indelible presence on the Canadian cultural landscape

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