My fear was that it was gonna be a mass funeral every night. I had major trepidation about doing the whole thing. This is what he wants, and we’re gonna give him what he wants, but this isn’t actually possible. “We’re going through the motions for our friend. “Even the night before the tour, I was like: ‘I don’t think this is actually gonna happen’,” says fellow guitarist Rob Baker. Then the other guys would come and visit and see for themselves, it just seemed like such a far reach that he would ever be able to do it again. '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. 1 on MuchMusic Countdown for the week of June 18, 1993.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. In the video, Downie is wearing a ball-cap advertising Gros Morne National Park, located in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. It was filmed in Melbourne during the band's tour of Australia and New Zealand in March 1993. The music video for 'At the Hundredth Meridian' was directed by Peter Henderson.

The song is a reference to the 100th meridian west, which is a line of longitude that separates much of Western Canada from the Central and Atlantic regions of Canada and is where the Great Plains begin, as lead-singer Gordon Downie states in the song. When performing the song live, the band would often play it at a significantly faster tempo than on the album, and would use the instrumental break for a jam session lasting several minutes. The song was also featured in the Due South episode 'Heaven and Earth' in 1995. It was released in April 1993 as the fourth single from the band's 1992 album, Fully Completely. ' At the Hundredth Meridian' is a song by Canadian rock band The Tragically Hip. 1993 single by The Tragically Hip 'At the Hundredth Meridian'

Tragically hip gord downie