A sold-out World Premiere on #TIFF24’ opening day and an enormous singalong street celebration of The Hip’s four-part doc The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal gave fans all the feels. They showed their love and excitement as well as that unmistakable Canadian bond. The doc screens at TIFF Sept 12, 17 and lands on Prime Video Sept. 20. It’s phenomenal, a celebration and a love fest complete with tears, as we as a nation, miss Gord Downie. What She Said’ Anne Brodie met with the late Gord Downie’s brother, director Mike Downie, Rob Baker, Johnny Fay, Paul Langlois and Gord Sinclair at Prime Video Toronto HQ.
Anne Brodie – Diving into the film, creating it, looking at everything, having that lump in the throat, has all of that helped you with your sense of grief?
Rob Baker – That’s a good question. I think grief is always going to be with you. It never goes away, you know the good times. You remember them they’re like a nice cleansing bath or A night that would have great memories of it but uh, grief is like something that kind of pierces your skin and bleach scars, and You have to reform the way you move through life to accommodate it. And time is really just the best. The best way to deal with it. Just have to like we did in the band, you put one foot in front of the other we never focused on the horizon and conquering the world. It was all about the next gig.
It’s like the net song we’re going to write, it’s the same thing with dealing with grief, you just put one foot in front of the other and keep going. The really the most difficult thing about it. I mean, we lost a brother But, We went through everything that we did together.
Very collectively and openly together. And that we all went off separately and grieved completely alone. That was really hard.
AB – If you can describe the Canadian-ness of the songs, the imagery, the lyrics, the ideas and history.
Paul Langlois. Yeah, it’s You know, I think it’s cool that Gord kind of increasingly attempted to write about Canadian things and Canadian places. If you did a percentage, I think it’s far lower than people think. As far as Canadian references in our songs, I’m going to say eight percent. That’s a guess, but the things that caught on happened to be beautiful things as in Courage and Bobcaygeon. They were both popular songs and Hugh McLennan inspired Courage and Bobcaygeon the town. There are two Canadian songs. They’re up there but just like that Ahead by Century was Canadian but it’s not really, you know. It was never. It was never nationalistic, ever and sometimes it was kind of complanatory.
So I think it touched people, and that’s something and we all feel good about that and Gord in particular, but we were moved. What Mike just said about that sort of feeling that Canadians have, we contributed to the fact that it’s okay, to make Canadian references. There are some areas out there that wouldn’t reference Canada because the Americans are like, so who is Bill Barilko? The American record company would be like What? But hey that song did well too up here.
So I mean I think it’s you’re right. We toured everywhere but we started touring in Canada. Probably our first six cross-countries before we started touring the States. That’s just part of what we knew and part of what Gord knew and he was very interested which became obvious, especially with his solo record The Secret Path, like he really cared about what’s going on everywhere. We’re proud of it, it’s cool and I would say it’s the most popular thing. You might even get us in a bar or whatever. Man, that’s so cool bro. You guys wrote about Canada. I think that it makes people feel good. So obviously it makes us feel good.
The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal at TIFF Sept 12, 17 on Prime Video Sept. 20