What to know
- Aug. 20 marks 10 years since The Tragically Hip played their final concert in their hometown of Kingston, Ont., during the band’s 2016 Man Machine Poem tour.
- To mark the anniversary, the band is releasing Live July 22 – August 20, 2016, a 29-song collection featuring performances recorded across the 15-date final tour.
- The album arrives on vinyl, CD and digitally Aug. 21 and includes performances from Kingston, Toronto, Hamilton, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa and London.
- CBC will rebroadcast The Tragically Hip: A National Celebration commercial-free on Aug. 22 at 7 p.m. local time on CBC TV and CBC Gem, preceded by a 17-minute mini-documentary from Gord Downie’s brother, filmmaker Mike Downie.
- The original 2016 broadcast of the band’s final concert reached an estimated 11.7 million people across television, radio and digital platforms.
It feels like yesterday, but it’s been 10 years since The Tragically Hip played their emotional final show on Aug. 20, 2016, in the band’s hometown of Kingston, Ontario. With mourning turned to memories, the band will release the 29-song Live July 22 – August 20, 2016, culled from the 15-date Man Machine Poem final tour.
The band — comprising the late singer Gord Downie, guitarists Paul Langlois and Rob Baker, bassist Gord Sinclair and drummer Johnny Fay — has sold more than 12 million albums in Canada and over two million in the U.S.
Downie died a little over a year after their final show, on Oct. 17, 2017, from brain cancer.
Live July 22 – August 20, 2016, mixed and mastered in Dolby Atmos by the band’s longtime audio engineer Mark Vreeken, is available on vinyl, CD and digitally on Aug. 21. The next day, CBC will rebroadcast their final show together, The Tragically Hip: A National Celebration, which drew an estimated 11.7 million viewers and listeners on television, radio and online. A special 17-minute mini-doc by filmmaker Mike Downie, Gord’s brother, will precede the airing, featuring never-before-seen footage.
At a recent preview of tracks from the live album at Universal Music Canada headquarters in Toronto, on their in-house Dolby Atmos sound system, The Tragically Hip’s manager Jake Gold, said, “We started talking about what we were going to do for the 10-year anniversary a couple of years ago. We had just come through 2024, which was a really big year for us with the No Dress Rehearsal doc, and all the other things around it, and it was like, ‘What are we going to do next?’ ‘Well, 10 years is coming up. Let’s do a live record that encapsulates the tour.’”
Gold said creating the live package began with an enormous archive of approximately 700 songs. Bruce Dickinson, the A&R executive who signed The Tragically Hip in 1988 and continues to work on the band’s archival box sets, worked with UMC A&R VP Shawn Marino to sift through the recordings. They went album by album, selecting the strongest performances and reducing the list to about a hundred songs, then to 75.
“Finally, we got down to 29 of what everyone felt were the best performances,” said Gold.
The artwork was another massive undertaking. Gold said graphic designer Simon Evers worked with The Hip’s Baker to go through approximately 20,000 photographs by David Bastedo, ultimately selecting 50. “And that was just one photographer that took that many photos,” Gold exclaimed. “We tried to use a lot of photos that had never been used before in any of the other packages that we’ve done or any of the stuff anyone’s seen.”
Leading up to next week’s album release, preview tracks have been rolled out, including “At The Hundredth Meridian,” “Fifty-Mission Cap” and “Locked In The Trunk Of A Car.”
On the anniversary of the final concert, “Ahead By A Century,” from the Kingston show, will also come out.
The track list for Live July 22 – August 20, 2016, including the city of the concert recording, is as follows:
Side One: “At Transformation” (Winnipeg), “In View” (Calgary), “In A World Possessed By The Human Mind” (Kingston), “Family Band” (Hamilton), and “Lonely End Of The Rink” (Hamilton).
Side Two: “Something On” (Toronto), “Locked In The Trunk Of A Car” (Kingston), “Opiated” (Winnipeg), “Nautical Disaster” (Kingston), and “New Orleans Is Sinking” (Ottawa).
Side Three: “Yer Not The Ocean” (Calgary), “Gus: The Polar Bear From Central Park” (London), “At The Hundredth Meridian” (Toronto), “Daredevil” (Toronto), and “Bobcaygeon” (Calgary).
Side Four: “Lake Fever” (Kingston), “Escape Is At Hand For The Travelin’ Man” (Kingston), “Flamenco” (Edmonton), “Putting Down” (Kingston), and “We Want To Be It” (Toronto).
Side Five: “50 Mission Cap” (Edmonton), “Little Bones” (Kingston), “Greasy Jungle” (Toronto), and “The Last Of The Unplucked Gems” (Winnipeg).
Side Six: “Fiddler’s Green” (Hamilton), “Machine” (Kingston), “What Blue” (Toronto), “It’s A Good Life If You Don’t Weaken” (Toronto), and “Ahead By A Century” (Kingston).
Then on Saturday, watch The Tragically Hip: A National Celebration in full and commercial-free, at 7 p.m. local time (7:30 p.m. NT) on CBC TV and CBC Gem. The concert will also be available through CBC Radio and CBC Music’s YouTube channel, with the global stream available through YouTube and additional broadcasts on SiriusXM.
The decade anniversary comes after years of archival projects, celebrating the band’s legacy, including Road Apples 30thAnniversary Deluxe Boxset (2021), Fully Completely Vinyl Release (2022), Phantom Power 25th Anniversary deluxe boxset (2023), and Up To Here 35th Anniversary Deluxe Boxset (2024), in addition to the four-part Amazon Prime documentary No Dress Rehearsal and the coffee table book This Is Our Life.
In 2021, the band, which already won 17 Juno Awards and been inducted at the Junos into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 2005, received the Juno’s Humanitarian Award. The following year, they received their second star on Canada’s Walk of Fame, this time recognizing their humanitarian work In September, they will be inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame at Massey Hall in Toronto.
