Every year, countries in search of musical glory select artists to represent them on the global stage. If provinces got the same shot, what song would we choose to represent Ontario?
This summer, we’ll find out. In TVO Today’s Ontariovision Song Contest, 16 beloved standards and newer classics will go head to head — and you’ll get the chance to back your favourites.
So kick back, relax, and listen to some trademark Ontario tracks. Voting begins in August, and in September, we’ll reveal the province’s signature song.
Song: “Echo Beach”
Year: Recorded in 1979 and released in 1980
Album: Metro Music
Artist: Toronto new-wave band Martha and the Muffins has had a varied lineup. Martha Johnson and Mark Gane (who are a couple) have been members since the group’s founding, but the band has also included Martha Ladly, Tim Gane, Jocelyne Lanois, Nick Kent, Carl Finkle, and David Millar. “Echo Beach” was the band’s first single and also its highest-charting one, reaching number five in Canada and number 10 in the United Kingdom. The song was written by Mark Gane, and it was the third he’d ever written. Their latest single is“Stay Home and Dance,” a reworking of their song “Come Out and Dance,” which was released in 2020 during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Out of all the terrible student summer jobs I have heard about, Mark Gane’s has to be the most mind-numbingly boring. While a student at the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University), in Toronto, he got a summer job as a wallpaper inspector, a job I didn’t know existed.
“I don’t think I knew that was a job either, until I got it,” says Gane. “These huge wallpaper presses would sometimes malfunction, and my job was to separate the stuff that had been wrecked from the stuff that was salvageable. I guess, subconsciously, I was thinking, ‘Boy, I’d rather be somewhere else.”’
From left to right: 1979 poster (Henry Dunsmore/Robin Cass); Musical Hall poster from 1979; and poster from 1978. (Courtesy of Martha Johnson and Mark Gane)
That “somewhere else” wasn’t really a specific place, Gane says, though it was Toronto’s Sunnyside Beach that directly inspired “Echo Beach”: “On a silent summer evening, the sky's alive with lights/A building in the distance, surrealistic sight/On Echo Beach, waves make the only sound/On Echo Beach, there's not a soul around.”
“It’s escaping reality,” Johnson says. “It’s in your head — it’s not really a place.”
Echo Beach / Martha and the Muffins live at the Ontario College of Art in 1978
That, Johnson thinks, is part of the song’s appeal: everyone can have their own place, their own memory, that represents Echo Beach to them. “The [narrator] is trying to recapture something that she had on that beach, because it was a freer feeling than what she has now,” she says. “I think that’s what people related to, because a lot of people are locked away in their cubicles, in their jobs, and they remember when they were 18 and spent their whole summer on the beach.”
Gane and Johnson, who spoke to me from their cottage near Picton, have come prepared: Johnson has brought a list of things that have been named after Echo Beach: a show-jumping horse from Ireland, a flower, a line of beach wear, a youth hostel, two resorts, a record label, a gay-porn film, a club, a science-fiction short story, among others. (I nearly manage to ruin the interview at the beginning by asking about the outdoor music venue at Ontario Place, called Echo Beach, which, Gane and Johnson say, is the sole place never to acknowledge a connection to the song. They tell me they brought a lawsuit, which was settled out of court.)
Autographed publicity photo from 1980. (Courtesy of Martha Johnson and Mark Gane)
As their list of namesakes shows, the song has had an influence all over the world. But Martha and the Muffins isn’t necessarily a group that comes to mind when one thinks of Canadian bands or “Toronto bands.” I admit that, for years, I didn’t know they were Canadian, and they tell me that I am far from the first to be surprised.
“It did confuse a lot of people,” says Gane. “The reviews of our first album, Metro Music, which ‘Echo Beach’ was on, there were a lot of reviews — I think one from Canada — that said ‘I can’t believe this band isn’t from London or New York.’ Everybody’s just shocked that it was a Canadian band because I think, at the time, we sounded a lot different from most Canadian bands. All the things that people expected from Canada, we didn’t sound like at all.”
From left to right: Live performance in the 1970s; 1980 promo photo (Douglas Elford); and performance from 1979. (Courtesy of Martha Johnson and Mark Gane)
Leonard Nevarez, a professor of sociology at Vassar College who is working on a book about Martha and the Muffins, sees them as representative of the Toronto punk and new-wave scene of the time. The locus of that scene, Nevarez, Gane, and Johnson all say, was Queen Street West — specifically, the Beverley Tavern.
“At some point in the 1970s, a number of avant-garde artists began showing work and developing artist-run centres, first in downtown at large, but then they really started to converge onto Queen West,” explains Nevarez. “This is also the time when punk rock starts taking off in Toronto.”
Live performance in 1978. (Courtesy of Martha Johnson and Mark Gane)
“That neighbourhood was dead,” says Gane. “It was basically a low-income, kind of shabby place where nothing happened. You’d go down there, and there’d be people passed out in the alleyways, and the only people that inhabited it were Ontario College of Art students, artists.”
“Spending their days at Beverley, drinking their education away,” Johnson cuts in.
Martha and the Muffins is probably the most famous group to come out of that scene, Nevarez tells me. “I think ‘Echo Beach’ is maybe even more popular than the band and their larger reputation,” he says. “It’s a really unique song. Almost everyone who hears it with open ears is sort of taken by it. And they probably don't have anything else like that in their catalogue, although they certainly have hits, and they have fantastic, dreamy, innovative music. But [‘Echo Beach’ has] the bones of a really great pop song, and it’s kind of lightning in a bottle.”
From left to right: Flyer for concert in 1978; poster from 1980 (Douglas Elford). (Courtesy of Martha Johnson and Mark Gane)
“We had enormous battles with record companies,” Gane says. “I don’t really know how we got away with it, because most of the time we did. In the early days, when ‘Echo Beach’ did well, at Virgin, they’d be going, ‘You know, we don’t hear another Echo Beach.’ And I’d say, “That’s because there isn’t going to be another one. We’re onto other things now.’ And that’s really not what record labels like to hear.”
“The world owns ‘Echo Beach’ in a way that doesn’t always pull the band along,” Nevarez says. “For the band, it was kind of a fluke in important ways. They were sort of an art-rock dance group. They were not really into the business of making pop songs. And ‘Echo Beach’ was the song that got them signed to a British label and brought them into the British music industry, which has very strong, passionate ideas about what pop music should do and what new wave should do. Within the year, the original band began to break up. Martha and the Muffins were not made for that kind of career. To a certain extent, they have spent the last 50 years kind of pivoting around ‘Echo Beach,’ its reputation, its continuing popularity.”
"Echo Beach" 30th-anniversary version / Martha and the Muffins
Gane and Johnson don’t seem to have many regrets about the path they took. “We did everything to probably wreck our careers, from a label point of view,” Gane cheerfully admits. “But, certainly, in our little group down on Queen Street, nobody went into it with the idea that they were ever, ever going to be a star or get a label. We were just doing it for fun.”
“You have to put yourself first,” he says. “And,' in a way, I think the success of ‘Echo Beach’ helped pay for some of those other projects, and there are certainly a lot of them.”
“Which we’re still doing now,” adds Johnson.
Cover of "metro Beach" album (left); "Echo Beach" 1980 U.K. single cover. (Courtesy of Martha Johnson and Mark Gane)
So why should Ontarians choose “Echo Beach” for our signature song?
“It relates to people on a universal level, but it's very local,” says Gane. “When Metro Music came out in 1980, we had an ordnance survey map of downtown Toronto, which everybody commented on because it was unusual for anybody to put something like that on a cover.”
Gane asks whether I was the one who wrote the case for Drake’s song “Know Yourself.” I tell him no.
The display for that suggests that Drake “put the 6ix on the map,” he says. “But I have to say, we might have done that 43 years earlier with our map of Toronto on the cover and ‘Echo Beach’ because of the curiosity from the press in the U.K. and worldwide. Everybody wanted to know about Toronto and Canada. So that might be a point to bring up as well.”
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Correction: An earlier version of this article misnamed the band's original drummer. TVO Today regrets the error.