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Echo Beach (WORD)
Echo Beach (PDF)
YOU CAN PLAY ALONG WITH THE VIDEO! We may leave out some of the instrumental for BUG night - we'll see! Depends if we have noodlers!
"Echo Beach" is a song written by Mark Gane recorded by the Canadian group Martha and the Muffins in 1979.
While Marc Gane was a student at the Ontario College of Art, he had a job one summer at a paint and wallpaper factory. It was so boring that he daydreamed a lot. While Echo Beach did not exist as a real location, it was a symbol of a place everyone wants to escape to when they're not where they want to be. The inspiration was Sunnyside Beach on the shoreline of Lake Ontario in Toronto. Says Gane, "The lake and beach could have been in the middle of nowhere while the city behind became a 'surrealistic sight'."
The group initially came together in Toronto in 1977, when David Millar asked his fellow Ontario College of Art student Mark Gane to help him start a band. Millar recruited Martha Johnson to play keyboards; Johnson brought in a friend from high school, Carl Finkle, to play bass; and Gane's brother Tim signed on as the drummer. They chose the name "Martha and the Muffins" to distance themselves from the aggressive names adopted by many punk bands of the era. According to Mark Gane: "We decided to use it as a temporary name until we could all agree on something better." The name ended up sticking for the next seven years.
This song won the 1981 Juno Award for Single of the Year, tying with Anne Murray's "Could I Have This Dance." It reached #5 in Canada and was the Canadian new wave band's only significant international hit, though they had several other hits in their homeland.