Salut! Live

Not that he ever gave it up. Whenever there was a fundraiser or some other event that featured Angus, you could bet he’d have a guitar with him. He found time for the occasional show with his band, Grievous Angels, and to put out their seventh and eighth albums in 2013 and 2021.

But back to 2004 and the post-election gig he was playing in the dingy and acoustically appalling curling arena of Elk Lake, population about 550, which flourished during the region’s early 20^th century silver-mining boom and was now eking out a precarious existence on the fringes of the lumber industry. A community, Angus told me, “too stubborn, too spirited to give up the ghost.”

A bit like the man himself.

The “g-string and a spider tattoo” line came from Lost in the Woods, a deliciously spiky little love song he did about an exotic dancer from “Nickel Town” – the nickel-mining city of Sudbury.

It was incongruous, a perfect illustration of Angus’s multi-faceted persona. On top of everything else, he’s been a journalist, a broadcaster, put out a magazine and authored several books.

His singing voice isn’t pretty but its jagged edges are perfectly suited to his material and the place that he calls home. Northern Ontario is often spectacularly beautiful but can also be an uncompromising, hard-scrabble place with communities dependent on lumber or mineral-mining for their existence. Always with a price to pay.

The Elk Lake gig was rambunctious, with some hard drinking going on and a lot of backchat between Angus and the exuberant crowd.

“Be nice,” he told them, “or I’ll outline my nine-point health plan.”

He played an outdoor folk festival next day near another old mining town, Cobalt, where he was living at the time. The audience was more staid and way more sober. Angus stuck mostly to his acoustic guitar, nicknamed “Patsy.” The night before he’d also used his electric bass, “Bernice,” and “Roxanne,” a cream Fender electric that he called “almost too nice for me to play.”

Born in the northern Ontario city of Timmins, Angus moved to Toronto before he was a teenager.

Known back then as Chuck rather than Charlie, in the late ’70s he and a friend, Andrew Cash – also an NDP MP for four years – formed a punk band called L’Etranger. Its main claim to fame was opening for seminal American punk rockers The Dead Kennedys when they played Toronto in 1983.

L’Etranger broke up in 1986 and Angus put together Grievous Angels (named for the Gram Parsons album), mostly a seven-piece outfit, though its membership and numbers have been fluid over the years. Angus hasn’t always been lead singer but was and remains very much the driving force. It's typical of him that he doesn't put his name out front and centre. It's not "Charlie Angus and..."

Variously described as “folk-rock… alt-roots… punk-country…” the band started off busking on the streets of Toronto, where Angus and his wife Brit Griffin were running a homeless shelter.

 Grievous Angels landed a recording contract, putting out six albums between 1989 and ’93. They began touring and, with two Juno nominations (Canada’s top music award), seemed on the brink of the big time.

 Angus’s songs were being spoken of as standing with those of Gordon Lightfoot, Ian Tyson, Stan Rogers.

They dealt with the harsh realities of life, both in Northern Ontario and on the streets of big cities, and with the killing conditions in the mines. Silver, gold, cobalt, zinc, nickel…

“When a man dies young from a rattling lung…” words that will resonate with anyone who comes from a coal-mining community.

There was humour too. Merry Christmas from Monteith is set in a northern prison, where a not-too-bright inmate is trying to win back his ex-girlfriend with a promise that he’s going to change, which he clearly isn’t.

(Art imitates life, or vice versa. I remember talking to a bartender up there whose soon-to-be-ex-husband was doing three years in Monteith after getting caught trying to jimmy the cash dispenser out of a bank wall. Not too bright.)

As Angus said, “You write a song about dying of silicosis, you can’t get it on the radio. You gotta write love songs.”

So, instead of potential stardom, he moved back up north, “where I was meant to be. There was no option as to how the story would go. I’ve always been an activist. It really is about changing the world.”

Angus will stay on as an MP until the next election, which will be October next year at the latest. But it’s unlikely to go that long and, anyway, parliament’s summer break is imminent.

Music, he recently told the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national daily, “is crucial to what I am. Songs can take you in a direction a political speech can’t.

“The folk-music tradition has been a means of telling stories, so that we can reflect on the situation we’re in and how we can get out of it.

“Today, I guess I’m writing songs for the dystopian age.”

That would be the latest album, Last Call for Cinderella.

These are two of my favourite tracks:

This is How the City Falls was inspired by the so-called “Freedom Convoy.” For a month in early 2022, hundreds of heavy trucks paralysed (many say terrorised) downtown Ottawa to oppose Canada’s Covid vaccination mandates. The protest, which Angus experienced first-hand, was widely condemned and has led to criminal trials for some of the organizers.

Bells of Pontecorvo is about a little-known town in Italy where Canadian troops fought (and almost 900 died) in 1944 during the battle of Monte Cassino. Legend has it that two of the soldiers rang the church bells to let the people know their town had been liberated.

Charlie Angus is back all right. Possibly better than ever.