Echo Beach
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Echo Beach is a single which was released by the Canadian group Martha and the Muffins in 1980 from the album Metro Music. It won the Juno Award for Single of the Year and is considered a classic in the field of New Wave music.
Echo Beach was the band's only significant hit internationally, although they had several other hits in Canada.
Although Mark Gane wasn't aware of a real Echo Beach when he wrote the song in 1978, several people wrote to him asking if it was about a beach in their local area. However, Echo Beach, as mentioned in the song, does not refer to a real beach but is rather a symbolic notion of somewhere the narrator would rather be, somewhere 'far away in time'. In reality, the song was thought of while Gane was working checking wallpaper for printing faults. He found this rather dull and his mind drifted to times he would rather be reliving. One such time was an evening spent at Sunnyside Beach on the shoreline of Lake Ontario in Toronto in summer.
In 2005, Echo Beach was named the 35th greatest Canadian song of all time on the CBC Radio One series 50 Tracks: The Canadian Version.
The name has also been adopted by a German record label and a Toronto boutique.
Echo Beach is also mentioned in Ultravox's 1977 track "Hiroshima Mon Amour", which can be found on the Ha! Ha! Ha! album.
