TIMMINS, Ont. — A Timmins band has secured a world record.
Local band Miners and Sons recently travelled 9,000 feet underground to set the record for the deepest concert with the Guinness Book of World Records.
“We held up the cages from 6 a.m. to 11 a.m.,” said promoter Norm Dwyer.
The Timmins record was set at Glencore's Kidd Mine, the deepest base-metal mine in the world.
It would take roughly five CN Towers stacked one on top of the other to reach the surface from the depth where the band set up the concert.
The Shaft Bottom Boys were the previous record holders at 6,213 ft or 1,893.8 metres below the surface on March 7, 2020, at Vale’s Creighton Mine in Greater Sudbury.
The Timmins concert was witnessed by 31 lucky ticket-holders.
If you're wondering how the acoustics are that deep, Dwyer says it's some of the best he's ever heard.
“We thought there was going to be an issue,” said Dwyer. “I don’t know about these guys, but that’s some of the best acoustics I’ve ever heard.”
Four of the five band members had been underground prior to this process, with Dwyer heading down for the first time two weeks before the performance. It was Olaveson’s first time underground.
“You don’t really understand how fast you’re going until you pass a level, and it's gone,” said Dywer. “Went all the way down to 9000 feet and set up.”
It took an hour to set up, and they played a 15-minute set that included the Tragically Hip’s New Orleans in Sinking and CCR’s Bad Moon Rising.
“Mines have spent 68 years taking rock out of that place and then spent one day bringing it back,” said Dwyer.
They only had a 30-second break between songs, and during rehearsals, they pulled that even tighter, aiming for 20-second breaks at most.
When Dywer found out that a Sudbury band held the previous record, he needed to defend Timmins’ honour.
“It took two years of trying to get a hold of the right people at Glencore,” he said.
It turned out that Dwyer knew the man he needed to speak with through other community connections, so he reached out to Dawid Myburgh.
“I talked to him all the time at the martial arts club,” he said. “So I went and talked to Dawid, and I said, ‘Look, we have this video; I want to do this’.”
The next step was getting the Guinness World Record people to take the bid seriously.
“It’s the only reason I started Dwy-nx Events, because as Norm Dywer, I wasn’t getting anything from them, so then I saw there was a different route to go and apply as a company,” he said. “I went back, and right away, they answered in two days.”
The company Dwyer formed covered the cost of the application and travel expenses for the adjudicator to the tune of $30,000 USD.
The band expressed their gratitude for the support they’ve received from sponsors as well as the patience of the miners at the Kidd Mine.
There was a lot of enthusiasm for the event on-site, though.
“They were helping us move, they had the place cleaned out,” said Olaveson
The band’s next major gig will be playing the Northern College’s miner’s ball in February.
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