When CBC viewers got to know Corey Hart
'Sunglasses at Night' musician broke out with 1983 album, is back in 2020
Never Surrender could be considered the guiding principle in the long career of Canadian musician Corey Hart.
At 22, he already had a hit song under his belt, 1983's Sunglasses at Night. And in February 1985 he was hard at work trying to make lightning strike again.
The CBC's Nan Devitt profiled Hart as he was recording his second album — Boy in the Box, which would introduce listeners to the song Never Surrender.
Thirty-five years after it first came out, Never Surrender is back, updated in 2020 as a "pandemic-era salute to people's strength," according to CBC News.
On May 29, Hart is releasing a new video for a reworked version of the song, Never Surrender (Angels) 2020.
'Press agent's dream'
On CBC's The Journal, host Barbara Frum introduced Hart as a "press agent's dream" whose "sultry James Dean looks" was irresistible to teenage record-buyers.
But Hart was trying to go beyond Sunglasses at Night and the teen-heartthrob image when he headed to Quebec's legendary Le Studio with his band in the first months of 1985.
"Corey Hart has come to a turning point in his career," said Devitt. "He has to follow up his early success with an album that will appeal to a broader audience."
That album would become Boy in the Box.
"I've reached a point with the first record of recognition that I'm very happy with," said a denim-clad Hart. "But now ... the true test [is] if I can come back and record and write a really strong second record."
A 'collapse' in 1987
According to the Globe and Mail, Hart "collapsed" from exhaustion after a concert in Sudbury in July 1987 and was ordered by his doctor to take 10 to 12 weeks off.
A tour spokesperson told the newspaper Hart was "physically exhausted after going nearly non-stop for the last three years."
That fall, he performed a concert in his hometown of Montreal, which was recorded for a CBC-TV special that aired that December.
Five more albums followed, according to Hart's Discogs.com catalog, until he largely stepped back from the music business in 1999.
'I stepped away'
"You're asking what I've been doing," Hart said in a 2019 conversation in St. John's with CBC reporter Carolyn Stokes as he prepared to go back on the road. "I've been raising four kids."
"I had one arm in the music business still. I was writing some songs for other recording artists," he explained. "But I stepped away in ... 1999, after the birth of my third daughter."
Hart had performed at the 2019 Juno Awards in London, Ont., and been inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.
He was launching his 2019 tour on May 31, which happened to be his birthday.
"Being in St. John's to start my tour was by design," he said. "That's where I started my 1985 Boy in the Box tour, which was the first time I ever headlined as a recording artist, as a touring artist."
