We’re only a week into Rush’s Fifty Something reunion tour and already the superlatives are stacking up. Fans and contemporaries have hailed the comeback – and Anika Nilles’ performance in place of the late Neil Peart - as a triumph.

Now the band have reacted to the outpouring of affection the shows have produced and put a statement on social media. “Thank you for making this week so effin’ amazing!” the band wrote in their message. “For embracing Anika, Loren so profoundly. Aimee Mann for joining us on Time Stand Still in tribute to Neil. To you, our fans, your steadfast support is what has made this a reality. Forever grateful!”

The reviews of the first few shows of the tour have been rapturous. Mojo have called it “an epic comeback”, whilst Rolling Stone described as “one of the most emotional Rush concerts ever” and praising the performances of all three members of the trio.

Anika Nilles, of course, was under the most scrutiny, and by all accounts did a superlative job behind the kit. Writing on Instagram last week, prog drumming legend Mike Portnoy was unstinting in his praise: “Anika absolutely KILLED IT in the best way imaginable... She really is the perfect choice for this!”

What the Oasis tour was last year to the Britpop crowd, Rush’s reunion is to the prog community. They’re touring through to April next year, but if you’re still wavering about getting a ticket you’re advised to move fast.

Alex Lifeson has been a paid-up member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame since 2013. He has sold over 40 million records over five decades with Rush. He’s been immortalised on South Park. And it’s not like he is a stranger to Best Guitarist of All Time lists.

And yet some people will tell you he is underrated. Rush’s bassist and frontman Geddy Lee is one of them. Joining MusicRadar in a London hotel ahead of Rush’s triumphant return to the stage on their Fifty Something Tour – a historic reunion that sees Anika Nilles assuming the late Neil Peart’s place on drums – Lee believes Lifeson doesn’t get his due, that some of the stuff he would come up with would blow his mind.

“I’m a big Alex fan,” says Lee. “I think he’s the most underrated guitarist in rock history. People don’t realise how inventive he was, because he refused to conform sonically, his chordal use.”

Paul Gilbert knows just what Lee is speaking of. When we caught up with Gilbert to talk about his latest studio album, WROC, Gilbert wasn’t so sure of where the critical consensus stood regarding Lifeson. “I don’t know about that,” he said, but he was sure of what made Lifeson stand out from his peers.

Like Lee, Gilbert remains in awe of Lifeson’s chord choices.

“Well, there are so many things,” said Gilbert. “But first of all, his chord work is so unique, and the chords themselves, and the way he arpeggiates them and the way he makes riffs out of them – there’s just so many cool rhythm parts. Clean ones, distorted ones, acoustic ones, there’s always something really creative with the rhythm stuff – it’s super-musical.”

Lifeson can tear up the fretboard if needs be but he’s never been a shredder. It did not fit with Rush’s sound. As expansive as the Canadian prog trio took their sound, that kind of individualism left unchecked might well have pulled focus from the grander concepts behind the music, like the dystopian sci-fi of 2112, the fever dreams of La Villa Strangiato.

Lee credits Lifeson with giving Rush a sound that was would have been beyond most power trios.

“I mean, we were three people, and he made it sound like there was more than one guitar player playing when there was one guitar player playing,” says Lee. “He invented chords.”

Lee says some of Lifeson’s best work came when he actively looked for alternatives to the traditional guitar solo.

“Listen to a song like Red Sector A, for example, to speak of Grace Under Pressure. I love the guitar work in that song,” says Lee. “He’s taken a song with this repetitive, sort of mind numbing arpeggiation coming from the pulsing of the keyboards, and he’s floating on top with these really interesting chord progressions – and that whole solo!”

That whole solo is audacious. Red Sector A needed that. It is a heavy song that speaks to the experiences of Lee’s parents as Holocaust survivors. Lee does not play any bass guitar on the track, just synth and vocals.

Lifeson’s lead playing on Red Sector A could be described as rhythm-lead, in how he used chord voicings, but it’s more experimental than the typical Hendrix/Stones sense of rhythm-lead. It is almost an abstraction of what lead guitar is supposed to do.

“You know, he was kind of anti-solo at that period,” says Lee. “And yet he created a solo that wasn't a solo that’s made up of sounds and chordal structures and emotion. That’s just one example [of this].”

Rush’s pop-cultural footprint is such that countless guitarists would fall under Lifeson’s spell. They, too, would reconsider the fretboard after falling into these immersive worlds created in tracks such as Cygnus X-1 – two-parters too epic for one album – and riffs that subverted the powerchord paradigm upon which rock was built.

One such guitarist is John Petrucci of Dream Theater.

“I love Alex’s choices,” Petrucci told MusicRadar in 2012, “the way he plays power chords with open strings on top. And when you combine that with the way he uses the chorus effect – to this day, I apply all of this information to my own style.”

Those open strings Petrucci speaks of transformed regular powerchords into something more exotic, as on the opening to Cygnus X-1 Book II: Hemispheres, where Lifeson plays a an F# powerchord with the high E and B strings left open, making it an F#11. He would move these shapes around, mining them for fresh harmonic intrigue.

And then there was Lifeson’s electric guitar tone, which became an exemplar in how to deploy a dual amp setup, with chorus pedals, tape echo and various delay pedals to make one guitar occupy a wider bandwidth. He was no stranger to the wash of flanger or the Leslie rotating speaker.

But when you strip all that away, Lifeson was fundamentally a blues-rock player. That’s what he cut his teeth on. As Rush grew more adventurous, so too did Lifeson. But his foundational influences would still erupt when the occasion required it.

“You listen to the solo of Kid Gloves if you want to hear a blistering guitar solo,” says Lee. “La Villa Strangiato, his playing there is is true to his blues-rock roots – that’s borne out of it. He was a great blues guitarist at a very young age. And that is sort of reflected in La Villa.”

La Villa Strangiato came together out of Lifeson’s dreams. Each morning he would come down for breakfast and tell Peart and Lee about his dreams.

Once they had stopped groaning, wishing that Lifeson would lay off the cheese – or the pot – before bedtime, Rush realised they had enough ideas for an epic instrumental to be delivered in 12 acts (and subtitled “An Exercise In Self-Indulgence”).

It has long been one of Lifeson’s favourites to perform live. What he had to say about it tells us much of how Lifeson thought about his solos. It was always about complementing his bandmates.

“It’s quite emotive, and it's got a very bluesy, almost minor-ish feel to it,” Lifeson told MusicRadar in 2010. “Also, the music that surrounds the solo – everything Geddy and Neil are doing – is incredible. It feels great to play it on my [Gibson ES-] 355, which is the guitar I recorded it with. All in all, it’s a wonderful moment.”

For Gilbert, it was the phrasing and the note choice that elevated Lifeson’s lead playing. Lifeson was unconventional but not at the expense of the song.

His solos adhered to Rush’s credo, that this might be high-information music – arrangements stretched out to accommodate big ideas, cross-album narratives – and yet it would give the audience hooks, ear candy that made it digestible and human, maybe even accessible

“His soloing, it’s just really memorable and unusual, and that is hard to do,” says Gilbert. “I mean, on the first album, if you listen to the solo on Working Man, that’s like straight-ahead Zeppelin-style, ‘I got it cranked up through a Marshall stack, and I’m just playing my cool pentatonic licks, and I’m playing them great!’ That was a great way to come charging out of the box.

“But then, as time went on, [listen to] the solo on Limelight – it’s so unusual, and it has to be that, like, it is part of the song! It’s not one where you go, ‘Oh, it’s in G#, I’ll just improvise that.’ No. It has got to be that solo. It’s thematic.”

Limelight is a great example of Lifeson being Lifeson. He loves that solo. He loves playing it. He loves how it sounded on record. It’s one of the highlights on Moving Pictures, a record that is front-to-back highlights.

“I’ve always enjoyed the elasticity of that solo, particularly the way it sounds on the record,” Lifeson told MusicRadar in 2010. “It has a certain tonality I just love. I do like playing the solo live, but I think I prefer listening to it on the album. On record, it has a magical quality to it – it really conveys the pathos of the song and the lyrics.”

Lifeson admits that even he has struggled to perform the Limelight solo live just as it was recorded. Maybe it is that search for perfection that keeps things interesting.

“I’ve never been able to recreate that live,” he said. “I get pretty close, but it’s never exactly the way it is on record. I’ll keep trying, though.”

Lifeson will do just that as Rush continue on The 50 Something Tour. See the official Rush site for dates and ticket details.

• “No one was more deserving of a life to himself than he was… We were torn, and sympathetic. At the same time, we felt we had unfinished business”: Geddy Lee on honouring Neil Peart and why he and Alex Lifeson are getting back together as Rush

Rick Beato has sat down with Anika Nilles and found out a bit more about her preparation in the run-up to her big gig last weekend – the opening night of Rush’s Fifty Something reunion tour.

The first show in LA on Sunday was a triumph for Rush – and Nilles personally – with fans and contemporaries of the band such as Mike Portnoy queuing up to praise her performance.

Nilles started off by talking about the new Bubinga kit she’s using for the tour. “A Maple kit is more of an all-round kit so you have all the frequencies there which is really in balance, but with the Bubinga you have that bottom end, it’s more phat and depending on the tuning you can still really have that super punchy tone. It’s what I played on the Jeff Beck tour.

"For huge stages and big venues, the Bubinga works really good. It’s not my go-to choice when I play in smaller venues, because it’s too boomy. But for this kind of stage, it’s the perfect wood.”

Asked how she learned Rush’s extensive back catalogue, she admitted: “I have no idea. Sometimes I was sitting there and thought, 'I have no idea how I'm learning that,' but somehow it's working because I learned those songs in a completely different way. My preparation was so different to how I prepare myself usually.“

"Usually I just listen, then I make a quick chart for myself to have it visually in front of my eyes and then I just listen, read and play. And I figured with this, it doesn't work right. So sometimes you cannot really write it out because a lot of it is also kind of a feeling."

Writing it out would have just taken too much time, she said. “And I thought, I don't have that time. I just have to listen, make chunks for myself and just learn it step by step and then this is how I did it. But just memorizing all the parts is one thing and then learning the feeling is a different thing.”

Nilles got the gig via Geddy Lee’s bass tech John ‘Skully’ McIntosh, who also worked with Jeff Beck. Once she signed up to joining the band it was a matter of deep research. “I was diving directly into the Rush rabbit hole and just listened to everything I could catch – music, videos, live shows – everything you could find online, just to get to know the songs a bit better, because I just knew a bunch.”

She explained that in a way they were learning or re-learning together. After all, Lee and Lifeson hadn’t played as Rush for over a decade. “We all kind of started a little bit together from scratch,” she said. “I mean, they didn't really start from scratch, but as a trio, we had to find a way to come together.

"And it's one thing when you come into a band and everyone knows everything and it's just like playing, it’s smooth because they're doing it every day onstage and you're the newbie (who) has to adjust and learn all this. It didn't feel like that. So (that) definitely took the pressure a little bit off my shoulders.”

Epiphone and Alex Lifeson have unveiled a replica of the Rush guitarist’s iconic ‘Whitey’ ES-355, and it is as high-end as Epiphone guitars get.

Based on the Alpine White 1976 ES-355 that can be heard right across the Rush catalogue, this Inspired By Gibson “reissue” comes with Gibson USA pickups, a signature hard-shell guitar case, and stays faithful to the original design with a Varitone and the guitar’s dual outputs.

The gold hardware isn’t to be sniffed at either, with a gold Harmonica-style Tune-O-Matic bridge paired with a Maestro Vibrola. This is Epiphone going premium, so there are all kinds of specs that you would typically associate with high-end electric guitars, such as the CTS pots and Mallory capacitors, the Switchcraft jacks and pickup selector switch, premium sealed die-cast tuners with metal tulip-style buttons.

Also, the Gibson Custom livery is all over the instrument, from the split-diamond inlay on the headstock to the block inlays on the fingerboard, plus multi-ply binding to the body’s top and headstock.

Lifeson had hinted that something special had been in the offing, and that he had been working with Epiphone on a signature guitar. And it could only really be the ES-355, aka Whitey, aka the electric guitar that – arguably – most Rush fans would first think about when they think about The Ultimate Rush Guitar®.

“The ES-355 has always been a really special guitar for me,” says Lifeson. “It’s got this incredible balance of elegance and power.”

Lifeson says this one is a chip off the old block. But even if the first thing you want to play on it is Freewill, consider this a blank canvas for your own prog rock peregrinations.

“What I love about this Epiphone “Whitey” recreation is how faithfully it captures that original spirit while still feeling fresh and alive in your hands,” says Lifeson. “It’s a guitar that invites you to explore, to take chances, and to find your own voice. I’m genuinely thrilled that players everywhere will have the chance to experience it and make it part of their own musical journey.”

Lifeson’s ES-355 comes with a pair of Gibson USA T-Type humbuckers at the neck and bridge.

These are hooked up to the usual three-way selector, dual volume and dual tone controls, plus you have the Varitone rotary dial running in mono, and a mini-toggle to bypass it.

Each notch on the Varitone removes a select band of frequencies giving you five filtered options that make the ES-355 one of the most versatile semi-hollows out there.

The rest of the specs are as you’d expect. This has the 24.75” scale length, the 12” radius ebony fingerboard, a Graph Tech nut and the tortoiseshell pickguard as per the original.

The Alex Lifeson 1976 ES-355 is available now, priced £1,199/$1,499. See Epiphone for more details.

• “It was the record that changed our lives. The record that won us freedom of creative expression”: Rush frontman Geddy Lee recalls how the band's 1976 prog classic 2112 transformed their fortunes

Mike Portnoy has given an unequivocal thumbs-up to Anika Nilles after the first show of Rush’s Fifty Something tour on Sunday night.

Nilles, of course, is stepping into some big, big shoes – Neil Peart’s no less. But the opening gig of the prog legends’ reunion tour at Los Angeles’ Kia Forum went without a hitch, and fellow drummer Portnoy was fulsome in his praise of her.

Writing on Instagram, Portnoy said: "What can I say that hasn't been written already by everybody online today…? It was magical! The setlist was absolutely PERFECT!! (and to think they still have around three other variations up their sleeves to come…) Anika absolutely KILLED IT in the best way imaginable. I was so happy for her…nailing all of the big Neil moments with a giant smile on her face the whole time! She really is the perfect choice for this!”

“The tributes to Neil throughout the show were so tasteful and emotional. (Yes I'll admit I cried at a few points) The production was absolutely INSANE... And most importantly of all, I am so happy for Geddy and Alex to be able to do this again! Seeing this tour come to life, it very obvious this needed to happen. As not only a proper tribute to Neil, but most importantly to honour the legacy of this band. Geddy and Alex deserve it. And the fans deserve it as well…"

Like countless other Rush fans around the globe, Portnoy caught the show via Youtube. "I'm still trying to figure out which show I will be able to attend (likely NYC or Philly),” he continued. “But I will be counting the days until I can witness this in person and soak up every single moment… Welcome back Rush!”

There had been rumours that the Dream Theater man might be the one to replace the late Peart, but in an interview with the Brazilian podcaster Regis Tadeu, Portnoy said that he had never been approached. “I'd be lying if I denied that, of course, playing with those guys would be a dream come true. Of course. And I love and respect not only Rush's music, but Neil Peart as a person and as a drummer.”

“But in a way I'm kind of relieved they didn't ask me, because that's a very tough role to walk into. I think for Anika, she's gonna have a lot of people making inevitable comparisons. There's no way around it. So that's gonna be a very tough gig to have.”

Tough gig or not, Nilles appears to have passed her biggest test with flying colours.

Just like George Lucas, Rush had their heads in “a galaxy, far, far away” in 1976 as they put together a sci-fi epic that would change their lives.

But while Lucas turned the clock back to a distant past, the Canadian prog-trio were imagining a dystopian future in the year 2112. All roads led to Megadon.

At that stage of their career, Rush badly needed a hit. They needed something, anything – some gift from the cosmos to reverse their fortunes. And in 2112 they had something.

Its predecessor, 1975’s Caress Of Steel, was an audacious statement of intent. Rush’s progressive mores were coming to the fore – not least on The Fountain of Lamneth, which occupied the entirety of Side B.

In hindsight, the critical consensus says that Caress Of Steel was the sound of Rush stretching their wings musically and flying a little too close to the sun. They had the ambition but hadn’t quite shed their influences and become themselves. These things take time.

The touring cycle brought forth the unedifying prospect of total failure, though not without a little gallows humour. Rush called it the ‘Down the Tubes Tour’ and even had it printed on the passes.

Guitarist Alex Lifeson admits he was considering strapping on his tool belt and becoming a regular working man again.

“That was a very difficult tour. We were already extremely in debt, and it was just getting worse and worse,” said Lifeson, speaking to Guitar World in 2013. “The crowds were getting smaller and there didn’t seem to be much interest in the album at the time. Everybody around was concerned about what the future was going to be. So there was a lot of reflection. I thought, Well, you know, I guess I could be a plumber again if I had to…”

But that is not how this story ends. Rush had ideas and they were letting them cook night after night on tour, writing whenever they could.

Drummer and chief lyricist Neil Peart always had something stirring in his brilliant mind, and as the tour rolled on, the songs rolled out – the concept for 2112 was taking shape. And the concept was pretty far out.

Peart had been reading a lot of Ayn Rand. With its neo-Dark Ages theme, Rand’s 1938 novella, Anthem, seemed to have catalysed something brilliant in his mind.

“As the record was coming together we all truly were very excited about it,” Lifeson told Guitar World. “I don’t know if we thought we had quite what we ended up with, but we did feel it was something special.”

The 20-minute title track, partitioned into seven movements, imagines a dystopian future that had been roiled by interplanetary warfare.

The Red Star of the Solar Federation now rules a union of planets, and by the time you stick the needle down on the album there is peace under the iron grip of totalitarian rule. The Priests of the Temples of Syrinx rule every aspect of life in the city of Megadon. All art is created by the temple.

The story’s anonymous hero is about to make a discovery that changes all that. Speaking to MusicRadar in 2016, bassist/frontman Geddy Lee explained how the narrative – and the music – flowed, once the Overture, the last piece of music to be written, welcomed us into this world.

“The Temples Of Syrinx sets the scene, because 2112 is about a totalitarian society that controls everything about your life, including the music that you hear,” said Lee. “It manufactures it all, so that’s what we wanted to say with this track. It sets up the hierarchy in this futuristic world that we’ve arrived in.

“Discovery is where the hero of the story finds a device in a cave. It’s a guitar, but he doesn’t know it because they don’t exist in his time period. So he picks it up and realises that it’s a device that can make music and create sounds. Previous to that point, everything he’d ever heard had been provided to him by the people that run his world.”

And this is just three songs/movements in...

“And the meek shall inherit the earth”

News that Rush were making a high-concept prog record was not received with the popping of champagne corks at the record label. It was widely reported that the band’s long-time producer Terry “Broon” Brown and their manager, Ray Danniels, were engaged in the urgent business of managing expectations as the record was being made.

Fast-forward 50 years and Geddy Lee is sitting in a London hotel with MusicRadar and laughing at the memory.

“We told the record company people to back off,” says Lee. “They didn’t understand that record. They didn’t understand Caress Of Steel, but Caress Of Steel didn’t break through because it was ultimately a record of experiments, not all successful. We managed somehow to correct that with 2112, and make a more cohesive, powerful statement.”

It says a lot of Rush’s confidence in themselves and the material that they doubled-down on those experiments. This was just the kind of creative derring-do that generations of Rush fans were weaned on. The record company sat back and waited. What else could they do? “And so they said, ‘Well, we don’t know what it is you’re doing, but just fucking keep doing it!” says Lee.

It didn’t take long. The album was written over six months on the road, workshopped at soundchecks, and so by the time they entered the studio they were well prepared. The songs were all but done. There was no time to waste. There was no money to waste. The album was all but done in a month, much of it recorded live in the room.

Lifeson’s main guitar was his Gibson ES-335 but he had borrowed a Fender Stratocaster and a Gibson Hummingbird for the sessions. Amps were his usual complement of Marshall heads plus a Fender Twin. He had a Tom Oberheim-designed Maestro Phase Shifter, an Echoplex tape echo, and a Dunlop Cry Baby wah pedal. All classic Rush gear.

There was a weird kind of Stanislavski method to the madness – can actually hear Lifeson tuning up his Strat at the beginning of Discovery, just as the anonymous hero of 2112 finds his guitar in the story.

Lee played his 4001 Rickenbacker bass guitar through Ampeg or Sunn amps. Hugh Syme provided the cover art; he also played on the record, too. Syme operated the ARP Odyssey synthesizer on the title track, and returned to play Mellotron on Side B’s Tears.

“This song marked the first time we used a Mellotron,” said Lee. “The gentleman that does all our album covers is called Hugh Syme, and it’s actually him playing Mellotron here.

“Tears is a romantic ballad to give the album even more variety and depth. Mellotrons are very unique-sounding; they sound sorta electric, but also kinda stringy, they have this real resin-y sound to them, which is very cool and unique to that period.”

With Side A housing 2112, Rush put together five tracks for Side B, all with a very different vibe. “We made it so you’d flip the record over and then you’ve got five individual songs that are stand-alone,” recalled Lee. “Back in the day of vinyl, it was very normal to have a different experience on side two.”

Passage To Bangkok kicks it off with a paean to smoking pot, written as a “travelogue” to the various terroirs of marijuana cultivation across the world. “It’s sort of comic relief in that sense,” said Lee. “All kinds of places get mentioned – the first stop is in Bogota in Colombia then you’re in Bangkok, Thailand.”

It could also be taken as a commentary on the writing and recording process. Rush were no strangers to the leaf. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2016, Lifeson testified to its inspirational properties in the studio. Rush were having the time of their lives making the record.

“When we worked on Discovery, I think it was honey oil [marijuana] that was around at the time, so that was a wonderful inspiration,” said Lifeson. “And I do remember working late nights ’til six or seven in the morning with our feet up on the console and suddenly all of us waking up to the flapping of the reel going around and around on the tape machine. It was just the feeling of being in a wonderful place.”

The Twilight Zone came together late. They had room for one more song and wrote it in the studio as a tribute to the TV show. Apart from Lessons, which was written completely by Lifeson, and Tears, written by Lee, all the lyrics came from Peart’s notebook and it is a heroic achievement of world-building with rock music.

2112 inspired many to follow in Rush’s footsteps. Dream Theater’s John Petrucci was one of them.

“Beyond his incredible drumming, there’s Neil Peart as a lyricist. I would say he’s been the biggest influence on me in that respect,” he told MusicRadar in 2019. “The way the tale evolves is astonishing, using the guitar as an actual part of the story – that really drew me in. To this day, 2112 is one of the greatest albums I’ve ever heard.”

How Lifeson plays guitar was also not lost on Petrucci. He has studied it closely, and like all responsible artists has borrowed/stolen where appropriate.

“I love Alex’s choices, the way he plays power chords with open strings on top,” said Petrucci. “And when you combine that with the way he uses the chorus effect – to this day, I apply all of this information to my own style.”

If there is a secret to Rush’s sound it can surely be found on 2112. It could be the rosetta stone for understanding everything; how they transform a rock song into a work of sci-fi theatre; how play what Steve Vai likes to call “high-information music” and yet present it as digestible and human, shifting through styles as though you’ve turned the dial on the radio.

The band themselves were a little split on where 2112 stands in their catalogue. Peart thought Moving Pictures was the album on which Rush truly found their sound. Lifeson could see that, but argued 2112 was the one

“Really for me it was on 2112 that I felt that we were becoming us,” he told Guitarist in 2010. “Our influences were less obvious and we were thinking in our own terms.”

Would Lee change anything about it now? He’s not sure.

“If I was gonna change anything in 2112, I would change some of the, y’know, the whole record goes up and down and up and down,” he says. “I maybe wouldn’t have so many down, and more ups, but other than that, it’s kind of a fool’s errand to try to reimagine a record that was made so long ago.”

It was written, recorded and released 50 years ago and yet 2112 retains its fizz. It is animated by the electric possibilities of a band just hitting its straps, the weight of a bleak future imagined, and the release after you turn the record over.

Great recordings have a strange magic; they store the energy from the room like a battery. They build a world that the audience will return to in search of answers.

“Rush are my biggest influence and favourite band,” said Petrucci. “Just the idea of this concept album, of a story being told and songs as vehicles to tell the story – it’s unbelievable. I would get lost in this album. I wanted to know what they were talking about. ‘Who’s this guy? What’s happening?’ It took you to another world.”

And it got Rush back in the game; 2112 was proof of concept that their musical adventurism applied to Peart’s novelistic lyrics could reach a wider audience. It took them to another level, laying the foundations for the experiments in synthesizers to come.

From Megadon, Rush beat a path to Xanadu, road high upon Lifeson’s fever dream en route to La Villa Strangiato.

Having proved the record label wrong, Rush would have the confidence to dream bigger, to close 1977’s A Farewell To Kings with sci-fi epic that is concluded on the opening track to 1978’s Hemispheres. Tune in for the next thrilling instalment…

Rush’s concepts would become too big for one record. Prog legend status was unlocked.

This was what 2112 did for them – multi-album storytelling arcs, freedom, longevity. Attention all planets of the Solar Federation, Rush have assumed control, and there was no letting go.

“There would not be Rush, a long history of Rush, without that record, so I owe sort of everything to it,” says Lee. “It was the record that changed our lives. It was the record that gave us, won us freedom of creative expression, or, shall I say, reinforced our right to creative freedom.”

Rush performed for the first time in over a decade last night when they opened the Juno Awards ceremony in Hamilton, Ontario.

And the trio – Alex Lifeson, a visibly-delighted Geddy Lee and new drummer Anika Nilles - decided to play Finding My Way, the opening track from their self -itled 1974 debut album. Whilst they played, old images of the band, including the late Neil Peart, were flashed up behind them.

Asked about the song choice afterwards, Lee said: “You really can’t ask us what song to play. If we have to choose one song, it’s almost impossible. We have so many. So we just asked management, and they said 'first song, first album.'”

Alex Lifeson added, sardonically: “Also, it’s the only song we know how to play.”

The Junos are the Canadian equivalent of the Grammys and so were the biggest domestic stage possible to launch Rush’s comeback, ahead of their upcoming Fifty Something world tour. The tour kicks off in Inglewood, California on 7 June, with dates going through into next year, winding up in Helsinki on 10 April, 2027.

Last night’s performance was also notable for being their first gig with Anika Nilles as replacement drummer for the late, great Neil Peart. A tough gig, undoubtedly. But Nilles put to bed any doubts she wouldn't be up to filling Peart's ample shoes with some style, and the YouTube comments from fans were full of compliments.

One fan wrote: “Congrats Anika, not only were you absolutely awesome but you’re now officially one of the most important women in Rock ‘n Roll history!” whilst another said: “She is a world-class drummer.”

Another wrote: “Neil's looking down and he's smiling ... beautiful job, Anika.”

Everywhere you looked there was bad news, tumult and tragedy. It was late summer, 1983, and the world thrummed with anxiety.

Rush had decamped to a lodge in the Horseshoe Valley, an easy 90-minute drive north from Toronto, where the peace and quiet of an off-season ski resort would give them some time and space to put some songs together. The outside world arrived by post.

Drummer and lyricist Neil Peart would pore over the newspapers, digesting the day’s events for inspiration. If the artistic mission behind the Canadian prog trio’s follow-up to Signals was their search for a more perfect union between synthesizer and Alex Lifeson’s electric guitar – and wherever Rush’s fathomless musical curiosity would take them – front-page events helped establish its emotional cadence.

Lifeson and bassist and frontman Geddy Lee would study Peart’s lyrics and let them guide their melodic choices. The question was how was all this going to sound? How was it to come together?

Rush had made the difficult decision to part ways with producer Terry Brown, who had handled all their albums from 1974’s Fly By Night to 1982’s Signals. Sitting in a suite in The Connaught, one of the more salubrious locations in London’s Mayfair, Lee explains why it was time for a change.

“We decided to move away from Terry for that album because we had gotten to the point on Signals that when Terry said something we all kind of knew what he was gonna say,” he says. “We were too able to read his reactions. And that told me that we were not learning anything from him any longer. What he would normally say was already part of our process, let’s put it like that. So we needed new input.”

Things were going well for Rush. Signals had gone platinum. The New World Tour of America sold out, with than one million tickets sold. London’s Wembley Arena was sold out for four nights straight, New York City’s Radio City for five.

But there was change in the air. The bands Rush were listening to were trafficking in intoxicating new sounds. The synthesizer was disrupting the rock idiom and Rush were already halfway down the rabbit hole. They wanted to see how deep it would go.

And, as Lee admits, they were still ambitious. Rush believed they could get better, and they wanted someone who would push them.

“We needed new opinions. We wanted new influences. We wanted to challenge our brains,” says Lee. “We wanted to write better songs. We needed to learn how to write better songs. We didn’t think we could do that in the same setup. So we wanted to bring somebody in that was fresh, challenging.”

They drew up a list of candidates. On the strength of Signals, Rush were hot property. Chris Squire of Yes was in the frame, as was Trevor Horn. Famously, they found their man but he bailed on them. He blew them out in favour of Glasgow’s hottest band.

“We had made an agreement with Steve Lillywhite to produce that record. Unfortunately, he pulled out at the last minute, and then sent us into a bit of a panic,” says Lee. “He went on to do Simple Minds. I just think he wanted to work with Simple Minds and that came up, and he said, ‘Oh, fuck. I already committed to these Canadians but…’”

With the studio deadline advancing, Rush cast the net wider and hired Peter Henderson as a co-producer. Henderson had worked with Jeff Beck and Paul McCartney, and helmed the previous three Supertramp albums.

By the time they arrived in Le Studio, up in Morin-Heights, Quebec, to record, winter was closing in and the world was in no better shape. The Soviets had shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 and pulled out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) talks, and tit-for-tat ballistic missile deployments upped the ante as the Cold War simmered.

Everyone, everywhere was tense.

How else could Grace Under Pressure open other than the restless, fitful energy of Distant Early Warning; it’s a vibe. We have Lifeson’s zero-gravity chord stabs, hanging suspended in the air, cold and frigid, slightly alien with the echo and reverb. Lee’s bass guitar is warmer, conversational, more human.

Lee can’t remember if this was a conscious decision but they had very clear ideas about what they wanted from the guitars on Grace Under Pressure.

“I’m not sure, and not in the way that you describe it so beautifully. I can’t take credit for approaching it that way,” says Lee. “But we definitely wanted to equal the role of keyboards and guitar. On Signals, we felt that the keyboards got a little dense, and the guitar got a little small, and Alex was a bit hungry to have the size, the guitar size back, and I thought, ‘Well, why not? Why can’t we trade off? Let’s have everything. [Laughs] More of everything, please!’”

There was more gear to be acquainted with. There was the PPG wavetable synth. You can hear that all over the place (like on the volume wells on Afterimage). This was the first time they would really layer the keys, hunting out different textures to complement Lifeson’s guitar.

That, too, was undertaking an evolution of sorts. Grace Under Pressure would be all electric; Lifeson’s acoustic guitars stayed in their cases. He had discovered the Roland Jazz Chorus guitar amp during the making of Farewell To Kings and ever since chorus had become the bedrock to his sound.

For Grace Under Pressure, he used the chorusing function on a pair of Loft Digital Delay rack-mounted units, running one with 25 per cent wet, with the rate at noon, the depth just over half-way. The other would be more lush, running 50 per cent wet, depth maxed out, rate the same.

An MXR distortion pedal would be a pinch-hitter in the studio. He’d use his trio of his modded Sportscasters – the red, black and white S-styles – going into his trusty Marshall 4140 combo amps, or on occasion his Carvins. As ever, there would be echo. For the first time on record, Lifeson would use a Fender Telecaster, often using it to double a part already recorded on this Hentor Sportscaster S-styles or his Gibson ES-355.

Lee says he wanted “more of everything” but physics dictates that there are only so many frequencies to work with. The engineers had their work cut out.

If Lifeson was streamlining his guitar sound, taking a more judicious approach to multi-tracking and not being afraid for the sounds to a little leaner and rangy, then the evolution of Geddy Lee’s bass offered ballast.

“My bass had a lot of twang in the early days,” he says. “Moving to the Steinberger was, as you suggested, moved it to a slightly different register to allow the guitar and some of the keyboard parts to poke through, and so all those things are dependent on the other.

“But, yeah, Distant Early Warning is a Steinberger. I’m playing Steinberger on that. I don’t think I played on every song. There were other experiments going on, obviously, and it was all about we have only so many frequencies you have to share, and if everybody wants attention you better have a good engineer to push those frequencies away in the right way – and that also went into the decision to change producers; we were becoming more adventurous, sonically.”

No adventure comes without risk. Grace Under Pressure was notoriously difficult to make.

Speaking to Jas Obrecht in 1984, a conversation you can listen to on Obrecht’s superlative YouTube channel, Talking Guitar , Lifeson said he nearly gave himself a “nervous breakdown” when tracking the solo to Kid Gloves. That was one that came together in the studio.

“The solo section starts with that one held note, and I kept thinking, you know, what the hell am I gonna do? I spent a long time on that, and I was really on the verge of a nervous breakdown,” said Lifeson. “Again, it was one of those situations where I just go crazy, just do something, and one thing led to the next. Each one of those sections of the solo led into each other.”

After a couple of days back and forth he had a solo. His leads on Body Electric were a similar story, with Lifeson driving himself to distraction before the dam broke and it all came together. Forty minutes later, it’s on tape.

The search for a producer, the practicalities of getting new sounds down, the damned weather, Grace Under Pressure was uphill all the way. “I did feel the record was very difficult to make, for all those reasons and more,” says Lee. “We were holed up in Morin-Heights, Quebec, in the dead of a very cold winter. Fuck, it was hard to make that record.”

The struggle was real. But they were reaping the rewards when they listened back to it in the control room. Lifeson had some weird kit with him, and some uncanny sounds coming through the speaker. He used the octave-up feature on his Delta Lab DL-5 HarmoniComputer to give the Distant Early Warning solo its unnatural quality.

The Enemy Within is another case study in how Lifeson has always been master of disguise when it comes to tone.

“That was kind of unusual. I split the guitar in half, and played a lower line and a higher harmony line,” he told Obrecht. “And we tried to get, a balalaika-type effect to it.”

Why should a guitar always sound like a guitar? Sometimes player can engineer a sound so weird it fools the ear and forces the audience to lean into the recording. This has always been Lifeson’s MO. Speaking to MusicRadar in March 2025, Lifeson said it is a sensibility he has to this day.

“I’ve always moved outside of what typically the job of the guitar is,” he said. “I have always looked at trying to manipulate the sound; it’s obviously played on the guitar but it doesn’t sound anything like one, so I am already set up for that sort of thing.”

Lee remembers Grace Under Pressure as another chance for Rush to prove themselves as songwriters, to take another stab at sonic expansionism with experiments conducted upon the Jupiter-8, Oberheim and PPG synths.

Pitched somewhere between nightmare and hope, inspired by Lee’s mother’s experiences as a Holocaust survivor, Red Sector A finds Lee dispensing with bass altogether in favour of propulsive yet haunting synth.

Here, again, Lifeson’s DL-5 throws his guitar sound off its axis, just as Rush throw us off ours, reminding us that barbarism runs deep just beneath the thin skin of civilisation.

One of the leitmotifs of Grace Under Pressure is how Rush play with the new sounds and rhythms that were augmenting popular music at the time. The Enemy Within moves to a ska beat, punctuated by the polished steel splash of Lifeson’s guitars.

“We were listening in bands like Ultravox, like the Police, like Propaganda,” says Lee. “There were so many bands that were happening around that time. And the English music scene, especially, was really vibrant. The studio scene was really vibrant, and Trevor Horn and all these great producers were breaking down barriers. Now, at the same time, recording budgets were getting huge.”

This truly was a golden age for studio experimentation. The record companies would bankroll it, then the artists would do as artists do and make the most of it. “People were spending a year making art of noise,” says Lee, a note of awe, maybe nostalgia, too in his voice, citing Tears For Fears as a reference. They, too, were making it up as they went along. Everyone was.

These technologies – samplers, drum machines, the evolution of synthesized sounds – had never really been used like this before.

“It just seemed to me to be a really fascinating time in production,” says Lee. “Record production had taken another attitude; electronic gear was expanding, the Fairlight was being used all over the place. There were devices being invented that could affect the sound of the snare by using that gated noise.

“All those things were going on and we felt we wanted some of that. We want to learn about that shit and see what’s appropriate to our music, and what’s not. And being sponges, we knew if we had the right guy we could soak up a lot of new techniques and have a different perspective on writing a song.”

And that’s what they were looking for from Henderson. As it turned out, he was more hands-off. Speaking to Guitar World, Lifeson said the band got more involved with the engineering of the sounds than they might have liked.

“Peter had a good track record, but while he was qualified, he just didn’t seem to be focused,” he said. “That left it up to the three of us to really focus on production. We like to work with a producer that’s sort of like the fourth wheel, where we do what we do and they add just a little bit of direction and deal with some of the stuff we don’t want to deal with. That way we can focus directly on the music. But that wasn’t quite the case.”

Still, Lifeson was happy with how the album turned out. And Lee agrees. Henderson did the business. Rush left a dedication to Terry Brown in the liner notes to Grace Under Pressure. But if there were any hard feelings on Brown’s part, they didn’t last. Brown volunteered a remix for its 2026 super-deluxe reissue.

“I didn’t think it needed remixing,” says Lee. “But I said, ‘Sure. Have at it, you know? Nothing to lose, everything to gain.’ It’s not gonna change that version that fans love. But it’s another take, and I think it sounds great. He did a great job because he is a good producer, and because Peter Henderson did a terrific job recording that record. So it’s a win win.”

Even if it isn’t a concept record per se, with no over-arching narrative from start to finish, Grace Under Pressure could be treated as such.

There is an emotional consistency that ties it together, contemporary anxieties, past traumas and grief (Afterimage was written as an upbeat tribute to Le Studio’s tape operator Robbie Whelan who had died the previous year).

• Geddy Lee on why he and Alex Lifeson chose Jeff Beck drummer Anika Nilles to fill the late, great Neil Peart’s role in Rush reunion tour

The title, borrowed from Hemingway, speaks to all of that. Furthermore, it speaks to what was happening inside that studio as the snow fell outside and the weeks went by, and three guys from Canada nursing what could be diagnosed as some kind of cabin fever.

“I mean, Grace Under Pressure does not refer to the music, it refers to the situation we were in, and it’s very much about our emotional state,” says Lee. “That title was borne out of our emotional state, and the difficulties making that record. And the songs were quite varied, but there’s a sense of unity on that record, from one song to the other, because of the fact it was written in isolation, and performed in isolation with those same people. And it’s a time capsule of that moment.”

So, then, another difficult Rush album. Plus ça change! But just between us – entre nous, if you like – they weren’t all like that.

“You said a lot of our records were painful to make – not all of them!” Lee protests. “You know, Hemispheres was a bitch. Urgh! [Laughs] Grace Under Pressure. But Permanent Waves, one of our best records, was a joy. Easy peasy! I don’t know why. Farewell To Kings was a joy. Moving Pictures was fun to make.”

• Rush's Grace Under Pressure Super Deluxe box set is out now via Mercury
• Rush's Fifty Something Tour visits the UK, Europe and South America in 2027. See AEG Presents for UK ticket details. Head to  Superfan Rush VIP and Superfan Rush Travel for VIP and deluxe travel packages

There had been so shortage of speculation that Rush could one day take to the stage again, that frontman/bassist Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson would once more perform the songs that made the Canadian trio one of rock’s most beloved institutions.

A lot of this was wishcasting. Rush had played their final show on the 1st August 2015, said their farewells. Whatever rumours had circulated in the interim were shot down by Lifeson in 2018; Rush were officially disbanded. The death of the band’s beloved drummer and lyricist Neil Peart in 2020 made all this tragically final.

And yet all this did not stop fans gaming out the scenarios. Whenever Lee and Lifeson appeared together in public – especially when they performed Closer To The Heart at the South Park 25th Anniversary Show with Matt Stone on drums, then played at both Taylor Hawkins tribute shows – it made these scenarios more plausible. Still, Lee and Lifeson remained coy. There were a lot of ins, a lot of outs, a lot of what-have-yous.

And there were a lot of good reasons why not to do it, not least because they would have to find someone to sit in for Peart on drums. Well, here we are, sitting across from Geddy Lee in a suite in Claridges, one of London’s most storied Mayfair hotels, and he is officially all out of good reasons why not to do it.

He is here to talk about Rush’s epic Fifty Something Tour, which has just been expanded from the US to include 2027 dates across the UK, Europe and South America. As for the drummer, Anika Nilles, formerly playing with Jeff Beck, has got the gig. And it will be an occasion for them to come together with the fans and celebrate Neil Peart’s life and legacy.

“During the show we will pay tribute to Neil a couple of times with film footage, and playing appropriate songs that we feel point to him more than other songs,” says Lee. “We’re going to try to learn 40 songs. We won’t play 40 songs a night, because... I am forbidden by law after the age 70 to play a three-hour show. I think it’s a law in many countries. [Laughs] The three-hour show is done for us, but we can certainly play 2 hours 20 minutes, and I think that’s a substantial thing.”

The Fifty Something Tour lineup will be further augmented by Loren Gold (the Who/Roger Daltrey) on keyboards and backing vocals, and with Nilles behind the kit, Gold on keys, four players onstage, Lee believes it will be reassuringly different.

The plan is to play the songs as recorded. As he relays said plan, Lee he sounds more and more excited about it; there is also a note of trepidation. The first show picks up where Rush left off in 2015, at the Forum, in Inglewood, CA. It’s going to be emotional.

“I have great trepidation about the first show,” he says. “I suggested that we do the first gig where we did the last gig – and I must have been high or something, ‘cos I’ve just made it even more difficult to hit that stage that night.”

But why now? What changed? “Quite a bit changed,” says Lee, smiling.

It was a good way to honor an old friend. It was a way of taking care of some “unfinished business”.

“Obviously, Neil retired in 2015. Not a happy decision for Alex and I,” says Lee. “Although we were torn because he was our friend, no one was more deserving of a life to himself than he was after all the shit that he had lived through and survived. And he had a second lease on life with a new family, so, of course, we were torn, and sympathetic. At the same time, we felt we had unfinished business.”

How could Lee have felt otherwise? The R40 Live Tour had been an unqualified success, proving that 40 years on from Peart joining the band in the summer of ’74, making his debut on record the following year with Fly By Night. It wasn’t just his drumming that transformed the band, Peart’s lyrics broadened their horizons. But a deal is a deal.

“We hadn’t taken this tour we were so proud of to England to play – or Scotland – to play for our fans,” says Lee. “We hadn’t taken it to Europe, and there were parts of North America we hadn’t covered. We hadn’t taken it to South America, We were more ambitious in that regard, but Neil didn’t want to do the tour at all. He committed to 30 shows, and he was a man of his word. He played 30 shows, and he did what he promised to do.”

Lee and Lifeson wanted more and yet they understood that Peart had already given more of himself than he wanted. That did not go unappreciated.

“Any bad feelings or frustrations subsided fairly quickly,” says Lee. “After a month or two of living a normal life we were communicating again, and all was good. And then we moved on with our lives. Neil, unfortunately, had only barely a year of that idyllic life before he was diagnosed. And then everything changed. The mood changed. Feelings about things changed to the point where our music kind of was put in a box.”

Rush as a band was most definitely over. Lifeson hooked up with his old friend Andy Curran, the co-founder and bassist/vocalist for Canadian rockers Coney Hatch, forming Envy Of None in 2021, with Alfio Annibalini on keyboards and the preternaturally gifted Maiah Wynne on vocals. Their self-titled debut arrived in 2022; its follow-up, Stygian Wavz, was released last year.

And it was something completely different to Rush. Speaking to MusicRadar in 2025, Lifeson said he was doing what he always did, in a sense, chasing fresh sounds, subverting expectations of how his electric guitar could sound.

“I’ve always moved outside of what typically the job of the guitar is,” he said. “I have always looked at trying to manipulate the sound; it’s obviously played on the guitar but it doesn’t sound anything like one, so I am already set up for that sort of thing.”

Lee didn’t have a musical project but he did have a book to write. His autobiography, My Effin’ Life, was released in 2023. The producers of long-running Canadian TV drama Murdoch Mysteries, cast him as Tom Sawyer for one episode.

There were other endeavours. Lifeson and Lee launched a Rush beer. Lifeson started a gear brand, Lerxst, partnering with Godin for replica editions of his classic Hentor Sportscaster S-styles, working with Mojotone on the limited edition RCHI50 tube amp, and a range of guitar effects pedals. Rush’s tones would live on in the hands of other players. Fans could drink Rush beer. The music stayed in the box.

But Lee says they were kidding themselves. When Dave Grohl asked him and Lifeson to join the 2022 Taylor Hawkins tribute concerts, one in California (again, at the Forum in Inglewood), one at Wembley Stadium, they dug out Working Man, 2112 Part One: Overture and YYZ, and they were to perform them with a cast of drummers.

There was Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, session legend Omar Hakim (David Bowie/Weather Report etc), Danny Carey of Tool, and Grohl himself.

Just looking at these guys, the penny dropped. The music was not over; it’s never over.

“Mistakenly we felt with the band over, the music was over, but that’s not how music is. Music has a life of its own,” says Lee. “Bands come and go, but when a band ends, it doesn’t mean that music isn’t still vibrant and alive and require some attention. But that was a lesson that was hard to learn, and we didn’t realise that until we played the shows in 2022 in tribute to Taylor Hawkins.

“When we did those shows, and we taught those songs to four different drummers, that was the greatest example of how alive those songs were, because those guys were so happy to play that music with us. That it was infectious, and we got happy again.”

Rush’s dynamic duo had a well-rehearsed answer to the question of whether they would perform together under the band’s name. It was always “no”. Prevarication became second nature but things were different now.

“The idea of playing those songs went from being verboten to, ‘Why not?’ And the high we felt after that concert – especially the one in London – lasted when we got home,” continues Lee. “We started talking about maybe a reunion is not such a bad idea.”

A better idea than reality could provide at that point. Lee had his book tour booked in. Lifeson had Envy Of None, Lerxst. More seriously, he had some health concerns that had to come first before they could realistically talk about actually rehearsing, booking shows and getting back out there.

“He has arthritis. That doesn’t go away,” says Lee. “And he has very serious health concerns. He’s had a couple of surgeries. He has digestive issues, and he wasn’t sure that his body could handle the work. Fair enough. We put it to bed, and I said, ‘Don’t talk to me about it again, unless you can do it!’ [Laughs] Well, late in 2024, it came up again.”

Lee had finished his book tour in early 2024. He had ants in his pants. He needed to do something, and that something had to be musical. “I was getting my fingers in shape again. I was writing lyrics, and I was pretty happy to do that,” he says.

He had been neglecting his bass guitar collection. He had been neglecting his chops. It felt good to feel a set of fresh Rotosound Swing 66 bass strings under the fingertips again. Lee was enjoying making some noise again – then the phone rang.

“My fingers needed some attention. My basses were lonely downstairs in my studio without me as company!” he says. “When Al got wind that I was prepping for something, he just called me, said, ‘Hey, let’s jam.’ I said, ‘Yeah, great. Come on over.’ So, we fucked around, recorded some stuff for fun, jammed.”

They were just about to finish, it occurred to them that they hadn’t played a Rush song. Would they still know the notes, the changes? Only one way to find out…

“We fucked it up, of course,” says Lee, smiling. But it was a start.

The pair only live five minutes away from each other They are often in each other’s company anyway, so why not jam, why not make it a regular thing. They did. Much of 2024 was spent going back and forth. But if they were to get serious about a reunion, Lifeson needed to get fit.

“In the New Year, we decided to get him to a wellness clinic in Europe,” says Lee. “There was this one a friend of ours had recommended that deals with his kind of issues – not the mental ones, the digestive. I went with them for moral support, and we both left there feeling great!

“He had a new regime, a new diet, a new positivity. And he looked to me, and he said, ‘Yeah, I can do this if you want to do it.’ I said, ‘Fine. But if you don't follow through on this we’re never talking about it again.’ He said, ‘Deal.’ And that’s when our trouble began, ‘Cos we had to find a drummer.”

Luckily, Lee had someone in mind…

• Rush's Fifty Something Tour visits the UK, Europe and South America in 2027. See AEG Presents for UK ticket details. Head to  Superfan Rush VIP and Superfan Rush Travel for VIP and deluxe travel packages
• Geddy Lee on why he and Alex Lifeson chose Jeff Beck drummer Anika Nilles to fill the late, great Neil Peart’s role in Rush reunion tour

There was no escaping it. When frontman/bassist Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson decided that they wanted to take to the stage together as Rush, for the first time since their 2015 farewell show, they faced an impossible decision. Who would be behind the drum kit?

The loss of Neil Peart, the band’s chief lyricist and drummer, who died in 2020, was incalculable. There was no question; the Professor was not someone they could replace, and nor would they try. This reunion is about celebrating Peart’s life and legacy, performing the songs they wrote together. They needed someone special

There would be no shortage of willing candidates. In April 2025, Lifeson spoke of the unedifying spectacle of seeing his inbox being filled by emails from drummers in the immediate aftermath of Peart’s death.

“After Neil passed, it didn’t take more than a few minutes before we started getting emails from all kinds of drummers who wanted to audition for the band, thinking that we were just gonna replace somebody that we played with for 40 years who wrote all the lyrics for our music,” said Lifeson, speaking to Out Of The Box on NY classic rock station Q1043. “I don’t know what some of these people were thinking.”

Lee reported much the same experience. It was inappropriate. But when it came down to it, choosing a drummer for the tour proved easy. Speaking to MusicRadar, Lee says Anika Nilles, the German drum ace who had previously been playing in the late Jeff Beck’s group, was the first person he thought of, and it’s all thanks to his bass guitar tech.

“He was on tour with Jeff Beck for, I don’t know, a number of years while I was quiet in the touring world, and he was on the tours that Anika did, and so he knew her well,” says Lee. “He knew her playing well. And I remember him coming back from a tour, saying, ‘Dude, if you’re gonna do something musical, think about her. She’s amazing.’ And so I just filed it away after I’d looked her up and listened to her playing, I was like, ‘So impressive.’

“I just loved it. There was just something about her that just felt really special to me, really different. Not a typical rocker. Because she really wasn’t a rocker in that context of her videos.”

Lee kept Nilles in mind. And when he and Lifeson started talking seriously about this reunion project, Nilles was the first person Lee suggested. Lifeson approved.

“We loved the fact she was not part of the scene of people that we knew,” says Lee. “She was an outsider, so to speak, and I thought that was very healthy for Alex and I – and also healthy for our fans, that they wouldn’t be making comparisons with every other band they knew.”

Lee and Lifeson are well aware that this is not an easy gig to step into. It is only natural that fans will inevitably compare her to Peart, willingly or not.

“I mean, it’s a terrible position to put someone in. They would always be compared to the man,” says Lee.

The three convened over a Zoom call, a quick interview to see where everyone’s head was at. “She was great,” says Lee. They duly invited her to Canada to see how it would work playing the material. They would spend five days in the spring making some noise together in a rehearsal space.

“She was up for it. She was really up for it. And that’s what we did! It took a few days to get used to it,” says Lee. “She was jet-lagged. We had assembled a kit for her there. She just showed up with her drumsticks in hand, and we had at it, and by the fifth day we were convinced she could handle it.”

And Nilles would have room to stamp her own personality on these parts. There was no question of her using Peart’s old drum kit, or anything like that.

“We didn’t want that,” says Lee. “She’s got her own identity. She needs her own kit. It’s not about… I think we have to be respectful to the things that were Neil, and respectful to the music, obviously, and his drum parts, but also respectful to Anika and her individual personality – that has to be a consideration. So no, she’s playing her kit, and she learned very quickly she can’t play those songs on a small kit, so her kit has grown I will say! [Laughs]”

But Nilles is not the only personnel update. Rush has added keyboardist Loren Gold to the lineup, and having played with the Who and Chicago, he will also be supporting Lifeson on backing vocals.

“It’s a four-piece setup, so when you walk in the building and you see it, you’re gonna know it’s something a little different,” says Lee. “And I’m very excited about that, but the mandate is to be true to the recorded versions of the song.”

Rush have just announced the expansion of their blockbuster Fifty Something Tour with UK, European and South American dates confirmed for 2027. Head to AEG Presents for UK ticket details. Tickets will go on sale Friday, 27 February at 10.00am local time – and there are VIP and travel packages available too.

Rush are officially taking their Fifty Something Tour to the UK, Europe and South America – announcing 24 shows across 13 different countries in 2027.

Guitarist Alex Lifeson and frontman/bassist Geddy Lee will put sets together from a pool of 40-odd Rush classics, playing two sets a night that celebrate the life and legacy of their late drummer and lyricist, Neil Peart.

This will be the first time Rush have played in Europe since 2013, and they will do so with the former Jeff Beck drummer Anika Nilles behind the kit, with Loren Gold (The Who, Roger Daltrey) playing keyboards – though we’d expect Lee to be playing some keys too.

“We can’t wait to get back to all these cities we haven’t played in so long, as well as hitting some new places we’ve yet to play,” says Lee. “Both Alex and I are loving the hours of rehearsal time we’re spending with Anika and now Loren, learning around 40 songs which will enable us to keep the shows evolving, playing some different songs on different nights.”

After months, nay, years of speculation, coy statements on whether a reunion could actually be possible, Rush made it official in October 2025, initially announcing 12 shows in seven cities across North America, before realising that this would not do. A few weeks later they expanded the Fifty Something Tour to 17 cities. Tickets sold like hotcakes and then it became 58 shows across 24 cities.

Rush have already sold over half-a-million tickets for their 2026 North American dates. Ticketholders can expect something special. Will there be rotisserie chickens in the backline? Washing machines? Who can say… But it will be a big production.

“We are thrilled that many of our longstanding crew have come back to help us design the kind of Rush show that fans have grown accustomed to expect from us,” said Lee. “We dearly hope you will come along and help us celebrate 50 years of Rush music, while giving Neil the long overdue tribute he so richly deserves.”

In a statement, Peart’s widow, Carrie Nuttall-Peart, and his daughter, Olivia, said it was a chance for Rush fans to celebrate the legacy of the band – and of a drummer and lyricist who was peerless.

“We are thrilled to support the Fifty Something tour, celebrating a band whose music has resonated and inspired fans for generations, and to honour Neil’s extraordinary legacy as both a drummer and lyricist,” they said. “Neil’s musicianship was singular. Compositions of intricacy and power that expanded what rhythm itself could express. As both drummer and lyricist, he was irreplaceable.

“Inimitable in his artistry, and unmatched in the depth and imagination he brought to the lyrics that inspired and moved so many, he profoundly shaped how fans connected with him and the band, giving voice and meaning to their own lives. As the band enters this new chapter, it promises to be truly unforgettable. We are excited to see how their new vision unfolds, and to hear this legendary music played live once again.”

Various VIP ticket and travel packages are available. Travel packages include a two-night hotel stay plus premium tickets, a limited edition gift, a Rush Welcome Pack, transportation and assorted goodies. Visit Superfan Rush Travel for more details.

VIP packages can be found at Superfan Rush VIP, and include premium tickets, with meet-and-greets, production tours, rig rundowns [yes, please!] exclusive merch, VIP bar and so forth.

See below for full dates and venues, and head to AEG Presents for UK ticket details. Tickets will go on sale Friday, 27 February at 10.00am local time.

In other Rush news, the band will release an expanded box-set edition of 1984 studio album Grace Under Pressure, featuring remixes from long-standing producer Terry Brown alongside the originals. Lee tells MusicRadar that the Brown appeared out of the blue with the offer to remix the album, and described it as a "win-win" for Rush fans.

“Terry called Alex and I, and he said, ‘Guys, I’d like to remix this record. What do you think?’ I said, ‘Sure. Have at it!’ Nothing to lose, everything to gain,” says Lee. “It’s not gonna change that version that fans love. But it’s another take, and I think it sounds great. I think he did a great job because he is a good producer, and because Peter Henderson did a terrific job recording that record, it’s kind of a win-win.”

Grace Under Pressure Super Deluxe Edition is available to pre-order.

Rush Fifty Something Tour 2027 dates

• 15 Jan – Buenos Aires, AR – Movistar Arena
• 22 Jan – Curitiba, BR – Arena da Baixada
• 24 Jan – São Paulo, BR – Allianz Parque
• 30 Jan – Rio de Janeiro, BR - Estádio Olímpico Nilton Santos (Engenhão)
• 01 Feb – Belo Horizonte, BR – Estádio Mineirão
• 04 Feb – Brasília, BR – Arena BRB
• 19 Feb – Paris, FR - La Défense Arena
• 21 Feb – Berlin, DE – Uber Arena
• 23 Feb – Amsterdam, NL - Ziggo Dome
• 25 Feb – Munich, DE - Olympiahalle
• 28 Feb – Cologne, DE - LANXESS Arena
• 02 Mar – Hamburg, DE - Barclays Arena
• 04 Mar – Stuttgart, DE - Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle
• 08 Mar – Glasgow, UK - OVO Hydro
• 12 Mar – Manchester, UK - Co-op Live
• 16 Mar – London, UK – O2 Arena
• 18 Mar – London, UK – O2 Arena
• 27 Mar – Kraków, PL - TAURON Arena Kraków
• 30 Mar – Milan, IT – Unipol Dome
• 01 Apr – Basel, CH  – St. Jakobshalle Basel
• 04 Apr – Copenhagen, DK - Royal Arena
• 06 Apr – Oslo, NO - Unity Arena
• 08 Apr – Stockholm, SE - Avicii Arena
• 10 Apr – Helsinki, FI - Veikkaus Arena

Every band has to start somewhere, and for Canadian rock legends Rush it was in a church basement – a debut performance that was witnessed by just 20 people.

That first gig was in September 1968 at a Toronto venue named The Coff-Inn.

The band line-up was Alex Lifeson on guitar, John Rutsey on drums and Jeff Jones on bass and vocals.

Geddy Lee would replace Jones for the band's second gig. And the trio of Lifeson, Lee and Rutsey would go on to record the band’s self-titled debut album, released in 1974.

Alex Lifeson shared his memories of that first gig in an interview with PROG magazine in 2012.

He began by explaining how Rush formed from the remnants of his and John Rutsey’s previous band.

“John and I had been playing together for three years in a little basement band called The Projection,” Lifeson recalled. “We were as psychedelic as 15-year-old kids could be – in our paisley shirts! And we played covers: The House Of The Rising Sun, I’m A Man, stuff like that.

“But we also jammed with other people, and when we got the offer to do this gig at The Coff-Inn, I called up a bass player I knew, Jeff Jones. Jeff had his own band, but I said, ‘Do you want to do this gig for ten dollars? You can make three dollars! It’ll be fun.’

“It was actually John’s brother Bill who suggested we use the name Rush for that gig. We thought The Projection was a pretty cool name, but Bill said: ‘You need something shorter and to-the-point, something with energy to it. How about Rush?’ We were like, ‘Okay, that sounds good.’ And it stuck.”

Lifeson continued: “The Coff-Inn was in the basement of St. Theodore of Canterbury Anglican Church. It was two blocks from my house and it was a drop-in centre, a place for kids to hang out safely, drink pop and watch local bands play.

“There was no stage – the bands played on the floor at one end of this fairly large room. You could fit about a hundred people in there when the room was packed. But there were probably 20 people there at that first Rush gig.”

He admitted: “We didn't have a lot of equipment. We didn’t have a mic stand so we used a standing lamp and taped the mic to it. And we had a little crappy PA system with two small columns with four eight-inch speakers in them. It was very basic, the bare bones.”

Their setlist was filled with popular rock songs of the period.

Lifeson recalled: “We played Fire and Foxy Lady by Hendrix, Spoonful by Cream, Snowy Wood by John Mayall. We knew about seven or eight songs, so we played them over and over.

“I don't recall whether those 20 people were impressed or not," Lifeson said. “I'm guessing that they weren't! But we had fun. And after that first gig we got an offer to come back the following week.”

This was when a door opened for Lifeson’s buddy Geddy Lee.

As Lifeson told PROG: “Jeff Jones couldn't make it – he had commitments to his actual band. So that’s when I called Geddy and asked him if he could fill in.

“I’d known Ged for a couple of years. He might not have done the first gig as Rush, but he was there for the second one. And after that we would play at the Coff-Inn once a month.

“The last time we played there was in the spring of 1969, and the place was packed. I can still picture what it looked like. Just before we started, I looked at the lights shining on our equipment and the room full of people. That was so exciting.”

In 1981, Rush had the biggest selling album of their career with Moving Pictures. But if that decade began brightly, it soon became a struggle for guitarist Alex Lifeson.

In the mid-’70s, on their first three studio albums, Rush had operated as a power trio in the classic sense – Lifeson on guitar, Neil Peart on drums and Geddy Lee on bass guitar and vocals.

As a band always willing to experiment, they had first used synthesizers on the 1976 album 2112 – although the ARP Odyssey featured on that album’s title track was actually played not by a member of the band but by Hugh Syme, the designer of the cover artwork.

However, on the following album A Farewell To Kings, released in 1977, Lee played Minimoog as well as bass pedal synthesizers.

And it didn't stop there.

By the turn of the ’80s Lee’s love of synthesizers began to dominate the band’s sound on albums such as Signals from 1982 and especially Power Windows from 1985.

This left less room for Lifeson as a guitarist. And by the end of that decade, he’d had enough of it.

In 2012, both Lifeson and Lee spoke to Classic Rock about that period of Rush’s career.

“I don't think I was pissed off,” Lifeson recalled. “I just saw that there was a shift in my role.

“At first, I was totally into it. I even played some keyboards, and I thought it was a really important and unique part of what Rush was becoming.

“There was this attitude: ‘Let's just push them up, they’re the new thing and they sound big and they sound cool.’ But the guitar suffered in a lot of the mixes. That’s what bothered me more than anything.

“I don't have anything against keyboards," Lifeson said. "I just thought that we needed to preserve the core of what the band is. It’s a three-piece.”

He admitted: “It was a challenge. I remember thinking, ‘What is this all about?’ But I did see the bigger picture: I knew we were going in a new direction and this was part of it.

“I thought: go with it and it will all work out in the end. So I did that.”

Rush’s preoccupation with synths might have pulled focus from the electric guitar, but Lifeson’s relationship with the instrument continued unabated throughout the ‘80s.

This was when played some of his most iconic guitars. When we think of Lifeson then, we think of the Hentor Sportscaster, the hot-rodded S-style that supplanted – for a time – the Gibson semi-hollows he used throughout the ‘70s.

Veneman Music build him his first Sportscaster, a souped-up HSS S-style with a Bill Lawrence L500 rail humbucker at the bridge, a Floyd Rose double-locking vibrato, an aftermarket neck from Ottawa-based parts company Shark.

The Hentor Sportscaster was the inspiration for Lifeson’s recent collaboration with Godin, with two signature guitar replicas released already, and another to come (Lifeson tells us it will be black and named Free Will).

There were more, though. There was the even-more-80s Great White, which was, yes, white, but had the six-in-line pointy headstock finished in black, and was made by the Signature Guitar Company. Again, it had the Floyd Rose; Lifeson had been all in with the locking vibrato since the late ‘70s, when he had ordered a custom Les Paul with a Floyd from Gibson and started modding his Stratocaster.

For his part, Lee confessed that he was oblivious to Lifeson’s feelings at this time.

“Alex had to rethink everything,” Lee said, “and that's something I never really appreciated.

“I was so caught up with keyboards – loving those noises and the melodies and the ability to play those things. It was a fascinating period for me. But I never realised just how difficult it was for Alex. And he didn’t object to the direction we were going in.

“Alex went along with the ride. We wouldn't have made those records if he was upset about it. It’s just not the way we function.

“But the turning point was Power Windows. That was the first album where we actually put all these keyboard parts all over the tapes before Alex had the chance to put his parts down. So he had to figure out a way in, and I think that's when he first started resenting the keyboards.

"It made his job much more difficult, which in retrospect I completely understand.

“At the time, being the pro that he is, he just did his best. And I think he played amazing things on Power Windows.

“Alex rose to the challenge," Lee said. "But in a way he carried a bit of resentment forward from that point. He wasn't one to make a big deal of it, but I don't blame him for lashing out against that at a certain point.”

What Lee referred to as “our keyboard period” effectively ended with the 1987 album Hold Your Fire.

That was followed in 1989 by a more guitar-oriented record, Presto.

But in his interview with Classic Rock, Geddy Lee said he was proud of those ’80s albums.

“Power Windows is one of my favourite Rush albums,” Lee said. “Certainly it’s the most successful of the ‘keyboard period’ albums.”

He also referred to the band’s 2020 documentary Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage and the comments from two famous fans – Rage Against The Machine bassist Tim Commerford and Nine Inch Nails mainman Trent Reznor.

“Everybody has their favourite period of the band,” Lee said, “and I thought it was great in the documentary to hear Tim Commerford speak out against the keyboards and then you hear Trent Reznor speak out in favour of them.”

Last week saw the announcement that Rush fans have been waiting for for nearly a decade, that Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson were reuniting for a series of North American gigs, with Anika Nilles replacing the late Neil Peart on drums.

Now, Lifeson has spoken about how and why the reunion is happening. In an interview at the Rock N’ Roll Hall Of Fame, the guitarist explained that it was a very gradual process that presented more than a few challenges – not least playing the band’s old songs...

"I love playing so much,” Lifeson said. “And I've continued, over these last years, doing other projects. But when we sat down and started playing some of the Rush stuff, I realised how hard it was to play these songs. When you do it every day for 40 years, it's not a big deal, really. You're used to it."

"But when you're away from it, and you are a little more objective about the intense complexity of the music and the feel and the new nuances and all the things that go into making a Rush song and performance, to be challenged with that again was really, really exciting.

"And the more we started rehearsing and playing, the more I just fell in love with the idea of playing again."

Lifeson also spoke about his and Lee's decision to seek a new drummer for a reunited Rush. He noted that the decision was "very difficult" on many different levels:

"First of all, because of what it entails in terms of work, but also what had transpired, you know. Losing a member like Neil is devastating. It was a very sad time, and it took time for us to even contemplate.

"This is a relatively recent decision, and I would say it was kind of out of the question for the longest time because of those circumstances – and how do you replace someone who's irreplaceable?"

Lifeson revealed earlier this year in an interview with Canada’s CBC Radio One that he and Lee were hanging out and play music together. It seems that from these initial sessions, the idea sprang of reuniting Rush for one last tour.

"He would come over, drink my coffee, hang around, jam, and we would laugh. And then one day, I don't know why, we started playing some Rush songs for fun.

"God, we were laughing so hard, and we were enjoying it so much, and it was almost like playing those songs dispelled the dark clouds."

The band are playing 23 dates next summer in the US, Canada and Mexico. As yet there’s no indication that the Rush Fifty Something tour, as they’re styling it, will be extended to Europe.

It’s official: Rush are returning next year for a tour they hope will celebrate their 50 year legacy and honour their late bandmate Neil Peart.

The two surviving members, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson, have announced that they will be performing 12 gigs in seven cities in North America next summer. The 50 Something Tour will mark the first time the band have performed in eleven years, since the end of their R40 tour in August 2015.

In a statement, Geddy Lee said: “It’s been over 10 years since Alex and I have performed the music of Rush alongside our fallen bandmate and friend Neil. A lifetime’s worth of songs that we had put our cumulative hearts and souls into writing, recording and playing together onstage.

"And so, after all that has gone down since that last show, Alex and I have done some serious soul searching and come to the decision that we f***ing miss it, and that it’s time for a celebration of 50-something years of Rush music.

"So in 2026 my BFF Lerxst (aka Alex Lifeson) and I are going to hit the road once again to pay tribute to our past and to Neil by performing a vast selection of Rush songs in a handful of cities. No small task, because as we all know Neil was irreplaceable.”

So who, you might well ask, is going to take the place of the late Neil Peart? Well, behind the kit will be Anika Nilles. She’s a 42-year-old drummer from Germany who made her name with her YouTube content, and has released two albums with her band Nevell as well as playing with Jeff Beck. She is highly rated, not least by MusicRadar: she was rated Number 3 in our list of ‘Best Clinicians’ in 2019.

The tour has the blessing of both Peart’s widow Carrie Nuttall-Peart and his daughter, Olivia, who together have put out a statement of their own.

“We are thrilled to support the Fifty Something tour, celebrating a band whose music has resonated and inspired fans for generations, and to honour Neil’s extraordinary legacy as both a drummer and lyricist.

“Neil’s musicianship was singular. Inimitable in his artistry, and unmatched in the depth and imagination he brought to the lyrics that inspired and moved so many, he profoundly shaped how fans connected with him and the band, giving voice and meaning to their own lives. As the band enters this new chapter, it promises to be truly unforgettable. We are excited to see how their new vision unfolds, and to hear this legendary music played live once again.”

As yet, there is no indication whether any European dates will follow these North American ones.

So, as is the way with these things, fans are advised by sign up for the pre-sale by the end of Thursday 9 October Eastern Time by clicking here. The artist presale begins at 12pm local time on Monday 13 October in US and Canada on at 12pm Thursday 16 October in Mexico. The general sale starts at 12pm on Friday 17 October.

This week saw the surprise announcement that Rush will tour again in 2026 – six years after the death of drummer and lyricist Neil Peart had seemingly ended the band's career.

Bassist/vocalist Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson have teamed up with German drummer Anika Nilles for a 12-date North American trek named The 50 Something Tour.

So what better time to dig deep into the Rush catalogue?

In the past, Rush have been described in various ways.

Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett proclaimed them “the high priests of conceptual rock”.

Critic Robert Christgau, writing in 1977, dismissed them as “the most obnoxious band on the zonked teen circuit.”

But perhaps it was Nicky Wire of the Manic Street Preachers who best summed up Rush: “The world’s biggest cult band.”

Career sales of more than 40 million records were achieved with artistic integrity fully intact.

Across 19 studio albums, the band’s music – its essence, progressive hard rock – was continually redefined.

The “conceptual rock” that Kirk Hammett spoke of was the fabric of 1970s albums such as 2112 and Hemispheres, in which epic tracks swallowed up entire sides of vinyl.

In the '80s, the sound was updated on Moving Pictures, the band’s biggest seller, and in what Lee described as “our keyboard period”.

From the ’90s on, there was a return to the core principles of a classic guitar-based power trio. And with 2012’s Clockwork Angels, their swan song, Rush turned full circle with a first complete concept album.

19. Test For Echo (1996)

There are many great bands that have made downright awful albums. Metallica’s St. Anger perhaps the last word on that score. Rush never served up a turkey like that, but their standards slipped on Test For Echo. There were flashes of the old magic there and there – in the title track, Resist and the heavy-hitting Driven. But the remainder of the album is largely uninspired, and the wacky humour in Dog Years is the worst five minutes in the entire Rush discography.

18. Vapor Trails (2002)

This was the comeback album that few had expected – Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson least of all. In 1998, Neil Peart had told his bandmates he was finished with Rush after the recent deaths of his daughter and wife. Some of Peart’s lyrics on Vapor Trails – notably in the song Ghost Rider – gave some insight insight into how he rebuilt his life. Similarly, much of the music had a raw edge, although an overly compressed sound necessitated a remix in 2013. Vapor Trails was not a great album, but in the circumstances it was more than enough.

17. Snakes & Arrows (2007)

Snakes & Arrows arrived five years after Vapor Trails but was recorded in just five weeks. Producer Nick Raskulinecz was a relative rookie but had already worked on two Foo Fighters albums, and as a hardcore Rush fan he encouraged the trio to relax into this record and not worry if they ended up referencing past glories. This was evident in the first seconds of the first track, Far Cry, which sounds like a throwback to 1978’s Hemispheres. Also included are not one but three instrumentals, with some thrilling interplay in the The Main Monkey Business.

16. Counterparts (1993)

In the ’80s, producer Peter Collins worked on the two Rush albums most dominated by synthesizers – Power Windows and Hold Your Fire. When he returned for Counterparts, at a time when grunge was ascendant, there was a greater focus on guitars in a classic power-trio sound. The album is bookended by two outstanding tracks – beginning with Animate, a full-throttle rock song, and ending with Everyday Glory, an uplifting anthem reminiscent of U2 and Simple Minds.

15. Presto (1989)

After four albums dominated by synths, Rush returned to a more guitar-centric style on Presto. “This album,” Geddy Lee said, “was a reaction against technology.” Producer Rupert Hine also instigated a major change. “I asked Geddy to lower his voice by an octave,” Hine said. A heavy tone was set in the album’s opening track Show Don’t Tell, built around a stinging riff from Alex Lifeson. But the best track is more subtle. The Pass was Neil Peart’s meditation on teenage suicide, and the music had a perfectly judged emotional pitch. On an album that is much overlooked, The Pass is among the best songs Rush ever recorded.

14. Clockwork Angels (2012)

It turned out to be the last Rush album, and it was a perfect note on which to finish. From the high priests of conceptual rock, Clockwork Angels was a grandiose concept album – and their first complete concept album at that. With a plot line described as “an individual trying to follow his dreams in a dystopian future”, there were echoes of the band’s classic conceptual piece 2112. Most impressive of all was the quality of the songwriting, with power and complexity in tracks such as Caravan and Headlong Flight, and beauty in the finale, The Garden.

13. Caress Of Steel (1975)

Geddy Lee once remarked of the third Rush album: “You can smell the hash oil.” There was also more than a whiff of self-indulgence about Caress Of Steel. The album’s trippy vibe hit a heady peak with The Fountain Of Lamneth, a 20-minute prog rock odyssey in six parts. At a relatively snappy 12 minutes, The Necromancer was only slightly less ostentatious. But there was a lighter touch evident in the Zeppelin-style groover Lakeside Park, and muscular riffing in the album’s most famous track, Bastille Day.

12. Hold Your Fire (1987)

Hold Your Fire was co-produced by the band with Peter Collins, who recalled to Classic Rock magazine: “Producers such as Trevor Horn and I were into the hi-tech sounds of the ’80s: Fairlights, Synclaviers, all that cutting edge stuff.” The result was the slickest-sounding Rush album, with a standout track in Time Stand Still, featuring guest vocalist Aimee Mann from the band ’Til Tuesday. Always thinking outside the box, the band wanted to use an English brass band for the song Mission. “We tried it,” Collins said, “but it didn’t work.”

11. Roll The Bones (1991)

Producer Rupert Hine called Roll The Bones “a very playful Rush album”. This was certainly true of its title track, featuring a goofy rap delivered in a comedy voice by Geddy Lee – because their intended guest star, John Cleese, was unavailable! But this album also includes one of the band’s most powerfully emotive songs, Bravado. Other highlights include the dramatic opening track Dreamline and the elegantly phrased Ghost Of A Chance.

10. Rush (1974)

On this debut, the influence of Led Zeppelin was writ large in Lifeson’s heavy riffing and in the way Lee yelped like a geeky Robert Plant. It was also the only album the band made with drummer John Rutsey, who played hard, no frills, but was fired due to poor health and the standard ‘musical differences’. What shines out from the album’s best tracks – the freewheeling Finding My Way and the monolithic Working Man – is the blazing energy and raw rock ’n’ roll edge that would, in turn, be sacrificed to loftier ambitions.

9. Fly By Night (1975)

The first album with Neil Peart was a big leap forward. Not only was the new guy a more accomplished drummer than John Rutsey, he was smart – nicknamed ‘The Professor’ – and became the band’s lyricist. As a result, Fly By Night was a defining album for Rush, with a more finessed power in Anthem, and a strong progressive influence illustrated in By-Tor & The Snow Dog.

8. Grace Under Pressure (1984)

Grace Under Pressure is the Rush connoisseurs’ choice – a lesser-known album, albeit a hit in 1984. Alex Lifeson called it “the most satisfying of all our records”. There is a heavy dramatic tension in songs such as Distant Early Warning and Between The Wheels; a playful, trippy vibe in Red Lenses; and a profound sense of depth and weight in Afterimage, in which Peart wrote beautifully in what he described as “a response to a tragedy… and looking for a reason why”.

7. Permanent Waves (1980)

The band’s first album of a new decade was a game changer. In reaction to the convoluted, bombastic style of previous album Hemispheres, a modernized Rush emerged on Permanent Waves, as symbolized by hit single The Spirit Of Radio, a euphoric rock anthem in which trio’s virtuoso chops were combined with a zinging pop sensibility. And in the nine-minute finale Natural Science was a new kind of Rush epic, with Peart’s eco-conscious lyrics far removed from the fantasy themes of old. From here, they never looked back.

6. Power Windows (1985)

In the mid-’80s, Lee’s admitted “obsession” with synthesizers left Lifeson as the odd man out in a power trio that no longer functioned with guitar at its core. But while Lifeson felt marginalized, he sucked it up for the greater good; and in what was effectively a supporting role on Power Windows, he played brilliantly in keyboard-driven, emotionally charged tracks such as Marathon, Middletown Dreams and Mystic Rhythms. For one famous fan, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, this is the greatest of all Rush albums.

5. Signals (1982)

The opening track on the band’s ninth album was a sign of what was to come – for Lifeson, ominously so. Synthesizers had been a texture in their music since the mid-’70s, but on Subdivisions they were front and centre. This was also one of many powerful, expertly crafted songs on Signals. The reggae influence first heard in The Spirit Of Radio was at the heart of Digital Man and New World Man, and the theme of adolescent yearning in Subdivisions was developed in the supercharged rock song The Analog Kid.

4. Hemispheres (1978)

The last Rush album of the ’70s was also the last of its kind, the title track a vast piece in the style of 2112 and titled, rather wonderfully, Cygnus X-1 Book II: Hemispheres. The album also featured forest-themed parable The Trees and, in the dazzling, 12-part instrumental La Villa Strangiato, the band’s greatest ensemble performance. There was, however, a sense within the group that they were becoming formulaic. A reinvention was coming. They left behind them, in Hemispheres, a monument to excess.

3. 2112 (1976)

It is the definitive Rush album of the ’70s, and it saved their career. In danger of being dropped by their record company after their first three albums had stiffed, the band threw everything they had at 2112. On side one, the title track, in which an Orwellian sci-fi drama played out over 20 minutes at high intensity. On side two, five orthodox numbers, including telltale pothead song A Passage To Bangkok. A cult hit in ’76, 2112 threw Rush a lifeline. Many years on, it’s a rock classic.

2. A Farewell To Kings (1977)

In the year of punk, Rush had as the centrepiece of their fifth studio album the 11-minute fantasia Xanadu, inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 poem Kubla Khan. And yet, in this album’s title track, there were echoes of the Sex Pistols’ God Save The Queen in Peart’s small-‘r’ republican diatribe. A lighter touch was evident on Closer To The Heart, which became Canada’s unofficial rock anthem. And to finish there was Cygnus X-1, a space rock adventure that ended mid-suspense – to be continued on the following year’s Hemispheres.

1. Moving Pictures (1981)

The best selling Rush album, and their masterpiece. As prefigured by Permanent Waves, the modern Rush came into sharp focus on Moving Pictures – in the clean lines and lean power of songs such as Tom Sawyer and Red Barchetta. Their love of progressive rock lingered in The Camera Eye – “an homage to Genesis”, Lee admitted – and in the tricksy instrumental YYZ. But with this album, the band reached for, and found, a global audience, even if Peart’s lyrics in Limelight signalled a retreat from fame. With Rush, there was always complexity.

DRUMS WEEK 2025: Neil Peart was one of the greatest drummers that ever lived. Born in Hamilton, Ontario, he joined Canadian trio Rush in 1974 and also served as the band’s primary lyricist.

Peart rarely gave interviews in the last years of his life, but in 2012, during a Rush tour, he spoke to our sister magazine Classic Rock about his career, his lyrics and the art of drumming.

Growing up in rural Canada, you began playing drums as a teenager. How did music change you as a person?

I was very academic until I discovered drums. Then I was a monomaniac about drumming. I was physically awkward. My ankles were weak, so I couldn’t play any sports. I couldn’t skate and I couldn’t play hockey, which in Canada is like football is in the UK. And that makes you a pariah as a boy.

You wrote about that aspect of teenage life in the Rush song Subdivisions – the pressure to ‘be cool or be cast out’. Was that song autobiographical?

Extremely! How we turn out as adults has a lot to do with the way others saw us in high school. Consider yourself as a teenager – whether you were treated as a geek, or as a scholar, or a jock, or a good-looking Lothario or whatever. However you were treated by others has a lot to do with how you turn out.

Would you describe yourself as an introvert?

Yes. And extroverts don’t ever understand introverts. You know that from your school days. Shy people were seen as stuck up. They were seen as conceited because they kept to themselves.

That was a subject you addressed in the 1981 song Limelight: ‘I can’t pretend a stranger is a long-awaited friend.’ Are you still the same person who wrote that lyric?

Entirely so. And, honesty, I’ve never had to retract it. My ability to express myself has grown and evolved over the years. And when I listen to early songs, I might cringe technically, but never psychologically or emotionally. I still mean every word of Limelight, however crudely it might have been expressed.

What kind of encounter makes you feel uncomfortable?

If you meet someone at the launderette and they go: “Oh, this is the greatest moment of my life!” I like the motto: ‘never complain, never explain’. But I can never resist trying to explain.

There are echoes of Pink Floyd’s The Wall in Limelight. Did that album resonate with you?

Enormously. I totally understood it. Many years ago a DJ played a track from [Floyd’s] Wish You Were Here, one of the alienation songs that preceded The Wall. And he said: “If you’re a songwriter and you write about what’s near to you, if you become alienated you’re going to write about being alienated.”

Is that what fame means to you – alienation?

Another line from Limelight that grew in resonance over the years is: ‘One must put up barriers to keep oneself intact.’ But there is a corollary that I try to explain. Every day when I’m on tour and travelling between cities on my motorcycle, I have half-a-dozen pleasant encounters with people. I’ve spent a lot of time in truck stops and diners and cafes, very casual, low-grade places, and those are the encounters I have: stranger to stranger, I guess you could say. I love the anonymity of my travels.

And when you’re touring on a motorcycle, you must see a lot more of the world

I avoid motorways whenever possible. The roads I want are the ones that people don’t travel unless they live on them.

Do you ride alone?

In America I usually go by myself, but in Europe I have a riding partner who spends months on the road with me. And it’s a hugely planned effort to see everything we can.

Is there an affinity between travellers?

People are smiling and friendly because you’re kin: hikers, cross-country skiers, bicyclists, motorcyclists. And when you’re somewhere remote, other travellers immediately know that you’re one of them – that you’re cool, because you’re there! I’ve experienced this in the Arctic, in Africa…

And Britain?

I’ve really noticed how outdoorsy British people are. I lived in Britain as a teenager for a couple of years, and what I learned was: nothing is contingent on the weather. And I’ve carried that with me all my life. I’ve ridden across the Yorkshire moors when it was cold and raining; I was suffering. But people were out there because they’d decided to do it.

Touring also keeps you from your family

Honestly, people don’t realise the sacrifice you make as a touring musician. Being away when children are growing up and when your partner needs you around, it’s wrenching. Your family and friends, their lives continue and you’re not part of them. People don’t place enough value on family life. It’s too easy to get caught up in the tedious day-to-day stuff and miss the miracle that’s unfolding before you.

Do you consider touring a necessary evil?

Some years ago I met a wise man, Elliot Mintz, who was the PR guy for Bob Dylan and John Lennon. I told him I didn’t really like touring but felt that I had to. And he said: “You have to do it because you can.” I thought about that phrase for the longest time. I mentioned it to Geddy {Lee, Rush bassist/vocalist] one night when he was with a friend, and his friend said: “Well, it seems you have a pretty good life.”

I said: “It is a good life, but it has a price.” That’s the reality. I love my job and I love the people that I work with. I am very grateful for that. But I also love my home and family.

Do you feel misunderstood?

I don’t like to puncture illusions. I know I represent some kind of fantasy to a lot of people. But there is no fantasy. There’s a quote that I use: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” Most human life is made up of some mixture of happiness and misery.

You were never more misunderstood than in 1977, when the NME portrayed you as a borderline fascist for basing the Rush song 2112 on the work of right-wing philosopher Ayn Rand. How did that affect you?

I recall that NME interview very well because the conversation was great. And we all felt totally betrayed after, because we had a lovely time with the guy. I remember him being so courteous. It was so amicable. As far as I was concerned, we were just having an intellectual conversation. But these things are wide open to misinterpretation, and that was a classic case.

Where do you stand politically – left or right?

I know where I fall politically. And I define it better now: I’m a libertarian, but a bleeding-heart libertarian.

Meaning what, exactly?

I believe in taxation and healthcare that is outside the usual libertarian mandate, because I don’t want people to have to suffer. It’s as simple as that. If people are suffering and I can help, I want to. But here’s the difference between being an idealist and a realist. Idealistically, I believe that we should help people. But realistically, do I think that government will do that? No.

How do you define ‘libertarianism’?

It’s enlightened self-interest. Free will. I’ve lived in the US for the last 10 years, and I wanted there to be a health care system. The little bit that there is, it’s a wonderful thing. So that’s an example of what I consider enlightened self-interest. That’s why I’m a bleeding-heart libertarian. Paul Theroux said: “A cynic is a disappointed idealist.” But I’m not a cynic. I’m not disappointed. I’ve just broadened my idealism.

Most people become more cynical with age

I must say I’ve come to grips with that. There are enough good people in the world, enough good books, enough good music. And again, it’s about learning from people. In my book Traveling Music, I wrote about all the music that had meant so much to me. In Bob Dylan’s term: “What music should do is inspire you.” But, of course, I had to have some bile in there – for all the stuff that I hated. And my editor said: “Don’t bother. Concentrate on the excellence.” So I cut it. And he was right. I needed to write it, to vent my spleen, but I didn’t need to share that.

On the song Afterimage, from 1984’s Grace Under Pressure, you wrote movingly about the death of a friend

Afterimage is based on the idea that when someone goes, there are a number of lives they left their mark upon. The death of Frank Zappa was sad to me because the world needed people like Frank Zappa. And the same is true of a guy named Bernie, who I met when he was leading bird-watching tours in a national park. He had so much knowledge, but he’s not long for this world, and all that knowledge is going to be lost. That’s the tragedy. When some people go, I feel that kind of wrench. That’s why I wrote in that song: ‘I try to believe…’ But you can’t believe in that kind of stuff.

You can’t believe in what – God?

No. And I’m well-documented on that subject. In all my songs and in my prose. I was called a faith-basher recently and it went to my heart. I don’t want to be an anything-basher. I don’t like to make enemies.

What gives you the most satisfaction as an artist?

When I found out that Jeff Buckley was aware of our work… to have been a part of the inspiration for a talent like that! I refer back to that Bob Dylan quote. As an artist, what else can you do for people but inspire them? That is the absolute highest goal.

You’ve inspired a whole generation of rock drummers, of course, not least Dave Grohl and Taylor Hawkins of the Foo Fighters, who recently inducted Rush into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame.

The highest possible compliment is if someone that you admire respects your work. To those that have said I inspired them to start drumming, the first thing I say is: “I apologise to your parents.” But it’s wonderful just to be a little part of someone’s life like that.

In the mid-’90s you took instruction from jazz drummer Freddie Gruber. Why?

After 40, 45 years of playing, I wanted to push myself and open up this whole new frontier. I’ve been able to do that as a lyricist and as a prose writer, and now as a drummer. You have to challenge your own limitations and your own expectations of yourself.

Was that the secret to the longevity of Rush – the desire to keep pushing forward?

That’s the way we’ve always operated as a band. Always doing what we believe in and believing in what we do, writing songs that we still like 30 years on and can still play with conviction.

And after all these years, is it the ability to laugh at each other, and at yourselves, that has kept you sane?

Yes. The three of us really balance each other out. We’re still the same suburban goofballs that we always were. And we’re so fortunate to have a relationship like that.

It was the biggest album of their career, a multi-million selling masterpiece that elevated Rush from cult heroes to one of the world’s premier rock acts.

As guitarist Alex Lifeson said of Moving Pictures: “That record changed our lives.”

And yet, for this band, nothing was ever simple.

“It’s always hard to make records,” Lifeson told Classic Rock. “It’s always an enormous drain emotionally.”

And in the making of Moving Pictures, they had to dig deep – so much so that in the days immediately after the recording was completed, bassist/vocalist Geddy Lee harboured serious doubts about what they had created

“It took us so long to make the record,” Lee said. “By the time we left the studio it was the dead of winter. I had to drive home through this horrible snowstorm.

“Then, without any sleep, I took a flight to the Caribbean for a holiday with my wife. And when listened to the record out there, I was so burnt out that it sounded all wrong.”

But it was Neil Peart, drummer and lyricist, who felt most conflicted at this time.

For Peart, fame was not a blessing but a curse.

“I didn’t want to be famous,” he once said. “I wanted to be good! It’s a whole other thing.”

And in one song from Moving Pictures, he made his feelings explicit.

Lifeson described Limelight as “a straightforward rock song”, but in the words written by Peart were complex emotions and a blunt message to fans: “I can’t pretend a stranger is a long awaited friend”.

At the very moment that the band was making music that would connect with a vast audience, Neil Peart was already counting the cost of that success.

In the summer of 1980, when the three members of Rush began writing for Moving Pictures at a rural retreat in Stony Lake, Ontario, their confidence was high.

Their most recent album, Permanent Waves, released in January of that year, had been a significant breakthrough, both artistically and commercially.

In the '70s, Rush had built a huge cult following with the heavy progressive rock of albums such as 2112 and Hemispheres – both of which had epic tracks that swallowed up entire sides of vinyl.

Permanent Waves was a major reset. "We were writing shorter, punchier songs”, Lifeson said.

It was the big leap forward with which Rush defined a new sound for the new decade – a sound most perfectly illustrated in The Spirit Of Radio, the complex yet tightly focused and euphoric anthem in which the band’s virtuoso musicianship was distilled into five minutes, resulting in their first hit single.

With this transition complete, the stage was set for Moving Pictures.

“We were originally going to do a live album,” Lee said. “But then a friend of ours suggested that, as we were changing our style so fast, we should really think about delaying the live album and go into the studio again. We thought about it, and this made sense.”

On 28 July, shortly before they left home in Toronto for Stony Lake, Rush had joined up with fellow Canadian band Max Webster to record the song Battle Scar. An epic jam, cut live, with both bands going at it full tilt, Battle Scar would be the centrepiece of Max Webster’s album Universal Juveniles, a powerhouse track that Peart described as “a Wagnerian tumult”.

It was while the two bands were together that day, at Phase One Studios, that Pye Dubois, a poet and lyricist who worked with Max Webster, presented a new song to his friends in Rush – “humbly suggesting,” as Peart recalled, “that it might be suitable for us.”

Dubois wasn’t wrong. The song he had, in embryonic form, would subsequently be developed into a statement piece for Rush. It would become the opening track on Moving Pictures, and, ultimately, the most famous of all Rush songs – Tom Sawyer.

On arrival in Stony Lake, the rough outline of Tom Sawyer was all they had to work with.

“We had nothing at all written for the album at the time,” Lee said. “It was a case of starting it all from scratch.”

Their gear was set up in the barn adjacent to the house they had rented, and there they worked standard business hours. “Monday to Friday,” Lee said. “And then we went home for the weekend. That’s how we tended to do things in those days.”

In this relaxed environment, new songs came together quickly. As Lifeson explained: “Most of that record was written by all of us at the same time, in the room jamming with an idea and everybody going from there.”

By Lee’s recollection, the first song completed was The Camera Eye. At more than ten minutes in length, this was something of an anomaly in the context of where the band was headed, more of a throwback to the band’s ’70s work, as Lee would later admit.

“The Camera Eye was the last really epic song we wrote,” he said. “And at the time I thought it was too long, and it sounded derivative – kind of a Genesis wannabe. It didn’t feel legit to me.”

Once the ball was rolling, however, four more songs took shape, all of them more compact.

Tom Sawyer, with its measured, deep groove, and the faster Red Barchetta were big on melody, anthemic in feel, even if both lacked a defined chorus. Limelight was based around a simple guitar riff but moved through subtle mood shifts – “some beautiful ups and downs”, as Lifeson put it. And in YYZ there was an instrumental as dramatic as the Overture from the band’s era-defining 1976 concept album 2112.

YYZ was mostly the work of Lee and Peart. “One day, for some reason, Alex wasn’t around,” Lee said. “So Neil and I just went out to the barn and we started putting YYZ together as a bass and drum jam extravaganza. And then Al came in and added his licks, and before you knew it the song was finished.”

As Peart explained of the song’s title and percussive intro: “YYZ is the identity code used by Toronto International Airport, and the intro is taken from the Morse code which is sent out by the beacon there.”

In the busy, fast-moving riff there was a sense of the energy of a buzzing big city airport. In the keyboard-driven mid-section, a sense of the emotions carried in passengers saying their hellos and goodbyes. And in Lifeson’s solo, what Peart described as an “Eastern mode”, a sound to evoke “the exotic nature of travel”. This solo, Lee said, “took it to another level”.

YYZ was a brilliant construction, a story without words.

But for Rush, perhaps more so than any other rock band, lyrics were always as important as the music.

It had been that way ever since Peart first joined the band in 1974; certainly, since he had taken inspiration from Ayn Rand to create the dystopian sci-fi tale of 2112. And so it continued in the songs they wrote at Stony Lake.

From Pye Dubois’ original idea, and from Mark Twain’s classic 1876 novel The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer, Peart created a powerful declaration of independence. As Rolling Stone writer David Fricke saw it, Peart was “reimagining Mark Twain’s tearaway as a contemporary rogue with no fixed politics but a hunger for wonder”.

As Peart later revealed, this was in part autobiographical. The lyrics he took from Dubois were, he said, “A portrait of a modern day rebel, a free-spirited individualist striding through the world wide-eyed and purposeful.”

Peart then put his own spin on it. “I added the themes of reconciling the boy and man in myself,” he said. “And the difference between what people are and what others perceive them to be – namely me, I guess.”

These core principles – individualism, liberty, anti-authoritarianism – were also at the heart of Red Barchetta, for which Peart took inspiration from a short story by Richard S. Foster, titled A Nice Morning Drive.

In Peart’s tale, set in a future where cars are outlawed, a defiant hero gets his kicks burning rubber in a vintage machine, a Ferrari 166, or Barchetta.

There was, in this, an echo of 2112 – the hero in that story playing music banned by the rulers of a totalitarian regime. There was also a little personal detail in Red Barchetta. Peart loved fast cars, and this was a favourite model of his.

But if, in Tom Sawyer, he was making oblique reference to his own life, in Limelight he let it all out there.

With the success of Permanent Waves and The Spirit Of Radio, a sharp rise in the band’s profile had, for Peart, brought with it unwanted attention. Away from the stage, he remained protective of his private life. Faced with overzealous fans, he recoiled. As he remembered: “People chasing us around, coming to my house… I was shocked.”

Lines he wrote in Limelight – “One must put up barriers to keep oneself intact” – were reminiscent of what Roger Waters expressed in Pink Floyd’s The Wall, an album that resonated deeply with Peart.

“The Wall is my life story, too,” he said. “The alienation factor – all of us, as touring musicians, lived that.

“I once heard a DJ play a track from Wish You Were Here, one of the alienation songs that preceded The Wall. And the DJ said: ‘If you’re a songwriter and you write about what’s near to you, if you become alienated you’re going to write about being alienated.’ I totally understood that.”

Lee and Lifeson also understood where Peart was coming from. Lifeson said of the solo he played to fit the mood in Limelight: “It sounded haunting and very lonely.”

When Lee talked about this song, many years down the line, he explained the differences in personality that made him able to deal with fame in a way that Peart could not.

“Limelight came at a time when Neil was struggling, working out how to deal with it,” Lee said. “We all were going through it in our own way. Alex and I seemed to be able to block those things out. But Neil couldn’t. It was not in his nature to do that.

“When Neil wrote that lyric, we were getting more popular, it was a different level of fame, and Neil was being confronted with things on a regular basis that were making him really uncomfortable. So he wrote that lyric: ‘I can’t pretend a stranger is a long awaited friend.’ That song was Neil’s way of trying to sort it out.

Lee continued: “As frontman, you developed more armour: I was more ready to make a fool of myself on a nightly basis. Neil was a guy playing drums, so he was kind of protected. He had that battery around him. Like, he’s hiding behind there. They can’t find him.”

On 31 August, the band returned to Toronto and to Phase One Studios to work with producer Terry Brown on demos of these five tracks, plus a first draft of work-in-progress, provisionally titled Witch Hunt.

By Lee’s recollection, only one song written at this time was discarded, and while he could not recall why this song missed the cut for the album, its title – Sir Gawain And The Green Knight – was perhaps a little passé, with a echo of the band’s 1977 album A Farewell To Kings.

A short tour followed, just 16 shows around the Eastern US. Then, in October, they headed to Le Studio, in the small town of Morin Heights, up in the mountains outside of Quebec, to begin recording the album with producer Terry Brown.

Le Studio was where they had made Permanent Waves, and as with Stony Lake, the remote and peaceful location was very much to their liking.

“What a beautiful setting,” Lee said. “We all lived in a house a short walk from the studio, which was by a lake, and went there through the woods every day. It was very inspirational. Some people might wonder how such a tranquil setting could be a good thing when you’re making a hard rock album, but it worked for us.”

Even so, he admitted: “We went back to Le Studio because we’d had such a great time making Permanent Waves, but Moving Pictures was a much more intense experience. It took quite a bit longer to make that record. For sure, it was not as easy as we would have liked.”

As Lee remembered it, Red Barchetta was the easiest song to get down on tape. “It was such a great thing to play live, off the floor,” he said.

But other songs proved more problematic, the right feel more elusive: none more so than Tom Sawyer.

“That was such a hard song to get right,” Lifeson said. “I remember spending a lot of time on that song. A lot of time…”

Some of that time was spent, as Lee recalled, “experimenting to get the right sounds” – first, for the bass pedal synthesizer in the intro, with what he called “that big, growling low-end”.

But as he said: “The hardest thing of all was getting the right guitar sound in the solo section. We wanted that section to be played pretty much as a three-piece, not a whole lot of overdubs, but with a sound that filled up the stereo spectrum and didn’t sound empty.

“So the guitar sound for Alex’s solo was really critical. It wasn’t drowning in echo. That was the old trick we used in the past. If you want to fill the space, put an Echoplex on Alex and the repeats will fill up the space.

“But we didn’t want to do that. We were going for this dry sound with that unique tone, and for it not to feel empty, that was kind of hard. And even mixing that song was difficult.”

At one point, they almost gave up on it.

“We always have one song, on every album, that doesn’t quite click,” Lee said. “And we thought that Tom Sawyer was going to be the one. Which just goes to show you we don’t know what we’re talking about!”

In the end, what Rush delivered in Tom Sawyer was a brilliant ensemble performance: the tension in Peart’s taut beats and explosive fills, the expressiveness in Lifeson’s solos, the heavy propulsion in Lee’s bass, and the nuances in his voice, singing high and low to dramatic effect.

As Lee said of Tom Sawyer: “After a lot of struggling, we nailed it, and it was so powerful. We were going, ‘Shit, where did that come from?’ That song was a late bloomer, but when we finally nailed it, we were so happy.”

There was less of a struggle with two songs that would be placed at the end of the album, Witch Hunt and Vital Signs.

Lifeson said of Witch Hunt: “It’s kind of an oddball, but very dynamic.” Lee called it “an attempt at being cinematic, boldly illustrating a theme.”

Certainly, Witch Hunt was the darkest and strangest song on the album, with an enigmatic subtitle – Part III of ‘Fear’.

“It’s part of a cycle of songs,” Lee explained – a cycle that would be completed, albeit in muddled order, by The Weapon (Part II) on the 1982 album Signals, The Enemy Within (Part I) on 1984’s Grace Under Pressure, and Freeze (Part IV) on 2002’s Vapor Trails.

The subject of Witch Hunt was heavy. As Lee described it: “The effect that fear can have on a crowd or a mob.”

But he remembered the fun they had in creating the song. “It involved some stupid stuff,” he said. “Recording the mob shouts, the three of us went out into the studio parking lot in the freezing cold of winter.”

Vital Signs, what became the final track on the album, was also the last to be written, and with surprising ease.

“We needed one more song for the record,” Lee said, “and we wrote and recorded Vital Signs in one day. It was one of those happy, spontaneous things.”

In this song there was a flavour of new wave and, in the verses, the influence of The Police in a reggae rhythm – first utilised by Rush in The Spirit Of Radio, and later expanded into songs such as Digital Man and Distant Early Warning.

“With Vital Signs,” Lee said, “we felt that we needed something really different to the rest of that record, something that was up-tempo and that had a more modern pop/rock vibe to it. It was kind of a nice way to end the record too.”

As Lifeson put it: “You’d think, looking at the songs, that something big like The Camera Eye would be the closer. But we went out on a different note with Vital Signs. It was an interesting way to finish.”

With that last song in the can, all that remained was the mixing. But if the writing and recording of Vital Signs seemed all too easy, this final process proved once again that for Rush, nothing was ever simple.

“During the mixing stage, things started to go wrong,” Lee said. “We were getting stuff happening that wasn’t supposed to be there. Terry Brown told us that the only thing we could do was shut the thing down, and get someone to fly over from England to fix it.

“Without getting too technical, the problem was traced to a faulty wire, and there was too much moisture in the earth, and it was giving us spikes in the mix.”

The mood within the camp turned from frustration to sadness on the night of 8 December 1980, as they were attempting to mix Witch Hunt.

As Lee recalled: “This horrible news came over the wire, the news that John Lennon had been shot. We were sitting around the television just in shock. We were all so sad. That is something I will never forget.”

But as the days ticked down towards Christmas, the gloom eventually lifted.

As Lee explained: “We did some of the mix in the old-fashioned way, manually. There were four pairs of hands on the desk, trying to get things done, because all of us were actively involved in all of the production. And it made it a lot more exciting. Using a computer was a little more distant. We loved getting our hands dirty.”

And while Lee would suffer a crisis of confidence once he got out of the studio and sat brooding over the album in the heat of the Caribbean, the doubts in his mind soon cleared. “After a good couple of weeks away from it,” he said, “I could listen to it and go, okay, it sounds pretty good!”

Moving Pictures was released on 12 March 1981, preceded by the first single, Tom Sawyer, on 28 February.

“At the time it was just another album in Rush’s history,” Lee said. “But this was the point at which we made a real transition musically and lyrically. People might say it was the birth of the modern Rush. I think it was a more gradual process than that. But this album was a very important one for us.”

As Peart said, “We just made a record that we liked. That’s what we did all the time. But suddenly all of the stars were aligned.”

Within a month of its release, Moving Pictures topped the Canadian chart and reached No.3 in the UK and also in the US, where it was beaten out of the top spot by two soft rock juggernauts, REO Speedwagon’s Hi Infidelity and Styx’s Paradise Theatre.

Tom Sawyer was not a huge hit, peaking at No.24 on the Canadian chart, and No.44 in the US. Although a video for the track had been filmed at Le Studio – the bluish snowbound landscape visible through the windows as the band played – MTV was not launched until August 1 of that year.

What really mattered, back then, was rock radio. And for that, Tom Sawyer was a perfect fit.

According to Cliff Burnstein, who worked with Rush at Mercury Records before co-managing bands such as Def Leppard and Metallica: “Tom Sawyer became the anthemic track that Rush needed to become more than the biggest cult band in America. To become a band of mass cultural acceptance.”

In the words of Tom Sawyer there was so much that free thinkers could relate to: “His mind is not for rent to any god or government”. But there were two key lines – “The world is, the world is/Love and life are deep” – that made this song, for Cliff Burnstein and others like him, “a quintessential stoner anthem”.

Moving Pictures defined Rush in the ’80s as powerfully as 2112 had done in the ’70s. If 2112 was the apogee of the band’s progressive rock era, Moving Pictures crystallised the modern Rush – in the clean lines and lean power of songs such as Tom Sawyer and Red Barchetta.

But there was still enough to carry long-term fans with them – echoes of the past in the grand scale of The Camera Eye, and the concept of Witch Hunt as part of a thematic song cycle. And there was in YYZ a perfect example of what Cliff Burnstein described as “pure Rush as musicians”.

“There are a lot of songs that just reached a standard on that record,” Lifeson said. “I think it’s some of our strongest, most enduring material that we’ve written. The songs were good, and they connected with a bigger audience. But there was also something about the sound of that record that resonated with people.”

Moving Pictures stands tall as the biggest and arguably the best Rush album. “That level of success was like nothing we had ever experienced before,” Lee said. “It was such a huge record for us. And the years have been very generous to it.”

Tom Sawyer, for all the difficulty in its creation, became the band’s signature song.

“It’s a wonderful thing,” Peart said, “that such a bizarre song could be so popular.”

And as for Limelight, the song in which he signalled his retreat from fame, the message was not lost on Rush fans.

They respected Peart for the honesty in those lyrics, and in turn respected his privacy in all the years that followed until his death in 2020.

In an interview with MOJO magazine in 2011, Peart had described the kind of encounter with fans that made him uncomfortable. “If you meet someone at the launderette and they go: ‘Oh, this is the greatest moment of my life!’”

Laughing, he added: “I like the motto: ‘never complain, never explain’. But I can never resist trying to explain.”

Perhaps he had explained enough in Limelight.

As he told MOJO: “When I listen to early songs, I might cringe technically, but never psychologically or emotionally.

“My ability to express myself has grown and evolved over the years. But I still mean every word of Limelight, however crudely it might have been expressed.”

There are occasions in every great band’s life when their creative forces culminate to a degree where they can no longer be contained and it is time to turn all this imagination and musical nous loose on ever more ambitious arrangements. Rush had reached that point by 1978.

If we’re going to be telling the story of how the legendary Canadian prog trio applied the coup de grâce to Hemispheres by playing us out with La Villa Strangiato, an instrumental just shy of 10 minutes long, inspired by the REM activity of guitarist Alex Lifeson, then we have to go back a year, to the summer of ’77, when they arrived at Rockfield Studios, in Wales, fully prepared to execute their most-daring musical high-wire act yet, tracking Xanadu in one take.

Rush had, of course, done epic. A year earlier, with 2112, they had perfected blockbuster conceptual rock, the thrilling union of electric guitar and synthesizer redrawing rock’s boundaries, expanding them – and furthermore atoning for commercial failure of Caress Of Steel on their own terms.

“We wanted to develop that style. Because there was so much negative feeling from the record company and our management was worried, we came back full force with 2112,” said Lifeson, speaking to Guitar World in 1996. “There was a lot of passion and anger on that record. It was about one person standing up against everybody else.”

Rush’s long-form songwriting would test their audience yet reward them in kind. They knew how to hold people’s attention. Neil Peart, their late drummer and lyricist-in-chief, had a gift for story in verse. Bassist, lead vocalist and keyboard player Geddy Lee could make those big ideas relatable to all. Xanadu in a single take, however, was a new level of daring; this was Philippe Petit walking the wire between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. It was the perfect way to open the sessions to A Farewell To Kings.

But then, as Lifeson tells us, speaking to MusicRadar upon the launch of Envy Of None’s sophomore album, Stygian Waves, Rush knew what they were doing by then, and having stuck the landing on 2112, he has a point.

“Xanadu was the first song we recorded for A Farewell To Kings at the studio in Rockfield,” he says. “We went out with the engineer, we ran the song a little bit for levels and then a third of the way through we stopped for the take. We played it all the way through and that was the take.”

Jaws dropped.

“We went into the control room and Pat Moran, who was the engineer at the time, was in shock,” Lifeson continues. “‘Nobody comes in here and does a 10-minute song in one take. That’s insane. That’s crazy!’”

Moran had a point. Maybe you need to be a little crazy to play in Rush, or at least well prepared. This all happened a long time ago now – Lifeson’s recollections are a bit hazy – but there’s a sense of satisfaction in his smile that they pulled it off. “We had the benefit of working on it before we went into the studio,” he says. “I guess we were okay at that kind of thing.”

Given what Rush intended to do the following year upon returning to Rockfield, we could consider Xanadu's one-take epicry as something of a test balloon ex post facto for La Villa Strangiato (it was even prefaced by a long instrumental section).

They had developed a taste for instrumentals, and for taking inspiration from wherever they could find it. That planted the seed for La Villa Strangiato. Lifeson’s dreams had been a running joke among the band. Why not turn them into a track? It worked out all right for Paul McCartney.

“I have always been a vivid dreamer, and I used to share my dreams with the guys, what I could remember the next day,” says Lifeson. “It was an ongoing jokey kind of thing. When we talked about doing the song, and doing it in sections based on all of these dreams, I think it was Neil who suggested that we break them up and title them after these dreams. It was more of a fun kind of thing than anything else.”

La Villa Strangiato would be a lot of music. As was the fashion, Rush broke it down into sections, each giving us a vignette from Lifeson’s peregrinations in the subconscious mind – e.g. Buenas Noches, Mein Froinds!, A Lerxst In Wonderland, The Ghost of the Aragon.

Monsters were a recurring theme. The arrangement behaves like a dream. One minute your here, the next your there, out up on Danforth And Pape, through the looking glass as Toronto dissolves into dreamscape.

As was Rush’s wont, they didn’t take themselves, nor their critics, too seriously. La Villa Strangiato is subtitled An Exercise In Self-Indulgence.

“I remember writing it was great fun because the whole inspiration was, of course, these crazy dreams that Alex used to foist upon us every morning at breakfast,” said Geddy Lee, speaking to Prog magazine in 2018. “He’d start, ‘You’ll never guess what I dreamed last night…’ and the groaning would begin! But it was a really fun, visual and musical exercise, constructing a soundtrack to an insane person’s dreams!”

Recollections differ as to whether Rush got the whole of La Villa Strangiato down in one take. Everyone can agree that this was the intention. In Lee’s interview with Prog, he said it was definitely more than one take, that they recorded the track in four parts.

“We divided it into four, focused on those and then used the good old magic of editing tape to stick them together into one cohesive piece,” he said. “Those were the days before click tracks and that digital, metronomic attitude towards putting music together. So it was very much down to how you felt in the moment. Sometimes you’d get excited and you’d speed up, and sometimes that’s the way it should be. That's why it feels so live.”

When speaking to Guitar World, Lifeson said it was a one-shot deal, with everyone set up in the studio to run through it live together, baffles to separate the instruments. They recorded and then he overdubbed his solo.

Now, a lot of time has passed. Lifeson is unsure of what went on with the overdubs. One thing is for sure; you can still hear the print-through of his solo. La Villa Strangiato still sounds live, and feels live – and that was the intention whether it was one take or more.

Lifeson’s guitar tone on Hemispheres was coloured by the hallowed CE-1 Chorus Ensemble, which introduced Boss pedals in 1976. Lifeson was an early adopter. It would be a go-to effect for the foreseeable future. But the chorus tones on La Villa Strangiato was a Roland Jazz Chorus, the guitar his Gibson semi-hollow.

“By that time I had my ES-355, and my acoustics were a Gibson Dove, J-55 and a B-45 12-string,” he told Guitar World. “I had my Marshall in the studio. I had the [Fender] Twin and two Hiwatts, which I was also using live, but the Marshall was my real workhorse.”

Hemispheres was famously a tough record to make. Lee describes as like “pulling teeth” and part of the issue was they never had the time to rehearse a lot of the material before arriving in Wales. They would write at the farmhouse then work out how they were going to record it at Rockfield. The ideas were coming. That was not the problem. The key they were writing in was, and it would royally mess with Lee’s vocals.

“We never got a chance to kind of play it out and rehearse it, and for me to see where the range was,” said Lee, speaking to MusicRadar in 2024. “It’s one thing to sit down with a guitar, thinking, ‘OK, that’s going to work like that.’ But once you finish it and sing it out, you go, ‘F*ck, this is high!’ This whole record really pushed me into the upper register.”

“Hemispheres was very, very difficult to make. It was very hard,” says Lifeson. “Geddy was in a higher range. It was a full tone up from his comfort range, plus he tends to sing in the upper harmony, whatever the upper harmony would have been. Yeah, that record was a really difficult one.”

There were technical issues. The band’s new foot pedal system did not work as advertised. A lot of time was wasted. Checking out of Rockfield, Hemispheres still needed a lot of work. When they should have been mixing the album at Advision Studios in London, Lee had to finish the vocals, and find a way to reach those high notes. The tension was palpable.

“The whole thing took months, and it was tough. There were a lot of songs that were a lot more difficult to sing than I imagined,” said Lee. “I couldn’t hit a lot of notes. Everything we did was like pulling teeth.

“Every day at Advision I would go into a little vocal room and sing. Some days it would be okay. Other days my voice would be shot, and I’d just have to push through it. It was very frustrating. We spent a lot of time deep in that Hemispheres record. It was very ambitious, hard to record, hard for me to sing. It was even hard to mix. It really took a chunk out of us.”

Not La Villa Strangiato. And yet, this was meant to be difficult one, the ambitious, audacious arrangement to test just how far those creative forces could carry them. Without vocals to worry about, however, it became a vehicle for Rush to just play, let their hair down and have some fun. La Villa Strangiato is the sound of Rush living the dream – or dreams, plural – with a track that didn’t need lyrics to tell its story.

No wonder it became a fans’ favourite from Hemispheres, and that both Lee and Lifeson recall it fondly after all these years.

“Doing something like that gave us licence to change as often as we wanted, to make the music as complicated as we wanted, to stylistically shift gears every 30 seconds,” Lee told Prog, a piece published to make Hemisphere’s 40th anniversary. “All of that is free and open to you. That’s the beauty of doing that kind of instrumental.

“You can make it up as you go along, you can decide what the script should be and it doesn’t have to bear any relation to anybody’s idea of what an instrumental song should be. So it was super fun to do and it’s still super fun to play live. It’s one of my favourite songs to play."

Lifeson agrees. He says it is one of the best things they ever wrote.

“It was nice to have an instrumental that we could just play and have fun,” says Lifeson. “We have always loved instrumentals because we play our hearts out, and it’s kind of a reward at the end of a record to do one instrumental that you can blow it out on!”

Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson has been opening up about life after Rush and has revealed that he and Geddy Lee still meet up and play “once a week.”

In a new interview with Tom Power on Canada’s CBC Radio One, Lifeson gave an insight into the two men’s relationship: “Geddy’s my best friend. We do so much stuff together. We play tennis together. Often we drink a little too much wine together," he confirmed.

"So I'll go over to his place, and we'll just hang around. Invariably we'll go downstairs into his studio and we'll play and for fun we play some Rush songs - just the two of us, just jamming, really. We've been writing music together for 50 years.

“Honestly, he's my best friend. Why wouldn't I wanna hang around with him? So that's our relationship. And the rumours fly and all of that stuff - of anything, a new album and whatever. But we just really, really enjoy each other's company. I talk to him almost every day and have forever."

Rush effectively ground to a halt in 2015 when drummer Neil Peart quit after their R40 Live Tour. Five years later he died, bringing an end to any remaining possibility the band could reconvene.

Lifeson reflected on how it all ended: “Neil was adamant that he was done. There was a time where he was thinking that maybe we could stretch it a bit, but then he had a problem with his feet and he was done. Ged and I were disappointed. We felt like we had a lot of gas in the tank still.

“We wanted to go to Europe desperately. We had a lot of fans there and we never got there - in the UK especially. So I think Ged and I were very disappointed. I'd say we were, to be honest with you, maybe a little bitter that it ended that way. But what could we do? Neil did it for 40 years. He absolutely had the toughest job in the band. And he felt like if he couldn't play a hundred percent, then he was done."

Since then, Lee and Lifeson haven’t recorded any new music under the Rush name, although both have confirmed that several drummers reached out to them after Peart’s death in the hope they would be carrying on. Instead Lifeson has embarked on a new project, Envy Of None, who recently released their second album, Stygian Wavz.

A sense of liberation can do wonders for the imagination. Ask Alex Lifeson. After nigh-on five decades as Rush’s guitarist he is now chasing new creative frontiers with Envy Of None, whose sophomore LP, Stygian Waves, presents Lifeson’s electric guitar like we have never heard it before.

Not that playing in Rush was a rinse and repeat deal. The seminal Canadian prog trio were animated by a restless musical curiosity. But Rush played their final shows 2015, officially disbanding in 2018, and so being “Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson” is a label that could weigh heavily on you after some time. Lifeson had more to give. Creativity is like a muscle; it can waste away, and so he kept on writing.

In 2021, he found an outlet. Envy Of None would find Lifeson in the company of his old friend Andy Curran of Coney Hatch fame on bass guitar, and esteemed producer Alfio Annibalini on keyboards. The band would be fronted by the prodigiously talented Maiah Wynne on lead vocals, and their 2022 self-titled debut mined an altogether different sound for Lifeson, pulling ’90s industrial rock and electronic textures a la Depeche Mode into his orbit. Lifeson’s guitar found new purpose.

Stygian Waves draws the canvas wider. Wynne’s vocals once more pull focus. Everything is built around her voice. And there is a lot of building.

Joining from his home studio in Toronto, Lifeson says the idea is that we fall into these songs.

“When you have 16 layers of vocals plus a bunch of keyboard stuff, plus guitar stuff, and Andy likes to play a lot of stereo bass stuff, it does build up the tracks,” he says. “But it’s great, because we want the tracks to be dense, and we want them to be kind of spongy. You want to sink into them.”

That you do, as though in a dream. Wynne’s vocal has an after-hours feel, a hypnagogic, 4AD/Cocteau Twins quality. It is a sound that establishes its own logic, emboldening Lifeson’s guitar to play with textures and to drop all kinds of sonic references. As he explains here, there are ‘60s Motown influences, solos that call to mind David Gilmour – there’s even a six-string shout out to Sir Paul McCartney.

Some of the guitar sounds on this record that sound like you are trying to disguise the instrument.

“I’ve always moved outside of what typically the job of the guitar is. I have always looked at trying to manipulate the sound; it’s obviously played on the guitar but it doesn’t sound anything like one, so I am already set up for that sort of thing.”

How does Maiah’s vocals influence what you want to play?

“There is something about her sensibility as an arranger. When I heard her vocal arrangements, they really informed a lot of my guitar parts. So we would trade back and forth. We would trade back and forth several times.

“I would update guitars. I found we would dance together in these arrangements. I would weave in and out of her vocal lines and she’d do the same. She would add something under a solo, for example. On this new record, she does vocal lines under the solos that I play and it is just a great relationship that we have as guitarist and vocalists.

“Most vocalists, when you are working with them, they will have the main vocal, a double, and then two or three harmony vocals, and so you have five or six tracks of vocals. Maiah has 16 to 20 tracks when she submits her arrangements.”

With so much of the guitars serving as textures, did you have to have a special pedalboard put together for this?

“No, I didn’t. Anything that I had to use pedal-wise, I would pull it out and plug it in. Generally, it was just guitar straight in, and then I am manipulating it through software and some effects. I played some different instruments.

“I got an oud, and I won’t say that I learned to play it but I managed to play it. The 12-string mandola! It’s inspiring to just pull out other instruments and create sounds. And then Alf does a great job with mixing, and he will also massage some of the sounds so that they can be a little different from the norm.”

It sounds like you are having fun with this, dropping little references here and there. Thrill Of The Chase even has this little Daytripper call out. It sounds so freeing.

“Oh yeah, first of all it is a lot of fun, but it’s also challenging to come up with something different. I embrace it. I love the challenge. I love to do that sort of thing. Like on Not Dead Yet, that kind of ’60s funk, Motown-ish funk, is so cool.

“The Story, in the chorus, bringing in the 12-string Rickenbacker is just the perfect sound for what I was going for, that ‘60s kind of vibe. And that pops up here and there. Daytripper, like, stealing a part of that line? That was for my buddy Paul McCartney. [Laughs]”

Sometimes you’ll present something, a lick, or a guitar sound, in a totally different context to what we might expect. Is that a deliberate choice?

“It’s hard to say because it all comes so naturally. It’s not as though we are looking for a direction, or looking to do a specific thing. We work remotely. We’ve been in the studio together a couple of times but generally we work remotely and that started during the pandemic. We had no choice but to work that way, and also distance –Maiah is out in San Francisco and we are all here in the Toronto area.

“We would share files. We would get something and it would spark something, and you would follow that up. A lot of trial and error. There was a lot of stuff that I deleted because it just wasn’t going anywhere. But the things that stuck, that back goes to the next group pass and everybody else hears that and it sparks something else in them that’s a little bit more out of the ordinary.

“So I guess it became a very natural thing for us to look for different influences and flavours. I think there’s great variety on this record; every song is different. And sonically, there are a lot of different characters going on in each of those songs.”

All those different flavours have this effect on the whole, it’s like you are playing around with the pop-cultural timeline, with some ‘60s elements, an ‘80s vibe. Some of your solos have an almost David Gilmour feel.

“I don’t know if I was aware of doing that. I guess it’s a flavour that I like and try to incorporate, like, ‘Maybe a ‘60s thing would be good for that part.’ I’ll try things.

“When I used the Ricky for the chorus in The Story, it wasn’t my first choice. I thought of a guitar, just a melody line in there – and I have another 12-string that I’d much rather play, that’s much easier. That Ricky can be a nightmare to play! But it had the tonality I could hear in my head and it had to be the Ricky.

“Yeah, there’s a little bit in Under The Stars, the solo has definitely more of a Gilmourish bluesy kind of character to it. It just suits the density of that song, the sonic density. I think you derive inspiration from everywhere, especially when you are full of it.”

It still unspools a little like a dream, giving you little clues of what might have inspired you over the years. The End has this sort of folky guitar that’s kind of Hats Off To Roy Harper. I feel like all these details will reveal themselves over time

“I think it will and that’s a good point you bring up. I feel freedom on this record. I feel freedom on this project. Not that I was restricted in any way with Rush. I’m very proud of it and what we did. But this is a whole different kind of experience, a whole different way of writing and recording, and it requires the same kind of intense dedication to follow it through.

“But at the same time it is liberating and fun and easy, even when it’s hard! I’m so fortunate that I went from one career in one band to something that is so different in this little world that I am in now.”

When you are working remotely, how does the production work?

“Well, I sit right here, and I hit play, and I record. [Laughs] And that’s what I do over and over and over again! This is my studio. It’s in my apartment. We’re up on the 24th floor so we have a nice view of the city.

“When we moved in here I built this studio. I was limited with space. so I did what I could with soundproofing. It’s a great room and I get great results – and it’s comfortable. It’s my sanctuary.”

Usually in rock, you find a rhythm guitar tone and you’re off to the races. This album sounds a bit more complicated.

“It has to be in service to the song. That’s the other thing. It’s always about that for me, especially with this particular outfit. Nobody wants to stand out. It is all about presenting the song in the best way possible.

“I am playing way more solos on this record than I did on the first, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do that but in those places I could hear a solo, and the way I approach soloing it’s not just to be a show-off, or to play something super-fast – maybe when I was young!

“It is all about taking the song to another level with this very specific kind of music, this musical arrangement that fits inside but doesn’t take up too much space if that makes sense. I want the solos to be expected, to be part of it, and reflect the melodies and the emotional power of the song. And I think I did that with these solos. They’re sparse. They are not too fancy or anything. But they’re emotive and they fit.”

It sounds like you are using those solos as you might a backing singer…

“Yeah! And then the solo, like that solo in The Story, the most important function in that solo is to set up what follows, which is the whole point of the song... the song lifts after the solo.

“It kind of steps up for the solo, of course, like all solos do, but then it steps up again for that denouement that follows, where Maiah really sings into it and the music becomes driving being really distorted and heavy, just like a clean driving, really digging in.

“You’re playing the previous part one way but you get to this part, the climax, and you start digging in, and that’s how you start investing all that emotion into the part. It’s so important in crafting the song.”

What were the main guitars for the solos?

“It was a little bit of a mix. I used my Lerxst for some stuff. I used my 335, my original 335 – my first great guitar. This is a ’58, the first year they built the 335. I used a Les Paul with the vibrato.”

Did you write them out or were they improvised?

“Typically, I’ll do five tracks, and I find that five tracks is the perfect number for me. I’ll record solos five times and then I’ll listen back.

“That’s the way I have always worked. I do my best work when it’s spontaneous and quick. I can’t get too close to it because then I start repeating something. I lose my natural approach, that very uncontrolled sort of attack.”

Before you go. With your Lerxst amp and signature guitars in the background, we need to know – do you have any more releases planned?

“There is a black one – Free Will I think it’s called. And that will come out months from now as the final of the trio of these guitars.”

Nice. Completing the trilogy. Are there any more pedals?

“Yeah, we are working on a chorus pedal. It’ll be a little more than that. But certainly By-Tor and the Snow Dog have done well.”

• Stygian Waves is available for preorder, is out 28 March via KSCOPE.

Released in February 1981, Moving Pictures was the biggest selling album of Rush’s career, and arguably the best. But it wasn’t an easy album to make - especially when it came to recording what is surely the band’s best known song, Tom Sawyer.

At the end of the ’70s, Rush had arrived at a crossroads. The masters of progressive heavy rock felt trapped in a world of their own making after a series of fantastically overblown albums – culminating with 1978’s Hemispheres, a brilliant record, but one that the band’s bassist and lead vocalist Geddy Lee considered “formulaic”.

In the wake of punk, in an era dominated by new wave, it was time for Rush to move on. For a new decade, they developed a new sound.

The reinvention of Rush began with the 1980 album Permanent Waves and its hit single The Spirit Of Radio, in which rock power and intricate musicianship was allied to a zinging pop sensibility.

In an intervene with Classic Rock, guitarist Alex Lifeson said of Permanent Waves: “We were going in a different direction, writing in shorter, more concise forms. And that’s something that connected with people on a larger scale.”

That transition was completed with Moving Pictures.

Tom Sawyer, the opening track on Moving Pictures, is to this album what The Spirit Of Radio is to Permanent Waves – an anthem that defined the modernist Rush of the early ’80s, and endures, decades on, as a rock classic.

Equally, there is in Tom Sawyer, as in The Spirit Of Radio, a perfect synthesis of the old and the new: the clean lines of a slick, contemporary sound, but also the kind of bravura that dazzled on past epics, with Lifeson delivering a mind-bending solo, Geddy Lee free-styling on bass, and Neil Peart’s thunderous fills proving why many rated him as the best rock drummer since Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham.

But as Lifeson said of Tom Sawyer. “That was such a hard song to get right. I remember spending a lot of time on that song. A lot of time…”

Some of that time was spent, as Geddy Lee recalled, “experimenting to get the right sounds” – first, for the bass pedal synthesizer in the intro, with what he called “that big, growling low-end”.

But as Lee said: “The hardest thing of all was getting the right guitar sound in the solo section.

“We wanted that section to be played pretty much as a three-piece, not a whole lot of overdubs, but with a sound that filled up the stereo spectrum and didn’t sound empty. So the guitar sound for Alex’s solo was really critical. It wasn’t drowning in echo. That was the old trick we used in the past. If you want to fill the space, put an Echoplex on Alex and the repeats will fill up the space.

“But we didn’t want to do that. We were going for this dry sound with that unique tone, and for it not to feel empty, that was kind of hard. And even mixing that song was difficult.”

At one point, they almost gave up on the song.

“We always have one song, on every album, that doesn’t quite click,” Lee said. “And we thought that Tom Sawyer was going to be the one. Which just goes to show you we don’t know what we’re talking about!”

In the end, what Rush delivered in Tom Sawyer was a brilliant ensemble performance: the tension in Peart’s taut beats and explosive fills, the expressiveness in Lifeson’s solos, the heavy propulsion in Lee’s bass, and the nuances in his voice, singing high and low to dramatic effect.

As Lee said: “After a lot of struggling, we nailed it, and it was so powerful. We were going, ‘Shit, where did that come from?’ That song was a late bloomer, but when we finally nailed it, we were so happy.”

When the son of Yugoslav immigrants, Alex Lifeson née Živojinović, and a local lad from a close-knit Jewish family, Gary ‘Geddy’ Lee Weinrib, met at Fisherville High School on the outskirts of Toronto in the late sixties, little did they know that the Zeppelin-lite combo they would ultimately form would go on to be one of rock’s most revered.

Rush’s first gig was in the basement of a church in 1968 and, right up to what would be their final outing, at LA’s Inglewood Forum on 1st August 2015, they enjoyed a career that produced some of rock’s most stylistically diverse and enchanting music.

The tragic and devastating death of drummer Neil Peart in early 2020 put an end to such treasures, but if you’re a guitarist who’s struggling to find a way into the band’s exhaustive back-catalogue, we invite you to give these suggestions a try.

1. Fly By Night (Fly By Night, 1975)

By the time Rush convened for their second album they had many months of touring under their belts, playing with the likes of Kiss, Rory Gallagher and Blue Öyster Cult, amongst many others.

Of far more significance was that the original drummer, the late John Rutsey, had made way for the son of a farm equipment salesman from rural Ontario, one Neil Ellwood Peart, and history beckoned.

As an album, Fly By Night has glimpses of the melodies and song structures that were to become the band’s trademark throughout the seventies and beyond, and the song itself was the catchiest Rush had come up with to date.

Introduced by the lovely open chime of Lifeson’s trusty Gibson ES-335 and egged along by Peart’s hi-hat, this is the ideal example of where the band was at the time and even Lee’s uniquely shrill vocals, described by one rather cruel journalist as sounding akin to "a rat caught in a wringer", fit perfectly. The band was finally on the up.

2. A Passage To Bangkok (2112, 1976)

By early 1976 the band’s popularity was already beginning to wane, with diminishing sales of both albums and concert tickets making for a tense time. The band’s third record Caress of Steel, also released in 1975, had bombed and so, with the record company loudly demanding more singles from their next opus, they decided they may as well go out with a bang. Rush strode into Toronto Sound Studios with producer Terry Brown and the result was the million-selling, genre-defining 2112.

There’s more to the album than the lengthy seven-part title track that comprised side one, the story of the oppression of music by the dystopian Solar Federation and its eventual comeuppance, as A Passage To Bangkok demonstrates.

Eschewing such high ground in favour of a tale concerning, quite simply, the consumption of Marley grass, the suitably woozy intro riff leads to a chopsticks-style guitar lick that leaves the listener in no doubt as to the song’s destination.

The tongue-in-cheek lyrics follow the Thailand Express on its circuitous route through Columbia, Morocco, Afghanistan and Kathmandu in search of yet another ounce and the song is, if you’ll excuse the pun, a blast.

“It was kind of a relief from the 20 minutes of intensity.” Lee commented, and he’s right.

3. La Villa Strangiato (Hemispheres, 1978)

Inspired by a series of nightmares Lifeson had been experiencing, this dense piece of instrumental prog brilliance closes the opulent Hemispheres album and thus represents the close of the band’s lauded ‘swords and sorcery’ period.

Incredibly the base track; all dynamics, contrasting moods and intertwining time signatures, was laid down in one complete take after an entire week of focused rehearsals during which the band almost gave up hope of achieving the immediacy they were after.

However this dedication was certainly rewarded and the mesmerising guitar solo section, which sees Lifeson float some gorgeous volume swells into the ether before fully indulging his Jimmy Page fantasies just once more, is arguably his best effort of the time and is mentioned as an influence by players as diverse as Kirk Hammett and Billy Corgan.

Lifeson told MusicRadar.com in 2010 that the solo has risen up in his own rankings too: "I'd have to say that the solo in La Villa Strangiato is starting to catch up to Limelight as my favorite to play live, and for the same reasons: It's quite emotive, and it's got a very bluesy, almost minor-ish feel to it.

"Also, the music that surrounds the solo - everything Geddy and Neil are doing - is incredible. It feels great to play it on my 355, which is the guitar I recorded it with. All in all, it's a wonderful moment."

Rush would never be as over-the-top again and the ensuing change of direction apparent on the next album, 1980’s Permanent Waves, led to true global fame.

4. Limelight (Moving Pictures, 1981)

Following the huge success of Permanent Waves’ lead track The Spirit Of Radio the band now found themselves in the unwelcome glare of celebrity, something that Peart in particular was never comfortable dealing with.

The heartfelt confession of the lyrics deals with this head-on ("I can't pretend a stranger is a long awaited friend") and are in contrast to the bulk of the music, which is bouncy, upbeat and full of tricky riffs, arpeggiated chords and imaginative licks.

The composition is mostly set in mixed time signatures and sliding meters that flirt with straight-ahead 7/4 and although highly complex the music remains exceedingly catchy. If you fancy playing along to something that properly tests your dexterity, phrasing and time-keeping, grab a chorus pedal and give this a shot.

"I love the elasticity of the solo," Lifeson told MusicRadar in 2009. It's a very emotional piece of music for me to play. The song is about loneliness and isolation, and I think the solo reflects that. There's a lot of heart in it. It's a feel thing: you have to feel a solo as you play it, otherwise it's going to sound stiff.

"I never had that problem with Limelight. The first time I laid it down in the studio, I feel a real attachment to it and I could tell it was special. Even now, it's my favorite solo to perform live. I never get tired of it. Each time I'm about to play it, I take a deep breath and I exhale on that first note. I guess that sounds corny, but for me, it releases something."

Though Lifeson used his white Gibson ES-355 for most of the album’s tracking, that wonderful mournful solo makes use of a proper whammy-equipped guitar (reportedly a modded Bill Lawrence humbucker-loaded S-type you can see in the song's video above) rather than the latter’s rather limited Maestro vibrola system, and notes and harmonics slide into each other with masterful skill.

“Normally, live I have a few delays set up,” Lifeson told Songmaster.com of his delay approach on the solo, “one that is a fairly medium length delay of around 480ms and then I have a second delay that’s set up for 680ms with more repeats so that you can get all these cascading notes tripping over each other over the main part of what the solo is."

Most rock fans should be aware of Moving Pictures by now and not only is it Rush’s best album, it’s also one rock’s finest; a true cornucopia of riches.

5. The Anarchist (Clockwork Angels, 2012)

What would turn out to be the band’s final album saw them return to their conceptual roots with a brace of songs that served a central story set in a dystopian steampunk world. The full tale is available in a book penned by Peart and noted sci-fi author Kevin J. Anderson.

Lee’s bass shamelessly takes centre stage and drives the melody with gusto, backed up by some virulent guitar rhythm work that harks back to the band’s earliest days. Lifeson went on record saying he held himself back from overlayering guitars, even at the demo stage, as he wanted to retain a live dynamic to his parts.

"It’s an in-your-face song," Lifeson told MusicRadar in 2012, "and it’s a powerful part of the whole suite.

“If you listen to the demo and the final version, they’re pretty close, although a couple of things are different. There’s an instrumental melody line that Nick got us to think about that really gives the song its signature. The rest of it is pretty much the same as it was on the demo. It has an Eastern influence, which is somewhere we’ve gone before; it’s something we all feel and like a lot."

A string section adds lushness before a solo peppered with precise whammy dips and dives cap things off, and their studio swansong provided a fascinating conclusion to see how far the trio went in the best part of half a century.

Rest in peace, Neil.

As Rush’s R40 tour careered towards its, and the group’s, final date in 2015, the band knew their time in the live arena was nearly up. The R40 tour name referred to drummer and chief lyricist Neil Peart’s four decades in the band, and he was the man calling time, at least on touring.

Now, in an in-depth retrospective interview with Classic Rock, the surviving members of the prog power trio - Peart passed away in 2020 - discuss, amongst many other things including early days and future plans, that final live outing.

There was certainly some controlled but understandable tension between the band members at this stage, as two of the three were still enjoying their live work. Says guitarist Alex Lifeson, “We were playing well, the show was so much fun for us and our audience, and we had good energy despite playing three-hour shows in our sixties.”

“Ged and I were disappointed that Neil demanded playing only a limited number of dates… I think a dozen or so more dates would have made us a bit more accepting.

And it seems that at one point, with shows going well, Peart may even have considered extending the run, but, reveals Lifeson, “then he got this painful infection in one of his feet. I mean, he could barely walk to the stage at one point. They got him a golf cart to drive him to the stage.

"And he played a three-hour show, at the intensity he played every single show.

"That was amazing, but I think that was the point where he decided that the tour was only going to go on until that final show in LA.”

At that final outing, hosted by the forum, a venue the band were familiar with and fond of, Geddy Lee recalls the moment, captured by a fan in the video below, when Peart embraced his bandmates at the show’s finale: “The first time in forty years he’d done that, it was a beautiful moment.”

Lifeson also recalls his own emotions as a multi-decade jaunt around the world’s stages ground to a halt: “It was a weird feeling knowing that was likely the last time we’d play any of those songs together.

"I tried to soak in every moment and object at that last gig. I counted down the minutes on the giant clock they have there, you can see it from the stage.

“And I stared at all these faces, people that I didn’t know personally, yet happily greeted when I saw them return to so many of our shows over so many years.

"I looked at my bandmates and missed them already and I felt sad to see such joy in Neil’s face when we were down to the last few bars of our last song played together, as we finally finished our set.”

In December of that year, 2015, Peart told Drumhead magazine “Lately Olivia has been introducing me to new friends at school as ‘My dad — He’s a retired drummer.’ And it does not pain me to realize that, like all athletes, there comes a time to… take yourself out of the game.”

But it wasn’t until 2018 that Rush officially disbanded. Now, Lifeson and Geddy are in introspective, and retrospective mode, and were talking around and ahead of the release of R50, a suitably lavish boxset which collates material from their entire 50 year career.

For much more detail on R50 and the band’s entire career, see the full interview in Classic Rock, and stay tuned to Rush.com for further announcements.

IK Multimedia has teamed up with Alex Lifeson to help you nail the Rush icon’s electric guitar tones with a TONEX signature collection that collects four digital models of his most-loved tube amps.

If the machine learning TONEX tech behind this guitar plugin suite is complex, the idea behind it is simple; Lifeson picked four favourites from his guitar amp collection and IK Multimedia deployed its proprietary AI machine learning to engineer 25 tone models that give you tones from all stages of his career.

Been searching for that Moving Pictures “clean-yet-dirty” tone? You will find it here with a digital reproduction of Lifeson’s open-backed Marshall 4140 Club and Country 2x12 combo.

As IK Multimedia notes, Lifeson made full use of this lesser-spotted Marshall amp’s capacity for pedalboard accommodation. Pair this with a Boss CE-1 Chorus Ensemble or an EHX Electric Mistress, add a delay pedal of your choice and you’ll be on the guest list for Xanadu.

Next up is another Marshall and a cornerstone of his tone. Lifeson calls this one “Curly”, and it’s a Marshall 6100 30th Anniversary head that’s paired with a 1960BV straight 4x12 speaker cabinet.

“One of the most versatile amp designs yet produced, ‘Curly’ played an essential role in providing Alex with every era of ‘British’ guitar tone on stage and in the studio,” says IK Multimedia, and no one here is going to argue with that.

These three-channel 100-watters were launched at Winter NAMM 1992. If you attended one of the guitar expos of that year you too might still be lucky enough to still have your 30th Anniversary poster signed by Jim Marshall. Ours is sadly long missing in action. IK Multimedia presents 10 amp and cab tone models from this special edition tube head and cab.

This collection would not be complete with a Lifeson signature amp, and we’ve got two. His first, the all singing, all dancing Hughes & Kettner TriAmp, which IK Multimedia describes as “the backbone of Rush guitar tones from the late 1990s through the early 2000s” is replicated with five amp and cab tone models, and a super-wide range of tones, from gin-clear cleans to super-saturated lead tones.

The second signature amp brings us right up to the present day, and Lifeson’s signature Lerxst amp brand, with the Omega and its matching 4x12 offering you all the tone and feel of the amps he used on Clockwork Angels.

Again, versatility is the watchword. This is a two-channel amp with switchable clipping, a greatest hits of all his previous amps in one, and in Lifeson’s words, “These plug-ins sound just like the amps or better!”

They are also designed to as a standalone plugin in your DAW or anywhere within the TONEX eco-system, meaning you can access Lifeson’s signature Rush tones via your TONEX pedal.

The TONEX Alex Lifeson Legacy Signature Collection is available now, priced €99.99. See IK Multimedia for more details.

On this day (29 October) in 1978, the sixth studio album by Rush was released. Its title was Hemispheres, and as the band’s bassist, vocalist and keyboard player Geddy Lee admitted: “That record really took a chunk out of us.”

Hemispheres was a typically grand statement from the band that Metallica’s Kirk Hammett once descried as “the high priests of conceptual rock”.

The album’s title track - Cygnus X-1 Book II: Hemispheres, to give it its full name - is an 18-minute epic swallowing up a whole side of vinyl. And on side two, the dazzling, 12-part instrumental La Villa Strangiato stands as the band’s greatest ensemble performance.

But the last Rush album of the ’70s was also the last of its kind. After Hemispheres, the Canadian trio - Geddy, guitarist Alex Lifeson and drummer Neil Peart - took a radical new direction.

With the follow-up, 1980’s Permanent Waves, they streamlined their sound for a new decade - as illustrated by the zinging hit single The Spirit Of Radio.

And no wonder they changed direction. As Alex Lifeson said: “With Hemispheres, everything was a struggle.”

Here, in Alex and Geddy’s own words, is the story of that struggle…

Alex Lifeson: We started working on the songs in Toronto at a rehearsal space, and then we continued at a farmhouse just down the road from Rockfield [recording studio in Wales]. The place had a large living room, and we set up in there. The idea was that we would continue writing and we’d tighten up all the arrangements.

Geddy Lee: When we arrived in Wales we had very little written. We just had some desires. It’s kind of the way we always start: everybody has their own ideas of something they want to work on, the next project. Then when we sit down together it usually goes in a completely different direction, but at least we have a starting point.

Alex Lifeson: The problem with Hemispheres was that we were really lost in direction sometimes. It was all so difficult – even the keys we were playing in.

Geddy Lee: We wrote everything at the farmhouse and went straight into Rockfield to start recording it. So we never got a chance to kind of play it out and rehearse it, and for me to see where the range was. It’s one thing to sit down with a guitar, thinking, ‘OK, that’s going to work like that.’ But once you finish it and sing it out, you go, ‘F*ck, this is high!’ This whole record really pushed me into the upper register.

Alex Lifeson: We ended up spending a lot longer recording it than we’d planned. That’s what made it so hard.

Geddy Lee: The whole thing took months, and it was tough. There were a lot of songs that were a lot more difficult to sing than I imagined. I couldn’t hit a lot of notes. Everything we did was like pulling teeth.

Alex Lifeson: In the end we went to another studio in London – Advision. It was where we’d mixed [1977 album] A Farewell To Kings and we’d been very happy with how that came out. But with Hemispheres, nothing ever sounded good there.

Geddy Lee: Vocals had to be redone, so every day at Advision I would go into a little vocal room and sing. Some days it would be okay. Other days my voice would be shot, and I’d just have to push through it. It was very frustrating.

Alex Lifeson: We actually went home for a week, and then came back to London to mix the album at Trident studios. By that point, finally, we were a lot more settled about where we were going with the record.

Geddy Lee: We spent a lot of time deep in that Hemispheres record. It was very ambitious, hard to record, hard for me to sing. It was even hard to mix. It really took a chunk out of us.

Alex Lifeson: There were some great songs on Hemispheres. I still think that La Villa Strangiato is one of the best things we’ve ever done. But we came out of that record feeling that we were becoming a bit formulaic.

Geddy Lee: The title track [Cygnus X-1 Book II: Hemispheres] was another side-long piece. It was in a sense a different version of [1976 track] 2112. The notes were different, the story was different, but structurally we started feeling that we were repeating ourselves. So we thought, this isn’t healthy for us. We’ve got to break out of that. We needed a new direction, and we found it with Permanent Waves…”

Sweetwater is getting ahead of the Black Friday action by dishing out some seriously tempting music-making deals. The Black Friday guitar deals may not officially kick off for another month or so, but that hasn't stopped the American music retail giant from slashing the prices in their Beat The Holiday Rush Sale. From now until October 31st, you can score up to 50% off big-name brands such as Fender, Guild, Ibanez, B.C. Rich and more. 

We know better than most just how stressful it is to make a gear purchase on Black Friday - we've been covering the sales event for a number of years. This epic sale from Sweetwater allows you to take your time. Really think about your purchase, and it will, hopefully, lead to a much less stressful transaction. 

This sale is enormous, so to make it easier to navigate, we’ve gone through and hand-selected a few of our favourites.

First up is the ideal stocking filler – the D'Addario NS Artist Capo. With two variations available, DADGAD Tuning and Drop-Tuning, this highly reliable capo is very well-made, accurate and with $13.19 knocked off the price, it is now incredibly cheap. Bag yours for only $8.80! 

What about guitars? Well, you're in luck, as there are many models on offer. Here at MusicRadar, we love the stunningly versatile Sterling By Music Man Cutlass CT30HSS - and we love it even more with $150 slashed off the price. Sticking with Music Man, there’s also up to $800 off a range of Sweetwater exclusives, including the John Petrucci signature model! 

Elsewhere on the site, you’ll find up to $500 off a variety of D’Angelico models, up to $1,700 off a range of USA-made B.C. Rich guitars and up to $1,200 off Guild acoustic guitars. So, we implore you to take the time to browse the sale for yourself. 

Not in a position to buy right now? Well, you may want to bookmark our Black Friday music deals hub page. From now until the end of Cyber Weekend, we’ll be updating the page with the very best Black Friday offers we find from across the internet. 

Alex Lifeson’s Lerxt Amps brand has expanded its range of guitar effects pedals with the launch of the Blah Blah wah pedal. Developed in partnership with Morley, this optical wah features a pair of footswitchable circuits to give you something classic, and something a little more adventurous.

Lerxst say the adventurous players in particular will get a kick out of the Blah circuit, which applies a secret blend of filters to your electric guitar signals for the ‘Blah talkie’ effect. There’s a pitch knob to adjust just how weird and psychedelic this might get. 

While the classic wah is just that, offering up the sort of filter-sweep vocalisation that has made the wah a pedalboard essential since the very beginning of the stompbox revolution, when Jimi Hendrix et al first stepped on them. And, set just right, maybe with a little fuzz pedal in the mix, you can tease some quasi-synth sounds out of this as well.

The idea is to experiment, which is exactly what the R&D team at Morley did when putting the Blah Blah circuit together.

“Alex wanted us to create something unique and inspiring,” says Scott Fietsam, Morley’s owner. “We certainly achieved the ‘Blah-talkie’ sound, but what surprised us was how versatile this pedal turned out to be. It opened up numerous sonic possibilities in both clean and distorted modes, making it enjoyable for a wide range of players.”

This being Morley, the Blah Blah wah is designed a little differently. It is engaged via an optical circuit. There is no mechanical potentiometer to wear out after years of use. A spring-loaded treadle returns the effect the bypass position when you are not using it.

Step on it and it engages the wah, the LED comes on, and you are off to the races. You can toggle the Blah circuit on and off with the silent footswitch. And there is a buffer to protect against tone suck.

Lifeson named this pedal back in 2013. Well, at least that’s where the inspiration for the its name came from, with his famous ‘Blah, blah, blah…’ acceptance speech at the Rock And Rock Hall Of Fame induction ceremony.

Lifeson’s Lerxt Amps brand – a collaboration with Mojotone – is filling out its stompbox lineup nicely, with the Blah Blah joining the By-Tor amp-in-a-box overdrive pedal and The Snow Dog octave-fuzz. Everything you need for those Fly By Night jam sessions, which is when the wah became a regular part of Lifeson’s tone.

“Wah pedals have been an essential tool of sonic expression for me since the Fly By Night album,” says Lifeson. “With the ‘wah’ side of the Blah Blah, we really wanted to capture that classic sound while also giving it a wide enough frequency response to suit modern players.”

Judging by the demo video, with Andy Martin of Reverb’s Tone Report at the wheel, it certainly has all the core wah sounds you would need, and a bit more. 

“The guys at Morley have designed some of the greatest wah pedals ever, so it was a natural collaboration to work on this project with them, and also see where we could take it next,”says Lifeson.

The Blah Blah pedal has a road-worthy steel enclosure, takes 9V DC from a pedalboard power supply, and draws 300mA. It is available now, limited to 500 units, exclusively via Reverb.

With less than a week to go until the Prime Day music deals land, we've seen many music retailers launch their own sales - reminding us that the best offers for musicians are typically not found on Amazon. Case in point: Guitar Center has just slashed up to $300 off a slew of Roland drum sets and pianos. But remember, these deals are only available for a limited time, so hurry! 

This epic sale features a wide range of products, from top-of-the-line electronic drum kits to stage-ready digital pianos and beloved synths. Below are a few of our hand-selected favourites. 

Songwriting inspiration can come from anywhere – but the realms of sleep are perhaps the most mysterious. It it the subconscious or something more? The not knowing is part of the magic, and dream-inspired songwriting has given birth to some absolute classics. 

Whether it's a line, hook, riff or a whole song the writer wakes up to capture before it slips away again, we're here to look at the top 40 songs that owe their existence to 40 winks. 

1. Drops Of Jupiter (Tell Me) – Train (Pat Monahan)

The US band's 2001 hit and Grammy-winner Drops Of Jupiter took a deeper dimension for listeners when its genesis was revealed by vocalist Pat Monahan. It was the band's breakthrough hit, but its inspiration came at a bittersweet price. 

"I would give it back," Pat Monahan candidly told the Daily Blast in 2022. "I lost my mother that year so that's why the song was written. So I'd give the song back if I could still call my mom but it was a great gift that she gave me."

A gift because Monahan felt that his late mum Patricia was reaching out to him one night. "She came to me in a dream and she said she can do all these things now, including swimming through the planets and coming back with drops of Jupiter in my hair. But I'd rather be there with you – heaven is overrated and you should really pay attention to your life, because this is important."

It wasn't just inspiration for a great song then, it was life advice for Monahan to carry forward with the band. But there was one thing the singer wanted to set straight with any guitarists coming after him after mishearing the 'Man heaven is overrated' line in the chorus.

"When the song came out people thought I was singing 'Van Halen is overrated' so I was getting hate mail like crazy," he told the Daily Blast. 

2. Yesterday – The Beatles (Paul McCartney)

The ultimate dream song? It's certainly the most covered one. Paul McCartney stayed with former flame Jane Asher's family in London for three years in the mid-'60s. They allowed him to stay in the upstairs attic room. "Perfect for an artist," the Beatle recalled to Paul Muldoon in the excellent podcast series McCartney: A Life In Lyrics. "And I managed to get a piano in there – a small swan-off piano. I went to sleep one night and dreamed this tune.

"Somewhere in this dream I heard this tune, and when I woke up I thought, 'It's great – I love that tune'. It was so vivid that the songwriter couldn't pinpoint whether it was an existing song he was recalling from childhood. 

"Is it a Fred Astaire – Cole Porter thing? What is it?" he wondered. "So I fell out of bed and the piano was right there to the left of my bed. So I just thought, well I'll try and work out how this song goes. I wonder what it is? It's got to be some old standard that I've just heard years ago and forgotten it.

"So I worked out chords, and the two opening chords are kind of nice," continued McCartney. "I got pretty lucky there because I didn't have to go to those chords."

Luck? This is Paul McCartney talking. "It was very clear," he says, humming the melody that starts the song. But with no portable recording device invented / at hand, what if he forgot it?

"In order to solidify it in my memory, I just blocked it out with some words which were 'Scrambled egg / oh my baby how I love your legs…'  It turns out these kinds of placeholder lyics were not common for McCartney in the Beatles. "We did that sometimes but not often," he explained. "Mainly we would sit there writing it so you'd get your only lyrics. We never really revised our stuff". But McCartney was still convinced the melody he had came from someone else's song. 

"So I had this tune, and I think the first person I saw was John. I said, 'What's this that's been bugging me – what's this song?' I was thinking he'd know it." He'd never heard it before. Then McCartney tried George Martin's encyclopedic musical mind. 

"After a couple of weeks of this it became clear no one knew it and it didn't exist, except in my heard," added McCartney. "And so I claimed it. It was like finding it on the street."

3. La Villa Strangiato – Rush (Alex Lifeson) 

Who dreams up a nine-and-a-half-minute instrumental? Alex Lifeson of course! In truth, rather than a specific melody or lyrics surfacing from a recurring nightmare the guitarist would have, it's more an attempt to recreate his experience of it musically with Geddy Lee and Neil Peart on the trio's 1978 opus Hemispheres.

"Alex has some of the most bizarre bad dreams, especially when we're away touring on the road," Peart explained to Geoff Barton for Sounds magazine in 1978. "Sometimes, when we're all supposed to be fast asleep in our hotel rooms, he'll wake up either Geddy (Lee, the band's vocalist and bass player) or me with a phone call in the middle of the night and start telling us all about these terrible dreams he's been having. When you're barely conscious, some of the stories he comes up with can be quite mind-blowing."

So too was the way Rush recorded it. "That was all recorded in one take," Lifeson told Guitar World in 1996. "Because we were writing on the road, we used our soundchecks to run through songs that we were going to record. We would come off the road, have a few days off and start recording. It was all recorded at the same time with all of us in the same room. 

"We had baffles up around the guitar, bass and drums and we would look at each other for the cues," the guitarist remembered. "My solo in the middle section was overdubbed after we recorded the basic tracks. I played a solo while we did the first take and re-recorded it later. If you listen very carefully, you can hear the other solo ghosted in the background."

4. (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction – The Rolling Stones (Keith Richards)

Who really knows the mysteries that have been swirling in the subconscious of Keef for decades. They did the Rolling Stones legend proud here though; presenting him with one of the most famous guitar riffs of all time in his sleep, which was put to use within a month to not only be recorded, but make the then three-year-old innovation of the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone pedal famous.  The only initial stumbling was, Richards had forgotten he'd written it. Luckily he'd put it on tape. 

"I wish all the songs could come this way, you know, where you just dream them, and then the next morning, there they are, presented to you," Richards told Fresh Air in 2010. "But Satisfaction was that sort of miracle that took place. I had one of the first little cassette players, you know, Norelco, Philips, same thing, really. But it was a fascinating little machine to me, a cassette player that you could actually just lay ideas down and, you know, wherever you were.

"I set the machine up, and I put in a fresh tape," he continued. "I go to bed as usual with my guitar, and I wake up the next morning, I see that the tape is run to the very end. And I think, well, I didn't do anything, you know? I said, maybe I hit a button while I was asleep, you know? So I put it back to the beginning and pushed play and there, in some sort of ghostly version, is [singing] da, da, da, da, da – I can't get no satisfaction.

"And so there was a whole verse of it. I won't bore you with it all. But – and after that, there's, you know, 40 minutes of me snoring."

5. All You Had To Do Was Stay – Taylor Swift 

This cut from Taylor Swift's 1989 album has a chorus hook directly lifted from a vivid dream Swift had about an ex – an unnamed individual that's mooted to be Harry Styles. 

"There's this really high-pitched 'stay!' and I had a dream that my ex showed up at my door, knocked on my door, I opened it up and was just about ready to launch into the perfect thing to say," she revealed to Ryan Adams – who would also cover the song, and indeed the whole 1989 album in 2015. "Instead all that would come out of my mouth was that high-pitched chorus of people singing 'stay!'. 

6. River Of Dreams – Billy Joel

"I had this idea for a song, I woke up one day [sings], 'In the middle of the night / I go walking in my sleep'", Billy Joel recalls in the video below about a song he wrote, almost against his will. "It was kind of like a gospel song, [I thought] I can't write this. I'm not a gospel artist. I tried to shake it off, then I got in the shower that morning [carries of singing the song] and it would not go away.

"That's it – if you go in the shower and it becomes an earworm, forget it – you're not gonna shake it off," he adds. "It's not gonna go away. It's got all these biblical references – I still don't know what it means. But it was very strong visual images; 'Through the valley of fear', 'The desert of truth'… baptised by whoever it was. I'm not a biblical person, I'm not a religious guy but these images were very strong and the reason I wrote it, I haven't figured it out but it became a hit record."

Rush gave us a lot – 47 years of songs and shows, but the idea Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson would just stop that part of their lives in 2015 has often had fans wondering. But Lifeson already confirmed the two still play together, and now he's revealed some more about that – including the fact they are playing Rush songs together again.

"Ged and I are hanging out a lot — and we always do — but now we’re hanging out at his place and we’re playing," the guitarist tells Rolling Stone in a new interview. "And we’re actually playing a lot of Rush songs."

Cue clamour of excitement from fans, and some self-effacing honesty from Lifeson…

"It’s funny because we sound like a really bad tribute band for the first three or four run-throughs on these things," he admits. It’s, 'Oh, my God, what did I play there? Why did I play that so hard?' And then muscle memory kicks in, and we’re having a ball doing it. It’s good for the fingers."

But don't get carried away – it looks like this is as far as it's going to go.  

"We’re together in a room like we’ve always been. That’s been really good, but there’s no chance that we’re going to get a drummer and go back on the road as the rebirth of Rush or something like that. And if we wanted to write new material, nobody cares about new material anymore. They just want to hear the old stuff from guys like us."

We're not convinced of that – Rush never phoned it in with their material, and their fans loved them for it. But after losing Neil Peart, can anyone really blame the 70-year-old Lifeson for just wanting to play music with his best buddy and leaving any expectations at the door? 

"Yeah, they are special," Lifeson agrees with Rolling Stone on Rush fans being a dedicated bunch. "But maybe the feeling is that it’s just really about taking people back to an earlier time in their lives that they have very fond and vivid memories of, and I get it and that’s great. And then you do it for the money. And that’s not what we were ever about or what we would want to do. Offers come in all the time, but I don’t know. I don’t think that’s something that we’re really interested in."

Geddy Lee seems to have been far more open to a Rush return of sorts, and Lifeson is well aware of this. But it's not that simple now. The guitarist has dealt with stomach issues resulting from a failed hiatal hernia that will mean permanent changes to his lifestyle. And that inevitably includes touring. But even the guitarist was swaying between yes and no at one point when Lee brought the subject of Rush up.

"No, we’ve talked about it in depth, and I was waffling between maybe considering it and not," Lifeson confirms. "And then my health issues came up. I know if we went on the road, it couldn’t be like we used to do it. You need to go out for five or six months. You can’t just go out and play on the weekends. It just doesn’t work that way, especially if it’s going to be a big production. 

"I don’t know. We talk a lot about it. We’re in different worlds. I’ve been working on this Envy Of None stuff for four or five years now [Lifeson's studio project with musicians including Andy Curran and Maiah Wynne who are currently working on a second album). He’s been busy writing his books and he travels a lot and he does all those things that are important to him.

"He hasn’t been playing on a regular basis, and that’s why he really loves it when we’re together like this," Lifeson points out. "And this is where we came from when we were kids. This is not about putting something together for a possible tour or a record or something. This is the joy of those two teenagers sitting in a room looking at each other and trying to learn how to play an instrument better."

Who can possibly begrudge that? Despite dealing with health issues that have also included arthritis, Lifeson is still spending at least an hour every day focussed on his guitar playing – and has been very active on the signature gear side too.  Ultimately, he doesn't want to compromise a band that never, ever compromised and will always be admired for that.

"I’d rather have that and the sadness of not doing it again, than doing it again and sitting on a chair on stage because I can’t stand [laughs]," he tells Rolling Stone. I’d rather be remembered for that than something that’s more current.

"We talk about it," he says of Lee, "but at the same time, he’s my best friend and he loves me and he cares for me. He knows that I do have issues both physical and emotional with this whole idea. And he respects that we have so much respect and love for each other. I would do something like that, that he wanted to do, because I love him and I want to make him happy. But he knows that I wouldn’t be happy. It’s the bond that we have."

Read the full interview at Rolling Stone. 

• Rush's Geddy Lee: 10 bassists who blew my mind

Alex Lifeson and Lerxst have just released the ultimate aftermarket accessory for Rush fans who own an S-style electric guitar with an HSS configuration. It is the Limelight Pre-Wired Pickguard, it’s got a blade-style humbucker at the bridge position, two high-output single-coils, and it is modelled on the same electric guitar pickup configuration as Lifeson’s iconic Hentor Sportscaster.

Now you might be thinking, Rush fans with an HSS Strat. That’s a heckuva niche demographic? Perhaps. But then again maybe not. After all, what is more versatile than an HSS Strat? And what field of musical expertise requires more versatility than prog rock? It’s a match made in heaven.

Best of all, and the “pre-wired” bit is a clue, you won’t need to touch the soldering iron to fit this mod. Everything is done for you. The Limelight pickguard will fit pretty much any Stratocaster or Strat-style electric that has been routed for a humbucker at the bridge and has a standard vibrato. The pickguard is Sportscaster-inspired, so we’re talking satin black, single-ply, but it joins the body like any other ‘guard, with holes for 11 screws.

The bridge pickup has an Alnico V magnet, and is designed for high-gain scenarios, rock, metal, distortion, but the single-coils will give you the clarity and chime you’d want from an S-style. Lifeson says it was the range of tones and ride of the original Sportscaster that give him room to try new things.

“The original Hentor brought together a mix of tone and playability that empowered me to explore sounds and styles of playing that I had never attempted before,” he says. “Ultimately these things became signature parts of my style.”

The blade-style humbucker is a replica of Lifeson’s original. It might be punchy and hot but so too are the single-coils, which have been wound to be balanced with the bridge humbucker. 

The pickguard has a three-way pickup selector, allowing you to select the bridge ‘bucker alone, middle and neck positions, and the neck single coil. Lerxst, which is a partnership between Lifeson and Mojotone, has wired this up to vintage taper 500k CTS pots, a Mojotone Dijon .022uf tone cap, and the 1/4” output jack comes courtesy of Switchcraft. All top-quality components. 

The Lerxst Limelight Pre-Wired Pickguard is available now, priced $489.Of course there is an alternative. Maybe you don’t want to augment your existing HSS Strat. Maybe you like it just fine as it is. 

Well, in that case you have another option. You could grab a replica of Lifeson’s Hentor Sportscaster, which was announced during the fever of NAMM2024. Designed by Lerxst working in partnership with Godin the Lerxst Limelight is a high-end electric, yours for $3,999. Not cheap but it is a dream instrument for Rush fans – and you have the choice of a Vega trem or a Floyd Rose.

For more details on the Lerxt Limelight guitar, head to Godin. To give your HSS S-style a new lease of Lifeson, head on over to Lersxt.

Lerxst has launched a new signature fuzz pedal for Alex Lifeson. The Snow Dog is a limited edition octave fuzz that the Rush guitarist describes as being capable of generating “the most horrific fuzz in the Universe!”

Only 500 units of The Snow Dog have been made, and they are available exclusively via Reverb. The all-analogue design is the latest guitar effects pedal to come from Lerxst, and is a Fly By Night themed sibling to the By-Tor boost/drive pedal that is designed for vintage and modern fuzz tones.

Well, we are calling The Snow Dog a signature fuzz but can it be a signature fuzz when the brand, Lerxst, is a collaborative endeavour between Lifeson and Mojotone? Either way, it’s going to put a lot of Lifeson’s electric guitar tones on your pedalboard, and a lot more besides. This thing is eminently tweakable.

Sharing the twofer configuration of the By-Tor, with footswitches for the octave and the fuzz side of the pedal, this is a pedal inspired by the young Lifeson’s search for tones in the style of Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix and Erik Brann.

“My introduction to fuzz was before I had any on my face,” says Lifeson. “My first pedal was the glorious Fuzz Face and In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida never sounded better!” 

The fuzz side of the pedal is a three-dial affair. Sustain, Volume and Tone. The Snow Dog circuit is based upon a 1970s-style silicon fuzz with a wide sweep of gain that can take your tone from seminal vintage fuzz to thick and saturated super-sustaining sounds, with the fuzz’s character shaped by the Tone dial. You can have it up-front and screaming or dial back the high-end for a more tucked in sound. 

On the octave side there are controls for Level and Gain. A mini-toggle switch in the middle of the pedal allows you to choose between running the octave into the fuzz or the fuzz into the octave. With the fuzz disengaged, the octave circuit can give you those quasi-synth tones. Lerxst also says it can be a useful gain boost too. 

Pairing both is where you’ll get all the fun of the fair with octave fuzz thrills, harmonic content all over the place from that octave up, and assuming you have followed protocol and dimed your guitar amp, your power chords should sound like Bigfoot. Just the thing for writing the next In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.

Lifeson says it is a real screamer and makes a faithful companion to the By-Tor. As you’d expect, right? After all, the song is called By-Tor and The Snow Dog.

“I use distortion, fuzz, and overdrive pedals and plugins when I'm looking for that kind of specific sound for the projects I work on and am having fun with both the By-Tor and Snow Dog pedals,” says Lifeson. “But it’s the Snow Dog that really screams.  It can produce the most horrific fuzz in the Universe!”

If you would like your pedalboard to be The Snow Dog’s next forever home, you can make your enquiries at Reverb. Priced $295, it is available now while stocks last.

NAMM 2024: Rush guitar fans will already know the legacy of Alex Lifeson's Hector Sportcaster guitar well. As the Canadian prog-rock visionaries prepped to record their 1981 Moving Pictures album, the guitarist needed a new creative tool to craft the parts he was creating for the trio's next musical step.

It came with a highly modded S-type guitar that would be dubbed the Hentor Sportscaster. More Sportcasters would follow and become synonymous with Lifeson's work with Rush during the '80s. Despite tribute builds becoming available to fans, there was never any kind of official signature model. Until now…

In true Rush spirit, the Lerxst Limelight guitar isn't a recreation of the original that he used to record the classic song that inspired its name, it's more a progression. 

Created in partnership between Lifeson's Lerxst brand for signature guitar gear releases and fellow Canadians Godin Guitars. the original Sportcaster's ‘Frankensteined’ body construction is reflected, but idiosyncracies like the mismatched pickup outputs and tuning difficulties caused by its original Floyd Rose have been addressed with Godin luthier and design talent.

"The original Hentor brought together a mix of tone and playability that empowered me to explore sounds and styles of playing that I had never attempted before,” says Lifeson. “Ultimately these things became signature parts of my style. When the idea came to reimagine this guitar it made sense to partner with innovators like Godin who I knew I could trust to utilise the advances in technology and manufacturing skill to create something that could power a new generation of players looking to push their own boundaries.”

 “It was not quite enough for me to just develop a reissue of that very special instrument,” notes Lifeson. “This was an opportunity to showcase 40 years of evolution within that solid platform. Well, Axe and you shall receive!”

The result has a contoured swamp ash body finished in Cream, maple neck with 12" radius ebony fretboard with medium stainless steel frets. The pickups are in HSS configuration like the original Sportcaster, but unlike the Bill Lawrence models of the original, this time they are by Mojotone; made to Lifeson's specs for enhanced balance across the combinations. 

The locking tuners are 18:1 ratio and buyers have a choice of tremolo; either an Original Floyd Rose or Vega Trem with Graph Tech net. 

Both options are priced at $3,999 USD

“Collaborating with Alex Lifeson, an iconic artist who continually pushes tonal boundaries, is more than an opportunity—it's a testament to our shared pursuit,” says Godin Guitars President and CEO Simon Godin.  

"At the heart of our ethos lies a commitment to musicians driven by passion. Our history is woven with guitars that embody purpose and innovation, such as the Acousticaster, Multiac, and LGX. We're relentless in our pursuit of tone, seeking the extraordinary. Together with Alex, we’ve fused our expertise and passion to craft instruments that transcend expectations. This collaboration represents a union of two relentless forces, aiming not just to build guitars, but to sculpt vessels of inspiration, setting new standards in musical expression."

More info at Godin Guitars

The very recent announcement of Alex Lifeson's Lerxst line of signature tube amps alluded to the probability of more gear following – including pedals. We just never expected it would follow this soon, but here it is: the By-Tor Drive pedal.

"By-Tor is a British-voiced amp in a box pedal designed to capture the sound of the 50-watt Lerxst Omega in pedal form," says Michael McWhorter, founder of Mojotone– the collaborators with Lifeson on this run of signature gear. 

This is great news for those of us who can't stretch to any of the Lerxst amps, but the By-Tor – named after fan-favourite Rush song By-Tor And The Snow Dog – could be a go-to boost and overdrive pedal combo with wide appeal beyond Lifeson fans. 

"The Lexrst By-Tor is a compact, pedalboard-friendly version of the Omega that promises to replicate the head's same intensity and growl that the tube amp is known for," states the announcement. "The By-Tor is capable of jumping from light and crunchy drive sounds to tube-like overdriven chaos with the touch of a few controls." 

Those controls are the familiar Drive, Tone and Level, and with a similar setup to the Keeley D&M Drive but with shared knobs, the order of the Boost and Drive sides can be switched with a mini toggle. It all looks refreshingly streamlined.

"The By-Tor pedal sounds awesome and looks really scary," says Lifeson. "If you like awesome, scary stuff you need one of these. Or two!"

The pedal is available now from Reverb

The By-Tor Drive follows the news of the Omega tube amp's return as a 50-watt head following a limited 2012 collaboration between MojoTone and Lifeson for Rush's Clockwork Angels recording and touring cycle. It's also joined by the 30-watt Chi combo and head option with matching cabs. 

Who knows what might follow in the next chapter of the Lerxst story. 

• More info at lerxstamps.com

Alex Lifeson is gearing up for 2024 – literally, with a new line of signature guitar amps to follow up his previously limited LERXST Omega model that he first collaborated on with MojoTone over a decade ago. 

Now it's back, alongside a Chi head and combo tube amp – but it could be just the beginning from the Rush legend. 

The press release announcing the amps mentions Lifeson's “desire to design and manufacture a line of guitar products that reflect Lifeson's forward-thinking approach to sonic exploration and live performance” and plans to offer “a range of amplifiers, guitars, effects pedals, and pickups”. All very interesting, but what we do know right now is what the amps are…

“There has been an explosion of guitar music within the past five years that has been incredible to witness in its diversity of sounds and players,” Lifeson stated, announcing the signature line. 

“LERXST amplifiers provide a platform for these players that offers the power and quality of tone of the best amplifiers of the past, while also providing key features like power scaling and high-quality effects loops that reflect the needs of players today.”

The two-channel Omega will be offered in two iterations:  a limited hand-wired version at $3,495, and the $2,495 standard. Unlike the original 100-watt model, these are both 50-watt amps with the option to utilise a 25-watt mode. 

The US-built Chi is a smaller 30-watt head ($1,695) or combo ( $1,995) option with two channels and shared three-band EQ. They're available to order via lerxstamps.com

“The LERXST CHI is an awesome monster in its own right and one of the sweetest sounding amps I’ve ever heard,” says Lifeson. 

Lifeson may be putting both models to very good use soon if Rush bandmate and childhood friend Geddy Lee's recent comments are anything to go by. 

"If I say anything about working with Alex, people run to the conclusion that Rush is starting up again," Geddy told CTV Morning Live recently. "That is not the case. Yes, Alex and I like each other a lot, still. We hang around with each other a lot, and we both have a desire to try to write songs together. We don't know whether that will bear fruit or not. If it does bear fruit, great, then we might release some songs. If — that's always an 'if' there. 

"But when people publish articles about that, they leave the 'if' out. So, yeah, I plan to get together with Al, and we plan to write some songs, but we don't know if they'll be any damn good, so we'll see what happens."

• Rush's Geddy Lee: 10 bassists who blew my mind

Tool fan Alex Lifeson needed no encouragement when the band invited him to guest with them in his home city of Toronto. He's such a massive fan of Tool's Adam Jones he even gifted him one of his piezo-loaded signature Epiphone Les Paul Axcess guitars in Ruby.

"What an honour and delight it was playing with one of my favourite bands last night," said Lifeson on Instagram. I've loved Tool since the first time I listened to them. They are such a great band and I am lucky to call them friends.

Lifeson certainly didn't take the easy route, joining the band on the rhythmically challenging Jambi from their 10,000 Days album. Still, this is the guitarist from Rush after all! Who might even be returning to Rush duty with Geddy Lee in the future. The band and Lifeson then instersped the song with a burst of Rush's A Passage To Bangkok. Prog on! 

"One of the many highs of the evening was gifting my Epiphone Les Paul to Adam Jones," Lifeson reflected on Instagram, sharing a pic of the guitar handover. His playing is inspirational and speaks to my soul like no other guitarist. Respecto, brother." 

• Classic interview: Alex Lifeson talks Rush Moving Pictures track-by-track

With the passing of Neil Peart in 2020, the idea of Rush ever continuing seemed impossible. But time changes things, and it's given Geddy Lee the perspective to be open to going out and playing with guitarist Alex Lifeson again.

"It had been a taboo subject, and playing those songs again with a third person was the elephant in the room, and that kind of disappeared," Lee told The Washington Post. "It was nice to know that if we decide to go out, Alex and I, whether we went out as part of a new thing, or whether we just wanted to go out and play Rush as Rush, we could do that now."

The door is open then, for Rush or another Lee / Lifeson project, and that's good news indeed. The duo last played Rush material together in August 2022 for the South Park 25 Anniversary show at Red Rocks Ampitheatre in Morrison, Colorado. Lee revealed to the Washington Post that the duo also got together again in October that year to jam, but in July 2023 Lifeson underwent surgery for stomach issues and Lee is mindful of his recovery with regards to any future musical plans.

"He needs to feel good and feel healthy and strong," Lee says. "And then maybe we have a discussion."

Rush's debut album celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2024, and earlier this year Lifeson's Envy Of None bandmate Andy Curran aired his own hopes for what that landmark might prompt. I’m going to answer that in two ways," he told Rock History Canada of the chances of a Rush reunion."I’m going to say, I hope they do [reunite] as a Rush fan. I hope those boys do because I see that there’s a lot of race left in both of those horses. Those guys are extremely creative guys… I would be shocked if they didn’t do something together; that’s maybe the hopeful side of me.” 

Meanwhile, Rush fans have Geddy Lee's TV series to look forward to. A four-part documentary, Geddy Lee Asks: Are Bass Players Human Too? is coming to Paramount+ and will feature the Rush man talking to and exploring the lives of fellow bassists including Krist Novoselic, Les Claypool, Melissa Auf Der Maur and Metallica's Robert Trujillo. 

"It was a lot of fun. I got to hang with Geddy for two days solid," Trujillo told Detroit's WRIF's Meltdown radio show [transcribed by Blabbermouth]. "I'd met him before, but we were hanging out for 10 to 12 hours through the weekend. And we just kind of threw it all into two days. We had two beautiful days down in SoCal. And it's basically a lifestyle hang. He wants to know, or wanted to know, what's it like in the world, in the life of Robert Trujillo outside of bass? And he came by the house. We went down to Venice Beach. We kind of got a bit of education on the history of my neighborhood and some of the people I grew up with. It was really, really cool. And the stars kind of aligned those two days." 

The bassist added that it was somewhat surreal to spend time with his teenage musical hero.

"I played in backyard party bands at age 16 and we played La Villa Strangiato, we played YYZ, we played all those classic songs," continued Trujillo. "The harder, the better back then. And we probably butchered them, but we would play these backyard parties and play Rush songs in the same way that we also played Ozzy [Osbourne] songs and we played Black Sabbath songs and Van Halen and all these different bands. So you can imagine hanging out with one of your heroes and just trying to stay grounded. At the end of the day, everybody's a human being and you always wanna treat people with respect and, again, stay grounded. But at the same time, you're going, 'Damn, that's Geddy Lee.'"

Geddy Lee is to present a new series streaming on Paramount+ in which he will interview some of the biggest names in bass guitar.

The show, which has a quasi-existentialist title of Geddy Lee Asks: Are Bass Players Human Too?, opens on the streaming platform on 5 December in the USA, the following day for other territories, and will feature conversations with Rob Trujillo of Metallica, Melissa auf Der Maur of Hole and Smashing Pumpkins fame, grunge icon Krist Novoselic and Les Claypool of Primus.

The inspiration for the show came from the former Rush bassist and frontman’s book on bass.

“The idea for this show was born out of interviews I did for my first book The Big, Beautiful Book Of Bass,” said Lee. “I was struck that these accomplished musicians also lived incredibly interesting, multifaceted lives offstage. Who knew bass players were so effin’ human?” 

There are only four episodes in this series but, who knows, if it takes off, maybe there could be more. Lee has had more time on his hands after Rush were officially disbanded in 2018, performing on the odd occasion with his old bandmate and friend Alex Lifeson, but he has been keeping himself busy in recent months and welcomes the release of his memoir, My Effin’ Life, on 14 November. 

He will embark on a 19-date speaking tour of the US, UK and Canada to discuss the book. For the Rush fan and bass player alike, it will be essential reading, offering an eye-witness account of life at the prow of one of rock’s most-loved institutions. 

As for the show, well Lee is very easy company and he has an interesting mix of guests. He and Trujillo have previously bonded over their love for the late, great Jaco Pastorius, with Lee praising the Metallica bassist for telling the story of Pastorius’s life in his Jaco documentary, and helping to preserve his legendary fretless 1962 Jazz Bass, better known as the Bass Of Doom.

And Claypool, a long-time touring partner and Rush super-fan, is a player who makes Lee’s Top 10 bassists of all time, even edging out the likes of Victor Wooten and Paul McCartney. As Lee recalled to MusicRadar in 2021, they didn’t know who Primus were when they first took them out on tour, but soon fell under the Californian rockers’ weird spell.

“We started jamming before the shows in the dressing rooms,” said Lee. “[Les] always had these weird instruments and there was only one rule to the jams – you couldn’t play your main instrument! Then I started watching them from the side of the stage every night.”

If Claypool’s world had been shaped by Rush’s discography, those tours together returned the favour, giving Lee a new way of looking at his instrument. The influence went in both directions.  

“I’d never heard a bass player do anything like that, doing single notes in a rock way then going to slapping and popping in this slinky, almost humorous way,” said Lee. “It was very effective rhythmically. So as much as he says I inspired him when he was young, he kinda inspired me in the middle of my career, making me realise I could get a lot more rhythm out of my playing.  

“I started trying to bring that into my work in Rush. Listen to Jerry Was A Race Car Driver or any of those songs, and you’ll be hearing a pioneer of the bass guitar. He’s got this very original attitude and fresh approach with this highly creative, albeit quirky, player.”

You can watch the trailer for Geddy Lee Asks: Are Bass Players Human Too above. My Effin’ Life is available for pre-order now, and you can find dates and ticket details for Geddy Lee’s speaking tour over at the official Rush website. 

A DW piccolo snare drum owned and played by late Rush drummer, Neil Peart is for sale with an asking price of £73,480/$125,870 CAD.

The listing — which is advertised by Soul Drums in Toronto, Canada via Reverb — states that the drum was used by The Professor during multiple recording sessions for Rush's Test for Echo and live shows between the mid-’90s and early ’00s including Rush’s Vapor Trails tour. The drum is also featured in Peart’s own DVD: A Work in Progress, which documents the recording of Rush’s Test For Echo album.

The drum itself is a DW 13”x3” piccolo with a 10-ply maple shell (stamped with a pitch of Bb) carrying the serial number 022022 on its badge, and finished in Red Sparkle Lacquer. It’s got 8 lugs and brass-plated, triple-flanged hoops/tension rods. Meanwhile, this being a shallow-depth drum, the lugs are DW’s mini-Round Lug design, and the throw-off/butt plate are chrome.

The listing shows that it’s fitted with a Remo Controlled Sound Clear batter head, and the snare side is home to a Remo Ambassador Snare head, as well as 13-strand snare wires.

Also included in the listing are multiple documents of provenance, including an appraisal by Vintage Drum Centre, Iowa and a certificate of authenticity from Toronto’s TRS Custom Drums founder Seppo Saliminen, who acquired the snare along with other Peart-owned gear in the early 2000s.  

Piccolo snare drums — often tightly-cranked — were a strong and distinctive fixture of ’90s drum sounds, with the shallow depth offering a heavy attack and fast decay. 

Their popularity both as main snares or as second, ‘auxiliary’ drums has waned since, but more recently tighter, higher-pitched snare sounds have begun to become more popular again in the form of smaller-diameter, but deeper-shelled snares offering greater body to their sound.

Robby Krieger and Alex Lifeson lit up the stage on Monday, 24 October, at the Medlock-Krieger All-Star Concert when they joined forces for an epic performance of the Santana classic Evil Ways.

Hosted at Bogie’s Westlake Village Inn, California, the event was held in memory of Scott Medlock, Krieger’s friend and co-founder of the Medlock-Krieger Foundation, and raised money for various charities including the Pat Tillman Foundation, Colontown/PalTown Development Foundation ad Cancer Support Community.

As in past years, when the likes of KISS’s Tommy Thayer, Lukas Nelson and Richie Sambora have turned up to jam, there were no shortage of big names onstage. The evening welcomed the return of the Cars’ Elliot Easton and Orianthi, but one of the highlights of the night – captured in the fan-shot footage below – arrived when the Doors met Rush on Santana’s Evil Ways, with Krieger and Lifeson on guitar, and Santana’s Andy Vargas handling lead vocals and tambourine.

With Lifeson playing a Les Paul, Krieger on his Gibson SG, the pair took turns on rhythm and lead. Krieger cuts loose first a fusion-style lead before busting out the slide half-way through. 

• Classic Interview – Robby Krieger on making the Doors' LA Woman

Other guests on the night included former Chicago drummer and co-founder Danny Seraphine, singer Haley Reinhart, and the comedian Mark Eddie. But look closely at the video above, there’s another Doors connection, with Dan Rothchild wearing the Joan Jett t-shirt and playing bass guitar. Dan is the son of Paul A Rothchild, who produced the Doors’ first five albums.

Speaking to Total Guitar in 2020, Krieger said the band were in awe of Rothchild at the time, and looked on him as a mentor.

“We loved Paul,” Krieger said. “When I learned that he was going to produce us, I was really excited. I thought that was amazing. In fact, he was my favorite producer way from before The Doors, because I had been listening to the stuff he produced when I was in high school, like the Paul Butterfield Band, the Even Dozen Jug Band and there was an album called The Blues Project that he did with all kinds of cool and unknown players – at least to us on the west coast. the Even Dozen Jug Band… He really did help us on the first three or four albums because we had never recorded before. He taught us a lot.”

The Medlock-Krieger All-Star Concert was the latest in a string of guest appearances for Alex Lifeson. Most recently, the guitarist performed some Rush classics alongside Geddy Lee and Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl at the Taylor Hawkins Tribute Concerts, first at London’s Wembley Stadium, then in Los Angeles. In August, the Rush legends reunited to play Closer To The Heart at a concert celebrating the 25th anniversary of South Park, with the show’s co-creater Matt Stone playing drums.

Lifeson has also kept himself busy with his Envy Of None project. Speaking to MusicRadar, he described the band's eponymous debut, his first after Rush disbanded, as a "life saver" that got him back in love with playing again.

“I came to realise, with this project – especially in the last year where we’ve really focused on it – for me, it was a life saver,” Lifeson said. “It was a kind of renaissance for me. I got back into playing on a much more regular basis, I looked forward to the songwriting, I really wanted to do my very best and be innovative with what I was doing. 

“All of those things that relit my reason for living happened, and now I’m clearing the past of a lot of things in my life, and I’m looking forward to the sparkly things on the horizon that are catching my interest. This has definitely been the key for me.”

Tech 21 has good news for bassists with designs on Geddy Lee or Rush’s bass guitar tone with the launch of the YYZ Shape-shifter Signature SansAmp.

Finished with black text and an illustration of the man himself on a shade of spearmint toothpaste green, the YYZ Shape-shifter matches Lee’s signature rack-mounted and floor units from Tech 21, but this appearance belies the fact that the all-analogue device is in fact the return of the MP40.

Launched to celebrate 40 years of Rush’s classic Moving Pictures – complete with Hugh Syme-inspired artwork – the MP40 was a strictly limited edition unit that sold out in no time, never to return. Until now. 

But this is a return that makes everyone happy. Those with the limited edition MP40 have a bona-fide collectible. Those who grab this will have the exact same circuit at their disposal – and it offers a wealth of tone-shaping power and uses, and a manual that compiles an array of Geddy Lee signature sounds.

• Rush's Geddy Lee: 10 bassists who blew my mind

The YYZ Shape-shifter has a dual-footswitch build, one for bypassing/engaging the unit, the other for a selectable boost function, which can apply 12dB of oomph to your presence for a more distorted high-end sound. And, giving the unit its name, there is a Shape-shifter button that adds an extra 6dB of what Lee likes to call “Schmegilka”, a technical term for an “an indefinable thing of awesomeness”.

There is also a Tight button to enhance definition and, indeed, tighten your distorted tones. As for controls, it is as you were with Lee’s signature SansAmp, the GED-2112. There’s a Master volume, a Mix control that takes you from Deep (“high-end studio clean”) to Drive (“dirty bass tube amp tones”), an active three-band EQ, and a Drive control.

You can hear all this in action below.

This new signature SansAmp continues Lee’s long-standing relationship with the analogue tech. Famously, he was an early adopter, and would have washing machines – and on occasion, rotisserie chickens – onstage lest Rush’s backline look too empty.

You can use the unit to go direct into the mixing desk for playing live, into the desk for recording, for fixing up previously recorded parts, or it can be used with the bass amp you already know and love. 

The Geddy Lee YYZ Shape-shifter is available now, priced $249 street. See Tech 21 for more details. And if you're still looking for an MP40 Limited Edition SansAmp, there are still some kicking around; Andertons presently has one, priced £369.

• Watch Rush legends Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson reunite alongside Primus onstage for Closer To The Heart performance

Well, we weren't expecting this; Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson performed Rush music together again onstage last night (10 August), alongside Primus and South Park co-creator Matt Stone.

Their rendition of Closer To The Heart was part of the 25th anniversary celebration of South Park at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado.

Footage courtesy of Andrew Doel / YouTube

Les Claypool explains in the intro the the song that while he pushed Matt Stone to learn the parts on drums, he didn't even know Lee and Lifeson would be guesting at the event. Talk about nerve-racking! 

Stone also joined Primus on vocal duty for a bespoke performance of 'Butters The Cat', a spin on fan favourite Butters The Cat, you can watch below.

Classic interview: Alex Lifeson talks Rush Moving Pictures track-by-track

Primus frontman and bassist Les Claypool has likened performing Rush’s A Farewell To Kings in its entirety to climbing Mount Everest. Primus embark on their latest A Tribute To Kings tour in April, playing a set of original material before covering the 1977 prog masterpiece from nose to tail. 

Having toured it 2021, tracks such as Xanadu and the epic Cygnus X-1 are now in the Primus wheelhouse. But even for a band weaned on the Rush, boasting the combined talents of Claypool’s hyper-animated bass guitar, Larry ‘Ler’ LaLonde on guitar and Tim ‘Herb’ Alexander on drums, getting a set of Rush classics together was a challenge beyond anything they had done before. 

Speaking on The Eddie Trunk Podcast, Claypool says it was like deciding to climb Everest. 

“It was just a big undertaking,” he said. “It was like saying, ‘Hey, let’s climb Everest. We’ve climbed Gleason, we’ve climbed a a couple of hills around Concord, so let’s try Everest. What the hell! And it was a lot of work. We have never rehearsed as much in our lives as Primus than when we did A Farewell To Kings.”

The connection between Rush and Primus goes way back to 1991, when Primus opened for the Canadian prog titans on their Roll The Bones Tour, an experience that Claypool describes as surreal, effectively transforming the “superheroes” of his childhood into close friends. For Primus, a band of myriad influences, the Rush canon was always a shared inspiration.

“Ler had this metal background but one of the things we could connect with was he was a Zappa head and a Gerry Garcia head, and Herb was into all this world music, and it was obvious with the size of his drum kit that he must have listened to some Neil Peart,” says Claypool. “I had this eclectic funk background, so, we could connect on Rush. We just started playing Rush riffs. Nothing in its entirety because I don’t think I ever knew any Rush songs in their entirety until this thing.”

The admiration between the two bands is mutual. Geddy Lee interviewed Claypool for his Big Beautiful Book Of Bass, an interview request accepted on the condition that Lee – one half of MusicRadar’s greatest rhythm section of all time – gave Claypool a bass lesson.

“When he came to my house to interview my for that book, I said, ‘Okay, I’ll do the interview but the deal is you have to show me the proper way to play YYZ’, and he did,” says Claypool. “And I had been playing it wrong all these years. You’d sit with Geddy, and just the way he phrases things, the way he fingers things… It’s like, ‘Oh my God! It’s Geddy Lee.’ Nobody does it like that. 

“Like, I was playing the right notes but I was playing them totally different from how he does it, and that’s what makes him Geddy Lee. It’s like what makes Hendrix sound like Hendrix; it’s how he approaches the instrument, not necessarily the buttons he pushes and the things he stomps on.”

Asked if Primus would consider doing a similar tribute with Hemispheres, Claypool demurred. It was something the band had always joked about but there were good reasons not to; not least of which would be what to do with the second half of Cygnus without playing the first. 

Also, they didn't want to give anyone the impression they were becoming a Rush cover band. However, Claypool did admit that, if pushed, Hemispheres was his favourite from the Rush catalogue. 

“I am not big on favourites but it’s Hemispheres,” he said. “Because like most music, for everybody, it represents a time in your life. It was the soundtrack to my 14-year-old life.

“I had been playing bass for two months when I saw the Hemispheres shows, and I bought scalped tickets, drank three warm Löwenbräus in the parking lot, and I was 14, and it was he greatest night of my life at that point. It was amazing to stand there in front of the stage and see Geddy’s bass as they were setting up all their equipment, and just drooling over it. Because that is what I wanted more than anything, a Rickenbacker.”

You can listen to the whole conversation – which also features an interview with Corey Taylor of Slipknot – at The Eddie Trunk Podcast. Primus’ A Tribute To Kings Tour 2022 kicks off on 15 April, at The Criterion, Oklahoma City, with Battles in support. See Primus for more details. Full dates below.

“It was a beautiful time,” says guitarist Alex Lifeson, recalling the summer of 1980, when he and his Rush mates (singer-bassist Geddy Lee and drummer-lyricist Neil Peart) rented a house in Stony Lake, Ontario and wrote their eighth album, Moving Pictures, together. “We’d spend the weeks working, and on weekends we’d drive back to Toronto. Rehearsing, figuring out arrangements – everything just flowed. Electricity was in the air.”

The past six years had been a tough slog, but by that golden summer, Rush were sailing. No longer an opening act, the group that had worn out cars and vans on a tangled path across North America, winning fans the hard way – knocking ‘em out with their stage show and a string of bold, radio-unfriendly albums that nonetheless found their way onto turntables - was now an arena headliner.

Not only that, they had an honest-to-God hit on their hands: Permanent Waves. DJs were all over the long-player, particularly its ironically titled single The Spirit Of Radio, a masterstroke that managed to cram Rush’s complex musicality into four minutes and 56 seconds while shoehorning in undeniable pop hooks with even a hint of reggae. That Rush succeeded in crashing the mainstream without losing one hardcore fan would play out big-time on Moving Pictures.

“After we felt confident of what we’d written, we started recording at Le Studio [the now-shuttered facility was located in Morin Heights, Quebec] with our co-producer, Terry Brown,” says Lifeson. “We ate well, drank well and we played really well. The whole vibe was fun. We’d gone from playing clubs and theaters and were now selling out big places. We were at that cusp of coming into our own.”

Released on 12 February 1981, Moving Pictures not only saw Permanent Waves’ radio win but raised it one better, packing the classic singles Tom Sawyer and Limelight. “We knew they were good songs,” says Lifeson talking to us in 2011. “Did we think that they’d ever be considered ‘standards’? Not at all. All we tried to do was please ourselves.”

In 2011, the whole of Moving Pictures was celebrated by Rush on stage and on a just-issued special edition 30th anniversary Blu-ray CD+DVD package, which renders its seven wondrous cuts with a level of sound clarity that Lifeson calls “mind-blowing. Richard Chycki, who remixed the album, knew he was working with a part of history, and he did an amazing job. He didn’t change the record, just expanded on it. When I heard what he did for first time, I couldn’t believe it. It was impeccable. It was Moving Pictures in a 3-D box!”

Heres, Alex Lifeson walks us through Moving Pictures track-by-track back in 2011. “It’s a very optimistic album,” he says. “There’s a brightness about it, which I think is why people respond to it so much. Playing it live every night is interesting – The Camera Eye, which we hadn’t performed in a long time because it’s pretty difficult, has now become one of our favorite songs. The bottom line is, we’re very proud of Moving Pictures. Thirty years later, it still feels magical.”

1. Tom Sawyer 

“We don’t like to think about the album sequence until we’re done recording everything, but I think Tom was always going to be the opener. Just the way it starts – it had to open the record.

“It was a refreshing arrangement. It didn’t follow the traditional verse-chorus-verse-chorus-middle-outro chorus thing. This spread from a verse to a bridge to a chorus to a solo section and so on – it was a more lengthy setup.

“Neil had worked on the lyrics from an idea that had come from a friend of ours, Pye Dubois. He expanded on that whole theme of rebellion and instinct.

“The recording was pretty straightforward, very comfortable and group-like. The guitar solo is pretty quirky, but I don’t think it took long to do, maybe five or six takes. With solos, I don’t like to be too prepared going in – I like to surprise myself. This might have been a comp of a few takes.”

2. Red Barchetta

“I remember that we really loved this song, and so the writing of it was very quick. It was born from a jam, which is how a lot of the stuff on Moving Pictures came about. We’d go into the studio in the morning, jam on an idea, and then huddle around a little cassette player to see if we had something.

“The parts were quite satisfying to play, which is probably one reason why the song was written so fast. Everything felt very natural and easy.

“The guitar solo was me stepping on the wah-wah pedal and kind of easing back on it a little. It sort of acted like a filter, and that’s how I got that nasal-y kind of sound. When I was younger and tried to get that Jeff Beck tone, that’s what I would do.”

3. YYZ

“Ged and Neil wrote YYZed. I was busy working on my airplane that day - I had a remote control airplane up there that I crashed to pieces, after spending weeks and weeks building it. [laughs]

“They went in early that day and got all worked up about coming up with an intro that was going to be quite unique, which stemmed from one of the times we were flying back to Toronto from Le Studio. We were landing at the Buttonville Airport. There wasn’t an ILS [instrument landing system] at the airport, but it had an NDB, which is a non-directional beacon. You had to tune it in, and you knew you had it by its identifier, which was a Morse code. This particular Morse code was ‘Y-Y-Zed.’

“I think it was Neil who said, ‘Hey, that could make a cool opener,’ and so that’s how the intro and the title came into being.”

4. Limelight

“The opening riff is so typical of something I would write, and the verses sound like something Geddy would write. That’s one of the things about knowing each other so well: we fill in the spaces for the other guy as we go along. I believe that Geddy wrote the chorus part, as well.

“It was another song that came together very smoothly, like most of the record, with the exception of The Camera Eye. Even though it’s a dynamic song with such a sense of optimism, there’s a fragility in the choruses that I’ve always liked. I love the contrast.

“I’ve always maintained that the solo is probably my favourite of anything I’ve ever done. If you can create a visual from a sonic standpoint, that’s really an art. The song has it, as does the solo.”

5. The Camera Eye

“A lot of this song came from separate parts that were written and then connected. I think that’s why we always had a bit of a problem embracing it fully in its early days.

“It was hard work. The opening was easy, and then we decided to build up to a crescendo. There's a lot going on. It was one of the last really long songs that we would write.

“There’s some very difficult playing here. Neil does an amazing job on it. He plays so dynamically, handling all of the changes and shifts in tempo and time. And Geddy, he’s playing bass, he’s singing, he’s playing bass pedals and keyboards – really something else.

“The guitar solo took me a while to get right. Funnily enough, The Camera Eye has now become one of our favourites, and the crowds really respond to it. Our feeling is, we haven’t just resurrected a song; we’ve improved it.”

6. Witch Hunt

“In Neil’s mind, I think it was always meant to be a part of either a trilogy or a series. He kind of laid out what he wanted to do, but this song, this part of it, ended up where it did.

“It’s kind of cool song for us. It’s got a really rhythmic opening and a strong guitar part, with no bass until the second verse, or the chorus.

“All that mob stuff in the opening, those sounds, that was a lot of fun. We went outside, quite a ways from the studio, down by the rode. It was a freezing cold night in January, and it was the three of us in the band and a couple of crew guys, and we recorded about 20 minutes of us mumbling and grumbling and making all kinds of mob noises. We had a bottle of Scotch with us to try to keep warm, and as you imagine, the more we drank the crazier we got!” [laughs]

7. Vital Signs

“We were into the idea of putting some of that reggae feel into this song, but with a little more ‘oomph’ to it. Dynamically, it was pretty different from the rest of the record, but I think that’s part of the allure of the album: None of the songs sound or feel the same. There’s a lot of diversity.

“Part of me thinks we were working on the song in the studio, as if we started recording the album and we didn’t have Vital Signs totally finished. I believe that was the case.

“Neil was a keener listener of reggae than perhaps Geddy was, and I was probably the least. I enjoyed it. I liked Peter Tosh and Bob Marley; I liked what The Police were doing. We were coming at reggae in a more Anglo way, which is how The Police approached it, too. It’s like the way English bands like The Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin worked the blues.

“As an album closer, lyrically it spoke well. It was a nice sentiment to end the record. The way it fades, it was quite dramatic. The Camera Eye almost ended Moving Pictures, but we finally decided on Vital Signs. It was all about being aware of your surroundings and rising to your highest level. That said something important to us.”

5 songs guitarists need to hear by… Rush

Rush were always been serious about their music but not always themselves, which has often made for some amusing moments. Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson are clearly in a playful mood again above as they tease their new Rush Golden Ale collaboration with Toronto's Henderson Brewing, while posing as 'Beer Scientist' and 'Beer Drinker'.

We'll buy whatever they're selling but the ale isn't even not even out yet and we're already trying to think of some follow-up puns for their next collaboration… Red Brewchetta, Limelight Ale, Closer To The Hop, Spirits Of Radio, Stick It Stout, Brewvado, Bastille IPA, By-Tor & The Snow Grog,… ok, we're out! 

Covering Rush is a tall order at the best of times, but the whole of A Farewell To Kings? Primus are surely one of the only bands who can pull that and roved it as kicked off their A Tribute To Kings tour in Nampa, Idaho on August 10. 

And yes, that is Les Claypool wearing a kimono in the video above, just like Geddy Lee did.

The bass icon even got Geddy's blessing for the tour. "I texted with him — I keep in touch with Geddy — just to make sure we weren’t trodding on something weird," Claypool told Rolling Stone. "So I checked in with him to see what he thought of it, and he was excited about the notion. ... He thought it was a great idea."

So much so, the Rush man even gave Claypool a personal bass lesson to make sure he got everything right when performing the 1977 prog opus.

The Rush man even chose Claypool as one of his favourite bass players for MusicRadar  and noted how he's inspired him: “I’d never heard a bass player do anything like that, doing single notes in a rock way then going to slapping and popping in this slinky, almost humorous way," Lee told us. "It was very effective rhythmically. So as much as he says I inspired him when he was young, he kinda inspired me in the middle of my career, making me realise I could get a lot more rhythm out of my playing.  

“I started trying to bring that into my work in Rush. Listen to Jerry Was A Race Car Driver or any of those songs, and you’ll be hearing a pioneer of the bass guitar. He’s got this very original attitude and fresh approach with this highly creative, albeit quirky, player.”

Primus – also featuring guitarist Larry LaLonde and drummer Tim Alexander – kicked off the first half of their set at the Ford Amphitheater in Nampa with their own songs before the Tribute To Kings section and an encore of two of their own best-loved songs.

The full set list was as follows:

1. Those Damned Blue Collar Tweakers

2. Mr. Knowitall

3. "Groundhog's Day

4. Fisticuffs

5. Seas of Cheese

6. Frizzle Fry

7. My Name is Mud

8. Over the Electric Grapevine

A Tribute to Kings

9. A Farewell to Kings

10. Xanadu

11. Closer to the Heart

12. Cinderella Man

13. Madrigal

14. Cygnus X-1 Book 1: The Voyage

15. Wynona's Big Brown Beaver

16. Southbound Pachyderm

For more info on future tour dates visit Primus.