It’s a long time since I’ve seen Rush live. I missed their 30th anniversary tour, so the last time I caught them live was the “Hold Your Fire” tour umpty-ump years ago.
This was my second visit of the year to our local Enormodome, the first being Deep Purple back in April. It’s not quite as horrible acoustically as the ghastly Wembley Arena were I last saw the band. In the last couple of years I’ve got used to small gigs where it feels like the band are playing in your front room, so huge arena shows feel a bit strange. To make matters worse, I was right up in the gods (Cygnus X1?), high above Alex Lifeson’s side of the stage.
But big shows tend to make up in sheer spectacle for what they lack in intimacy, and this one was no exception, with extensive use of back projection, lasers and even pyro. On the massive stage, Alex Lifeson had the classic backline made up from a wall of Marshall Stacks. But on the other side of Neil Peart’s immense drumkit, Geddy Lee had a backline of… rotisserie cabinets. Filled with chickens. Not only that, at two points during the show a roadie dressed as a chef came and inspected the chickens to see if they were done yet. I don’t know if the crew ate the chickens after the show, or how many complained “Not chicken again“.
All that would count for nothing if the music wasn’t up to scratch, but Rush didn’t let us down on that score. There was no support, the band choosing to play for no less than three hours, two 90 minute sets either side of an interval. While they’re clearly not young any more, they still have the stamina to keep up a high energy level throughout, and have the chops to deliver the often complex material virtually flawlessly. Geddy Lee can still hit almost all those helium-powered high notes.
They played a lot of material from the new album “Snakes and Arrows”, which came over strongly live, and confirmed that this their best album for at least a decade. The setlist also drew very heavily from their four albums from the first half of the 1980s; “Permanent Waves” through to “Grace Under Pressure”. While some may bemoan the absence of 70s prog epics like “Cygnus-X1″ or “Xanadu”, their 80s output does seem to have withstood the test of time rather better. Certainly for me, the superb renditions of songs like “Subdivisions” and “Distant Early Warning” were among the highlights of the show.
And then there was the drum solo. There are only two people in the world that can play drum solos worth paying money to see. One is the classical percussionist Evelyn Glennie. The other is Neil Peart. He battered away at not just two complete kits’ worth of drums, but all manner of electronic percussion, including what appeared to be an electric xylophone, kicking up a veritable percussive storm which drew the biggest applause of the night.
The triumphant show ended with their only two hit singles, “Spirit of Radio” and “Tom Sawyer”, the latter introduced with a specially commissioned South Park sketch about a Rush tribute band.
Encores saw Lifeson bring out his white Gibson semi-acoustic for the real oldie “A Passage to Bankok” and the instrumental “YYZ”.
And then it was 11pm, and a mad dash across town for the last train home. Where had those three hours gone?