Rush Feature in Sunday Times

[Slaine mac Roth]

OLD-SCHOOL ROCKERS STILL CUTTING A DASH

 

Rush were never the trendiest, but a new film uncovers their enduring appeal.

 

By Rob Fitzpatrick

 

They may have been going for 40 years, with sales somewhere north of 40m records, but there remains something almost shameful about admitting a fondness for the rock band Rush. although these white, middle-class Canadians are exceptional musicians, they are a considerable way down the perceived pecking order of cool. They are the sort of band you should fall hard for when you're 13, then, in theory, move on from. Except it doesn't seem to work like that. Indeed, on the evidence put forward in their enormously entertaining documentary, Beyinf the Lighted Stage, once you've fallen for Rush, you never really get over it.

 

This is a band who have never been within a country mile of mainstream fashionability, are rarely - if ever - on the radio and have certainly never been accepted as part of serious rock music's A list. "To be honest," laughs their bassist and singer Geddy Lee, on a break from rehearsals for their latest tour. "I was shocked that anyone would want to make a movie of us. The directors told us, 'We're convinced there's a story - we just don't know what it is yet...' I told them not to come crying to me in six months time when they found out boring we are."

 

Rush, as the film explains, are a band who, even when on the road with those professional party animals Kiss in the mid-1970s, would retreat tp their hotel rooms to watch television after a gig. But what the film does so well is investigate something much more revealling - the lifelong give and take of true friendship, and the way inspiration and creativity move in and out of sight like the moon.

 

Lee and the guitarist Alex Lifeson have been friends since they were at school together in the mid-1960s. Lee's parents were Holocaust survivors, Lifeson's Serbian immigrants. They grew up in homes almost entirely without anything as perfunctory as music, certainly without rock. the film has laugh-out loud clips of this blues-obsessed teenage group, dressed in flares, stack heels, satin and scarves, playing super-heavy songs to bemused schoolchildren and eager-to-dance local barflies.

 

They were an oddity, but they were striking-looking, they sounded like nobody else and, in the early 1970s, they began to take off. the film is particularly strong on the band's prime commercial era - they years between 1976 and 1981, when their huge live following translated into enormous record sales. Beyond the lighted Stage is like the flip side to the masterly Anvil documentary in 2008. Here is another Canadian band centred on children of imigrants, locked in a multidecade friendship. only this time, instead of crushing failure and Z-level touring, there are albums shifting in their millions, arena tours that sell out in hourse, private jets and top-of-the-line motorbikes that ferry the musicians between heaving stadiums. Perhaps the truth behind their appeal is that Rush are ludicrous and wonderful at the same time. They are serious and immensely talented, but have found room for double-neck guitars, kimonos and handle bar moustaches.

 

After it all, do you feel maligned, I ask lee. "No," he says. "I've never trusted the compliments and never taken the insults to heart. our dreams were always just a couple of steps ahead of where we were. We used to figure we'd end up back home, scrambling for work, and we never did. You certainly can't complain about that..."

 

 

 

Interesting that Neil's name isn't mentioned (although his 'tache is) but, for a mainstream paper, its not too bad a write up I suppose.