![]() Neil Peart onstage in Birmingham, England, in February 1978. His kits themselves looked less like musical instruments than pieces of an industrial plant (of course there is a website that details each kit from every stage of his career). At the way he seemed to make his way from one side of his enormous kit to the other in micro-seconds, touching every bit of it – toms, tubular bells, gongs, cowbells, wind chimes, cymbals of every kind. Only later did I realise that what really mattered was that three men could navigate all the vicissitudes of a career in the music industry and remain true to what they wanted to do, entirely uncompromised, and still be friends.īut back then, in the early 80s, I used to sit with my friend Ian Watts in his bedroom in Windsor listening to Rush albums – A Farewell to Kings, 2112, Hemispheres, All the World’s a Stage – and marvelling, above all, at Peart’s drumming. Like a lot of other people, I fell hard for Rush in my early teens, when what I thought was significant about them was that they had songs based on Coleridge poems, or that they had tracks that occupied entire sides of albums and had overtures. The key thing, Peart insisted in the song, was that “it’s really just a question of your honesty”. Rush’s biggest UK hit single, The Spirit of Radio (No 13, 1980), managed to be simultaneously a hymn to the old-fashioned notion of hearing a song on the radio that might transport you (“Emotional feedback / On a timeless wavelength / Bearing a gift beyond price”), a defence of musical technology against the Luddites who insist on the old way of doing things (“All this machinery / Making modern music / Can still be open-hearted”) and a tirade against those who would corrupt art with money (“For the words of the prophets / Were written on the studio wall / Concert hall / And echoes with the sounds of salesmen”). His lyrics, whether or not you liked them, were written with a plain-spoken and full-hearted honesty that meant they were sometimes extraordinarily on the nose, but could equally hit home with force. You could get a sense of this from his lyrics, which, for all the focus on his young love of Ayn Rand, often had an air of loneliness and separation, never more clearly than on Subdivisions, the song the Smiths might have written had they been a Canadian prog power trio: “In the high school halls / In the shopping malls / Conform or be cast out / Subdivisions / In the basement bars / In the backs of cars / Be cool or be cast out.” And he was loved by pretty much everyone who ever took the slightest interest in Rush, because he was so clearly not a rock star, but a bookish, shy chap, who happened to possess extraordinary dexterity on drums. He was loved by Lee and Lifeson, which was evident in the delightful documentary Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage. More than a drummer, Neil Peart was loved. He was a family man who lost his daughter in a road traffic accident and his wife to cancer within 10 months of each other, in 19, and whose response to those tragedies was to teach himself to cook, first to care for his wife, then for himself (touchingly, in his memoir Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road, he offered “thanks to the food hall in the Marks and Spencer in Oxford Street, which offered cooking instructions with every item, even fresh fish and vegetables”.) Photograph: Jason Merritt#TERM/Getty Images As far as I was concerned, he was hired from the minute he started playing.”Īlex Lifeson, Neil Peart and Geddy Lee pose in the press room at the 28th Annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony in Los Angeles. I’d never heard a drummer like that, someone with that power and dexterity. And then he sat down behind this kit and pummelled the drums, and us. Alex and I were chuckling – we thought he was a hick from the country. He comes in, this big goofy guy with a small drum kit with 18-inch bass drums. ![]() He drove up in this little sports car, drums were hanging out from every corner. And he was working for his dad’s farm equipment store. But he had just moved back home and given up his dream of playing in a rock band. He had spent two years living in England before that. Rush’s singer and bass player was talking about his first encounter with Neil Peart, his bandmate from 29 July 1974 until their final gig in 2015, almost exactly 41 years later. “He was one of the goofiest-looking guys I’d ever seen,” Geddy Lee told me in November 2018.
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