Rush finished up their run of UK dates this past week with stops in Newcastle, Birmingham and London. This weekend they return to the two cities where they filmed their 2 most recent live DVDs. Tonight (just a couple of hours from now) they play the Ahoy Rotterdam Arena in the Netherlands where they recorded Snakes & Arrows Live back in 2007, then it's onto the Festhalle Frankfurt where R30 was recorded on Sunday. According to this website the Frankfurt show is sold out, but Rush tweeted this morning that there are still ticket and meet-n-greet opportunities available. After finishing up in Europe the band will return to North America and take a 9-day break before kicking off the third and final leg of the 2011 Time Machine Tour at the BI-LO Center in Greenville, SC on Wednesday, June 8th. Neil Peart's friend and riding partner Brutus checked in from the road in the Netherlands via Twitter this morning and had this to report:

Wanted to add kudos to whoever designed Great Britain and Ireland. They did a really good job...especially with all those single track roads

Greetings from Never Netherlands! From the single tracks of Dartmoor to the streets of Paris. My first time in the city of lights. Pics soon

Apparently Rush has been so impressed by the success of their European tour that they are considering breaking with tradition and headlining one of the large British festival shows next summer as reported earlier this week by rock/metal news site Rush on Rock. Some of the possible festivals being considered are High Voltage, Download and Sonisphere. The show would be part of their planned tour in support of their forthcoming studio album Clockwork Angels. And for those of you going to any of the shows next month who would like to wear a GeFilter t-shirt (as worn by Geddy on tour), you can now purchase one via Amazon.com.

We learned on Wednesday that Neil Peart's interview on the CBC's Strombo (formerly The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos) will air next month on Friday, June 17th. Neil taped the interview way back on March 21st so it's good to finally know when it will see the light of day. According to reports from fans who attended the taping Neil talked about touring, his new book Far and Away and also did a track-by-track breakdown of Moving Pictures. Although both Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson have been guests on the show multiple times, this will be Neil Peart's first appearance. Neil also taped an interview with Jeff Woods of the syndicated radio show The Legends of Classic Rock last month just prior to the April 19th Rush show in Hamilton, Ontario to discuss his recently-released 5th full-length book Far and Away: A Prize Every Time. This interview will be airing on The Legends of Classic Rock this coming Sunday, May 29th. For a list of stations and air times, check out this link.

Late last year after the 2010 Time Machine tour Alex Lifeson lent his studio and production expertise to the Toronto-based David Barrett Trio. The Trio recorded three tunes in Alex's home studio - Hollowbody, Sonar, and Disappearance - with Alex producing and Rich Chycki handling the engineering duties. Back in March Hollowbody was made available as an MP3 download via Amazon.com and iTunes and now the second track Sonar is also available. Sonar is a mellow, acoustic-driven, instrumental track with some mind-blowing guitar work in it. You can listen to it on YouTube at this link and download it at both Amazon.com and iTunes. The Trio will be playing at Alex Lifeson's Toronto night club The Orbit Room (580A College St. in Toronto) tomorrow night. They'll also be recording some more tunes after the 2011 leg of the Time Machine tour. David talks about the songs and how his collaboration with Lifeson came about in this January post on his blog.

Speaking of Alex Lifeson, Back in January we learned that Lerxst would appear in Toronto filmmaker Rob Heydon's new indie film Irvine Welsh's Ecstasy. The film is an adaptation of Scottish author Irvine Welsh's book Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance. Alex will be playing the role of Dr. Michael Figg; a character made specifically for the film who does not appear in the book. Dr. Figg works in a mental hospital where Billy Boyd's character Woodsy is committed for a breakdown after consuming too much Ecstasy. The film is slated to debut at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and an official website was just recently launched. Alex is now shown on the cast list for the film at IMDB.com as well as on the website, and a Canadian release date of September 9th, 2011 is given. You can watch a short clip of Alex Lifeson as Dr. Figg at the film's YouTube channel here. The clip runs about 1 minute and features respected psychiatrist Dr. Michael Figg discussing his radical new treatment.

Pop Matters published their list of The 25 Best Progressive Rock Songs of All Time earlier this week and 3 Rush songs made the list: Cygnus X-1, Book II: Hemispheres, Natural Science and 2112. You can check out what they said about each track in this post.

Vintage Guitar magazine is celebrating 25 years of publication in 2011 and all year long are running a series of giveaways and features that rely on reader feedback. So far they've run polls to determine the Top 50 Guitar Songs of the '60s, '70s and '80s - and are currently conducting a poll to determine the Top Guitar Songs of the '90s (free registration required to vote). Rush's Working Man made the Top Guitar Songs of the '70s list at #48 and both Tom Sawyer and Limelight made the Top Guitar Songs of the '80s coming in at #20 and #27 respectively.

There was a Rush reference on last Friday night's episode (Season 6, Episode 22 - The Man Who Knew Too Much) of The WB's Supernatural. At one point in the show at about the 7:30 mark an amnesiac Sam finds various ID cards identifying him as Jimmy Page, Neil Peart (pronounced Pert), and Angus Young. You can watch the episode online at this link. This is the fifth Rush reference to occur on the show.

The Drum Channel and the film Adventures of Power (featuring Neil Peart) have teamed up to sponsor an Air Drum Battle where entrants could win one of over 100 prizes with the grand prize being a 3000 dollar Pacific drum kit with DW hardware and pedals, and Sabian B8 Pro Performance Cymbals. Entry is free - you just need to submit a video of yourself air-drumming to your favorite song. Our own air-drummer extraordinaire LanceTheShred has submitted his entry where he air-drums to Rush's Red Barchetta at this link. To vote for Lance's video or any other video, just go to this location and rate them from 1 to 5 stars. Voting ends this Sunday, May 29th.

The Rush Backstage Club is now selling limited edition Moving Pictures lithographs for $19.99. These hand-numbered lithographs are printed on heavy textured art paper and only 1000 of them were made.

Rush gets a mention in this review of the JL Audio Fathom f112 Subwoofer at CEPro. When testing the subwoofer's performance the reviewer had this to say:

... The subs showed an immense amount of detail and power. They articulated the low-end of Rush's Snake's & Arrows Live DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on songs like Malignant Narcissism - including Geddy Lee's fretless Fender Jaco Pastorius bass and Neil Peart's massive drum kit - without crushing detail, speed, accuracy and space within the mix. ...

Alex Lifeson is mentioned briefly in this Gibson.com article on the Gibson J-45 acoustic guitar. The article lists 20 Essential Facts regarding the guitar and #15 states Rush's Alex Lifeson used a Gibson B-45 (the J-45's smaller brother) 12-string on the album 2112. Thanks to RushFanForever for the heads up.

Neil Peart gets quoted in this opinion piece on hate crimes from the Dixie Sun. Author Mark Schurr quotes the line Mad men fed on fear and lies from Rush's Witch Hunt to highlight a point.

Rush get mentioned in a New York Times article about professional social media site LinkedIn (thanks CheeseCorn). It talks about using a headshot for your LinkedIn profile:

... It doesn't need to be a professional headshot. Just stand against a white wall in business attire (or, if you're a software engineer, a Rush t-shirt) and have someone take a cellphone photo of your face and shoulders. ...

By the way, I'm wearing a Rush t-shirt in my LinkedIn profile pic, although it's cropped out of the picture. :)

Reader Neil T let me know about a Rush reference in the Blue Man Group's current show. One of the skits is a demonstration of information overload and involves the Blue Men rapidly paging through e-books on an iPad, one of which is Tom Sawyer, which is described as Tom Sawyer floats up the Mississippi River and into Canada where he joined Rush and wrote songs about Ayn Rand.

The Music Group is a BBC radio show where host Dr. Phil Hammond asks each of his three guests to play the track of their choice for the delight or disdain of the others. On his April 5th show he had astrophysicist Dr. Lucie Green as one of the guests and the song she chose was Rush's Closer to the Heart. The podcast was just made available online this past weekend and you can listen to it at this link - the Rush part comes in at about the 12-minute mark. Thanks to Schuey for the heads up.

This past Wednesday evening around 8PM EST a one-minute, edited clip of Rush's Countdown from 1982's Signals was beamed to the Space Shuttle Endeavour as the wake-up music for the Shuttle crew, specifically at the request of Mission Specialist Mike Fincke. Here's what Mike had to say after hearing the wake-up:

Good morning to you all down in Houston and across the planet. I just wanted to say thanks for the song. That was by the band Rush and my friends Ken Fisher and Greg Shurtz sent that up for me. And Rush was really inspired by the launch of STS-1 so they included that in their music and it was really inspirational for them and for the whole album. What's really cool about it is that the Space Shuttle program has really inspired everybody across our planet for such a long time. So this song was a tribute to the Space Shuttle program and so we'd like to say good morning.

You can watch the video as was shown live Wednesday evening on NASA TV below or at this link.

That's it for this week. Have a great weekend!

NOTE: Posts over 10 years old are partially archived. All comments, images and other embedded media have been removed.