The UK's Daily Telegraph has just published a new print interview with Rush, conducted during their Fifty Something tour stop in Seattle last month. Alex was interviewed in person, and Geddy via video, with a quote or two from touring drummer Anika Nilles thrown in as well. The interview focuses on how Rush's tour came about, and how the band had not expected the level of enthusiasm they received from fans:
... "And the shows are not just rock concerts," adds the gregarious 73-year-old [Alex Lifeson]. "They're family reunions. A communion. People are high-fiving, crying, laughing, telling stories. There's not a single stranger in the building. Everybody feels a kinship. And there's no politics, no anger and none of the cr-- that's going on outside. There's such positive energy coming off the stage, and we're getting it back. Honestly, we never expected it."
"Surprised and gratified are appropriate words," is how Lee, also 73, describes his feelings about the ticket scramble when he video-calls from his Canadian home a couple of weeks later. Around show days, he saves his singing voice, that instantly identifiable (in his words) "screech", by not speaking. "We thought there would be demand from Rush fans, of course," he notes of the band's famously fanatical audience.
Looking very much like Bono's geeky older brother, he's speaking in front of a wall of Fenders - a fraction of his 300-strong collection of bass guitars. "We live a fairly quiet life here in Toronto," he says. "And we have not been a part of the music industry [for a while]. But the excitement that surrounded the tour, from all sorts of places we didn't expect, was a shock." ...
They also gush a bit about their new drummer Anika Nilles, and how well she has fit into the band, despite a few online Neanderthals:
... Peart's is a big stool to fill, but Nilles easily manages it, as evidenced by her thunderous but adroit performance onstage in Seattle, and also in the vast majority of fan responses. Nonetheless there was, inevitably, a vocal minority of online Neanderthals who criticised Rush for hiring (of all things) a woman. It was evidence, seemingly, of a "woke agenda", just like that of Linkin Park, who recruited singer Emily Armstrong after the death of vocalist Chester Bennington. "I ignore them," shrugs the easygoing Lee. "They're moronic assertions. We chose Anika because she's brilliant. We live in a time of empowered idiots, and they're all over social media. The quickest way to an unhappy life is to pay too much attention to them."
So, to be clear, Rush doesn't have a woke agenda? Lee laughs. "Definitely not. I wasn't aware that we had any kind of agenda." ...
Ged also talks about their upcoming show in Poland, and how that will hold special meaning to him:
... The week after their final show at London's O2, Rush play Poland for the first time. That show in Kraków will be particularly meaningful for Lee. As detailed in his vivid 2023 memoir My Effin' Life, the man born Gershon Eliezer Weinrib is the son of Jewish Holocaust survivors, both his Polish parents having made it out of Nazi concentration camps, arriving in Canada in 1948. "I went to Poland with my mother in 1995, which was the 50th anniversary of her liberation, and there was a big event at the concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen." Then the family visited Warsaw, where Mary (née Manya) was born, "and then we drove to the small town where she lived with her family, and where she was eventually incarcerated. And because she had spent quite some time in Auschwitz, we also went to Kraków and visited that camp." It was, he says, "an incredibly moving, difficult visit, as you can imagine. But it was also good for her to get some closure. So I have been to the country before, but I know there are a lot of Rush fans in Poland that have wanted us to come to play. So it'll be very interesting to hit the stage there. I'm really looking forward to that show." ...
Rush's UK tour kicks off in March of 2027, and you can read the entire interview online here (bypass paywall here). Thanks to Joe V for the heads up.
