Midlands Rocks caught up with a true rock legend recently. Alex Lifeson of RUSH took time out from his tour preps to give us an insight into the what makes one of the biggest bands in the world tick.

Photos are courtesy of Marty Moffat

Midlands Rocks: Hi Alex, how are you?

Alex Lifeson: Well I’ve got a bit of a cold at the moment but otherwise I’m fine.

MR: The Rush ‘Time Machine’ tour is notable for you playing the whole of  Moving Pictures plus introducing two new songs, Caravan and BU2B from the forthcoming album Clockwork Angels. Can we expect any more new songs on the European leg of the tour?

AL:  No, we kind of ran out of time.  At the end of the last tour we hadn’t planned on going back out. We planned to go straight into the studio to continue writing and recording but there was such demand for us to go back out and we were convinced, particularly coming back to the UK, that the tour was important to us.

So having a little break of only about six months it really wasn’t enough time to get into it. Once you get home you get into a whole other groove and then I’ve been doing a whole bunch of other stuff. I’ve been doing some scoring for film, and Ged and I have been doing a little bit of writing. We’ve got a couple of ideas down in the last couple of weeks and we’re excited about them but we couldn’t really dive into it and we’ll just wait till this tour is over and we’ve put Time Machine behind us.

With Grace Under Pressure we had some shows at Radio City Hall in New York and we’d been working in the music for Grace Under Pressure and we did play a few songs. I think we played Distant Early Warning and maybe Kid Gloves, something like that, at those shows. And it was kinda cool to play unrecorded music. And that’s what we did with this thing, doing Caravan and BU2B and we talked about maybe having another one for the second half of the tour.

It’s kind of interesting to us to write some stuff and go out and play it. I think those songs have since developed and it would be interesting to get into the studio and maybe having another crack at them, playing with a little more energy or changing them in some way.

MR: This tour saw you play Argentina and Chile for the first time. Were they as noisy as the Brazilian crowd captured on the Rush In Rio DVD?

AL:  Yeah they were, they were quite noisy. The Argentinians were particularly emotional. They were quite crazy. I mean there were people with tears in their eyes. And the Chilean audience was amazing it was a great way to end a tour. They were so appreciative. Like the Brazilians they knew every word to every song, even though English is not that prevalent there. It was great during those South American gigs. It was wonderful for us to finish that way.

MR: Although there have been a whole slew of DVD and Blu-Ray concert releases from Rush there are still no video releases of the whole of 2112 or Hemispheres – well, the first sides. Do you think those will ever see the light of day, even if only as bonus tracks?

AL:   I don’t know, I think we did have a version of 2112, the whole first side, a live version. But you know what we may have recorded it in Tornoto but it wasn’t released. That’s right, that was the summer of Serena’s accident (Rush drummer Neil Peart’s 19-year-old daughter was killed in a car accident in 1997) and we shelved that whole project. That exactly what it is, in fact. So we’ve talked about revisiting that.

 

MR:  I was lucky enough to meet you, Geddy and Neil backstage at Bingley Hall in Stafford around 1979, on the Tour of the Semi-Hemispheres. But I must admit to a twinge of guilt a couple of years later when I read Neil’s lyrics to the song Limelight, about his discomfort with the whole fanboy thing, and especially “I can’t pretend a stranger is a long-awaited friend”.

AL:  Well I think that he was still feeling OK then but a lot of things changed with Permanent Waves, we started to become a little more popular and of course with Moving Pictures it really opened up. He’s always been a little embarrassed by the whole adulation, the whole celebrity thing, now, obviously more than ever.

MR: So does Neil still escape on his motorbike straight after a gig?

AL: He doesn’t necessarily get on his bike after the gig but he gets on the bus with the bikes and they stop somewhere and stay at a motel somewhere along the way on the side of the road and get an early start and he motorcycles the rest of the way. He’ll do 25 to 30,000 miles on the tour.

MR: As well as recording one of the Time Machine gigs for DVD release you’ve also been working on the 30^th anniversary re-release of Moving Pictures plus the remix of Vapor Trails. What can we expect from those.

AL:  I just signed off on the 5.1 surround sound mix of Moving Pictures and that’s really great. It’s quite incredible, it’s such a sensory experience. We were very careful to be as true as we could to the original tonality of that record so it wasn’t like we were remixing it, it was like we were providing a different sort of mix of the same thing. And it’s a little tricky with 5.1 as it’s such a dynamic change - when you go back to the original it seems so small. We were as careful as we could be but I’ve got to say that I was really impressed, it really does sound great.

With Vapor Trails it’s a difficult thing. You could say with any piece of work you do you’d like to revisit it and have another crack at it. But there was something about Vapor Trails for all of us that was such a pivotal event it was such an emotional record for us and they way we recorded it, the way we worked on it (Vapour Trails was the first album recorded by Rush after the death of both Serena and then Neil’s wife Jacqueline).

We spent 14 months on that record and it was something that was so important about capturing the essence of what we were doing. It seemed to us at the time we were going through such an emotional upheaval that everything that we did at that second was what should be captured. We weren’t going to write it and then rerecord it and keep rerecording it until we got the perfect production.

Now there were some production problems, especially when the record was mastered, it was mastered too much. The thing with some of these mastering engineers, especially at that time it was like a bit of a competition to see who could be the loudest and Vapor Trails really suffered from that. There was a little distortion that was really amplified by that process.

So a few years back Rich Chycki remixed a couple of the tracks (Earthshine and One Little Victory appeared on the Retrospective III compilation album) and we were so impressed with those remixes that we’ve been talking back and forth for the past couple of years and the record company really had no interest in appeasing us so we decided let’s just do it ourselves - we’ll pay for it.

It wasn’t a question of money. We’ll pay to have it redone and then the record company finally decided that they would rerelease it – they wouldn’t invest anything in it but they would re-release it. So we’re just in the process of that. Rich is actually doing a little housekeeping for that. He has a template for the mix but there’s a great deal of going in and fixing little pops and crackles.

Earthshine sounds really great, astonishing. One Little Victory, that was in a rougher shape than Earthshine was and even that sounds so much better. And I know, for Ged, he feels a great responsibility, he was there for the mastering and it just sort of got away. And I know he always felt badly about that. We were so exhausted by the end of that record that I would never fault him for one second. But anyway this is our chance to kind of right that and even if it’s just for us then it’s worth it.

MR: One final question. Your show stretch beyond three hours and with you all in your late 50s, how on earth do you find the stamina?

AL: Well, I have to say it’s getting tougher but we all work out very diligently before a tour. Geddy and I go to the gym two or three times a week, we work with trainers. You have to do this stuff.

We didn’t have to do it before, in fact you could go out and drink, you know, a bottle of wine, and get up and get through it and it’d be fine and you’d do that over the course of six or seven months. But now even after the first month or two you feel exhausted after a three-hour show.

MR: Well Alex, thanks so much for taking the time to talk.

AL: My pleasure. Thank you.

·         Rush play the LG Arena, Birmingham NEC, on Sunday, May 22,. Tickets cost from £45 plus booking fees.
Photos by Marty Moffatt - http://www.martymoffatt.com/