Just this week I attended the Rush gig at Wembley (UK), part of their Snakes & Arrows tour. Of the three Rush tours I’ve been to (all at Wembley and all with Chris & Julian), this ranks top. Purely, because the band were relaxed, enthusiastic, and enjoying themselves.
No doubt Rush are proud of their latest material; Snakes & Arrows is a solid album with superb production. The positive reaction has re-ignited Rush and it showed in their performance. Although at Wembley, the atmosphere felt like a fresh band at the local pub, including an enthusiastic giving audience. This is how it should be; R30 (the previous tour) on the other hand may have been too much to undertake; the pressure to put on a spectacular show; the pressures outside out of band life too tiring, whatever it was, R30 didn’t quite hit the mark.
This time though, the audience had spectacular new material to hear & classics which hadn’t been played live for years, combined with a slightly updated Wembley arena (which improved the usually horrible acoustics), energetic band members (Neil Peart, for example, pounded his drums till the very last note) and complementary video backdrops, including this amusing South Park intro. The show rocked.
From the set list, my personal favourites on the night were Mission, Monkey Business, Circumstances, Dreamline, Far Cry, Armor & Sword, Witch Hunt, Malignant Narcissism, the solo (of course), Tom Sawyer and YYZ.
Each time we see Rush live in the UK, we believe it’ll be the last time. However, this time we believe they’ll be back - the re-ignited Rush may just have more material in them.
That’s it for now - I’ll leave you with Neil Peart’s “The Game of Snakes And Arrows“, the introduction to the tour programme.
