Where Worlds Collide

It’s a quarter of a century since a band from Aylesbury released their first single, “Market Square Heroes”. Having heard their Radio 1 sessions, and seen the band play the Reading Festival two months earlier, it was an eagerly-awaited release. With strong 70s prog inflences very much worn on their sleeves at the time, they were a world apart from the NWOBHM scene I was largely into at the time.

I bought the 12″ version which included the 17 minute epic “Grendel” on the B side. I remember listening to the solo at the end of that song, and thinking “That Steve Rothery bloke isn’t a bad guitarist”. It never occurred to me I’d still be a fan 25 years later.

Here’s to the next 25 years!

I’m about to upgrade this blog from WordPress 2.1 to 2.3. That should explain any strangeness for the next hour or two…

Update: Seems to have worked so far. No nasty-looking database errors, and it doesn’t seem to have eaten my theme.

It’s a long time since I’ve seen Rush live. I missed their 30th anniversary tour, so the last time I caught them live was the “Hold Your Fire” tour umpty-ump years ago.

This was my second visit of the year to our local Enormodome, the first being Deep Purple back in April. It’s not quite as horrible acoustically as the ghastly Wembley Arena were I last saw the band. In the last couple of years I’ve got used to small gigs where it feels like the band are playing in your front room, so huge arena shows feel a bit strange. To make matters worse, I was right up in the gods (Cygnus X1?), high above Alex Lifeson’s side of the stage.

But big shows tend to make up in sheer spectacle for what they lack in intimacy, and this one was no exception, with extensive use of back projection, lasers and even pyro. On the massive stage, Alex Lifeson had the classic backline made up from a wall of Marshall Stacks. But on the other side of Neil Peart’s immense drumkit, Geddy Lee had a backline of… rotisserie cabinets. Filled with chickens. Not only that, at two points during the show a roadie dressed as a chef came and inspected the chickens to see if they were done yet. I don’t know if the crew ate the chickens after the show, or how many complained “Not chicken again“.

All that would count for nothing if the music wasn’t up to scratch, but Rush didn’t let us down on that score. There was no support, the band choosing to play for no less than three hours, two 90 minute sets either side of an interval. While they’re clearly not young any more, they still have the stamina to keep up a high energy level throughout, and have the chops to deliver the often complex material virtually flawlessly. Geddy Lee can still hit almost all those helium-powered high notes.

They played a lot of material from the new album “Snakes and Arrows”, which came over strongly live, and confirmed that this their best album for at least a decade. The setlist also drew very heavily from their four albums from the first half of the 1980s; “Permanent Waves” through to “Grace Under Pressure”. While some may bemoan the absence of 70s prog epics like “Cygnus-X1″ or “Xanadu”, their 80s output does seem to have withstood the test of time rather better. Certainly for me, the superb renditions of songs like “Subdivisions” and “Distant Early Warning” were among the highlights of the show.

And then there was the drum solo. There are only two people in the world that can play drum solos worth paying money to see. One is the classical percussionist Evelyn Glennie. The other is Neil Peart. He battered away at not just two complete kits’ worth of drums, but all manner of electronic percussion, including what appeared to be an electric xylophone, kicking up a veritable percussive storm which drew the biggest applause of the night.

The triumphant show ended with their only two hit singles, “Spirit of Radio” and “Tom Sawyer”, the latter introduced with a specially commissioned South Park sketch about a Rush tribute band.

Encores saw Lifeson bring out his white Gibson semi-acoustic for the real oldie “A Passage to Bankok” and the instrumental “YYZ”.

And then it was 11pm, and a mad dash across town for the last train home. Where had those three hours gone?

As you’re proably noticed (unless of course you’re reading this via RSS), I’ve tweaked the layout of this blog a bit. Not a complete new design, more a second attempt at what I was trying to achieve in the first place. It now actually works properly in Internet Explorer (i.e it looks the same as it does in Firefox)

Let me know if it looks strange in any other browsers.

I’ve reinstated the coloured background rather than white, but I’m not totally sure about that. What does anyone else think?

The last three months of the year see some hectic (for me, at any rate) gig going, with another nine to add to the 22 for the year so far.

• Tomorrow night: Rush at Manchester MEN Arena
• Friday 26th Oct: Breathing Space, launch party for the album “Coming Up for Air” at York Post Office Social Club
• Friday 9th Nov: Mostly Autumn, York Grand Opera House
• Saturday 24th Nov: Twelfth Night, Deptford
• Thursday 29th Nov: Within Temptation, at Manchester Academy 1
• Friday 30th Nov: Marillion at Manchester Academy 1
• Saturday 8th Dec: Porcupine Tree, Manchester Academy 1
• Sunday 16th Dec: Mostly Autumn, London Astoria Theatre
• Wednesday 19th Dec: Mostly Autumn, Crewe Limelight

Tickets booked for most of these, and overnight accomodation sorted for the two in York (not a big rock and roll city). Fish at Crewe on the 22nd Dec is still a possibility.

This is amusing. Hipper-than-thou music journalist goes to see Rush at Wembley Arena, presumably with the intention of sneering at 70s prog-rock dinosaurs, and is reluctantly forced to admit that they were actually really, really good.

I’m going to see the final date of the tour tomorrow night. Should be good; everyone is saying they’re on cracking form.

Blender’s The 40 Worst Lyricists In Rock may have hit some worthy targets with Paul Stanley, Noel Gallagher and Jim Morrison, but their dismissal of Neal Peart is music journalist boilerplate sneering at it’s worst.

Drummers are good at many things: exploding, drowning in their own vomit, drumming. But the Rush skinsman proved they should never write lyrics—or read books. Peart opuses like “Cygnus X-1” are richly awful tapestries of fantasy and science fiction, steeped in an eighth-grade understanding of Western philosophy. 2112, Rush’s 1976 concept album based on individualist thinker Ayn Rand’s novella Anthem, remains an awe-inspiring low point in the sordid relationship between rock and ideas. Worst lyric: “I stand atop a spiral stair/An oracle confronts me there/He leads me on light years away/Through astral nights, galactic days” (“Oracle: The Dream”)

Nothing like damning someone’s entire work by quoting a few lines out of context, is there? The same list also includes Gabriel-era Genesis, and naturally, Jon Anderson’s lyrics with Yes.

The only people that think the lyrics actually matter more than the music are professional rock critics, and fans of those bands that are/were all lyrics and no music.

So Jon Anderson’s 70s Yes lyrics were all stream-of-consciousness gibberish, and weren’t deeply symbolic of man’s struggle against his socio-political envionment. So bloody what? Perhaps I should point out that post-punk sacred cows The Fall have no tunes, their singer can’t sing, and musicians can barely play?

The Grauniad’s Dave Simpson searches for the least musical city in the UK and doesn’t seem to get it.

I’m struggling with York. Ex-Seahorse Chris Helme still treads the boards, there was a tipped but flop band called the Ya Ya’s a while back (I think managed by the same guy that brought us the Stone Roses) and at least one of Nine Black Alps hails from the town. But otherwise, it’s full of former Zoot and the Roots types.

If York really is such a cultural desert, why have I travelled to or will be travelling to that city no less than five times during 2007 purely to go to gigs? Presumably he doesn’t acknowledge the existance of anything other than NME-approved four chord indie rock.

On the other hand, perhaps Steve Jones can tell me if this description of his home town is remotely accurate:

Nothing can beat Telford in Shropshire for being a cultural desert, It’s not a city yet, but it’s already the been voted the Chav capital of the U.K.

The only good thing to ever come out of this place is the road out of it.

Only thing in its favour (besides the road out) is that people here avoid going to Church and the C.o.E have had to draft in a Vicar to try and get the locals along to worship.

It’s main features are industrial estates, council estates and a population of binge drinking drug addicts.

I was once told that if the U.K. was to be given an enema they would stick the pipe in Telford.

It even has the lowest rate of lottery winners in the U.K.

Avoid !

The 2007 Manchester Model Railway exhibition was held, as usual, in New Century Hall in the centre of Manchester. This show traditionally features layouts of a very high standard, and this year was no exception

I’m not normally a fan of narrow gauge steam layouts. I find too many of them to be random hodgepodges that lack any sense of verisimillitude. Bridport Town is an exception; it’s set in a specific location in Dorset, with most of the non-railway buildings based on real structures. Another touch hat lends authenticity is that the scratchbuilt locomotive fleet are neither models of motive power well-known and associated with other lines, nor the sort of dubuous freelance concoctions you often see on narrow gauge layouts. Instead they’re based on drawings of proposed locomotives that were never actually built, in this case a Hunslet 4-4-0T intended for the Lynton and Barnstable

The World War One Baldwin was a common loco on a great many English (and Welsh) narrow gauge lines. Large numbers were shipped to France during the war for service on military railways. These rough and ready beasts were available cheap after 1918 for any railway in need of motive power.

Lapford Road is based in the Exeter to Barnstable line in the late 1970s. The blue diesel era is now as much ancient history as any steam railway; class 25 locomotives are long since gone from the main line network. Indeed, the surviving preserved examples have now been museum pieces for longer than they were in main line service.

Woodhouse was a large O gauge terminal, very much a classic steam branch terminus layout featuring the odd early diesel, such as this class 17, a model of an attractive prototype. Unfortunately the full sized versions turned out to be almost totally useless, and were consigned to the scrapheap after less than a decade of use.

There were only a couple of N gauge layouts in the show; this was one of them, Bassenthwaite, set in the lake district. Although fairly small (it’s little more than a train-set oval with some additional storage roads for exhibition use), it still displays some excellent scenic modelling, especially the late itself.

I had serious mixed feelings about this gig. I’d bought my ticket back in May, when both the circumstances and the lineup of the band were very different.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. I’ve expressed my opinions about events in several forums, and won’t repeat it all again. Let’s just say it was a very deliberate choice to go to the gig wearing an Odin Dragonfly T-shirt.

I wasn’t expecting to bump into the man himself on the steps of the venue. But since you’re reading this, you can tell that I did live to tell the tale. He even made a point of shaking hands with me at the end of the gig.

As for the show itself, Fish was on fine form both in humour and in voice throughout. By by the end of the first song, he dispelled any lingering doubts about the shape of his voice following from his bout of laryngitis that caused the postponment of the original gig two weeks earlier, and the energy levels didn’t drop for the next two hours.

The setlist included most of Marillion’s 1988 album “Clutching at Straws” along with four songs from the new album 13th Star, with a few other favourites from Fish’s near 20-year solo career thrown in for good measure. I can’t remember the complete setlist from the last time he played Manchester, but I don’t think there was a single song common to both nights. I think that says something about the strength of the body of work he’s produced over the past quarter century.

High spots were too many to mention; of the new songs ‘Machmal’ packs a very powerful punch, ‘Circle Line’ and ‘Square Go’ rock hard, and ‘Dark Star’ is even more intense live than on record. I have to say that him singing some of the angriest lines straight in my face was just a little intimidating. That T shirt may have something to do with it. I’d have loved to have heard more of the new album played, but the Clutching at Straws songs came over fantastically well live too. (I still love that album, even though it’s two decades old).

The band were tight and well-drilled. Frank Usher may look old, but he reeled off some superbly fluid solos from that battered guitar. I’ve got into trouble for criticising his playing on Marillion oldies before; after all, there’s only one Steve Rothery. Probably wisely, he didn’t try impersonate Rothers and play the original solos note-for-note, but creatively reinterpreted them in his own style. And his playing on Cliché was mesmerising. Chris Johnson seems to have fitted in well; although it was wierd hearing him singing all the female backing vocal parts.

One of the most memorable gigs of the year, for all the right reasons. If it didn’t quite top Marillion at The Forum or Mostly Autumn at Bury, it came very, very close.