Episode
Musical Musings: Five of the Best - Rush
- Podcast
- New Zealand Net Radio
- Published
- Aug 26, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 4196
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://www.nznetradio.net.nz/podcast/#ep-98
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Summary
On this edition of Musical Musings: Five of the Best, Armando Venditti — host of The Music Den on YouTube, joining us from Edmonton — comes back to the show to take on a band that is practically a Canadian institution: Rush. It starts in August 1968 in Willowdale, a suburb north of Toronto, with three high-school kids playing Cream covers in church basements. Six years later, four days after original drummer John Rutsey walked out, a bookish young man from St Catharines named Neil Peart — lately selling farm equipment parts for his father — turned up to audition in shorts, in a battered Ford Pinto, with his drums in rubbish bags — and a scrappy bar-rock trio became something else entirely. Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Peart went on to spend forty-one years and forty-two million albums writing about totalitarian futures, Coleridge and suburban despair, in time signatures you need a pencil to count, with no line-up changes and not the faintest interest in what anyone else was doing. Peart died in January 2020; this year Lee and Lifeson took the name back out on the road for the Fifty Something tour, and the songs turn out to have lost nothing at all. Armando's five run from 1977 to 1987 — precisely the decade Rush turned from the last of the great progressive-rock epics into a synthesiser band with one foot on the radio — and this episode carries a little extra history to join the dots between them. We open with "Subdivisions" from 1982's Signals, the suburban-alienation anthem that Alex Lifeson has never entirely forgiven the mix for burying his guitar under; then "Distant Early Warning" from Grace Under Pressure, a Cold War broadcast named after the radar line strung across the Canadian Arctic, complete with a Dr. Strangelove homage in the video. "Tom Sawyer" needs no i…