So, being a Rush fan in the early 1980s was to be something of an outsider. Earlier on in their career, the NME had dubbed them ‘junior Hitlers’, a tag which rankled for reasons I’ll explain later, and which definitely cast them into a shadow from which they never quite emerged in Britain, at least.Ī few months ago, I watched an episode of ‘Word in Your Attic’ featuring David Mitchell (not that one, the other one) talking about his extraordinary book Utopia Avenue, during which he returned more than once to the music of Rush, and saw clearly that not only is the music of Rush a gap in the otherwise comprehensive knowledge of both David Hepworth and Mark Ellen, but perhaps a certain unease at the mere mention of this band who talked about the likes of Ayn Rand in their sleevenotes. The one thing anyone in the UK could tell you about Rush in 1984 was that they were decidedly not cool. Well, I’m joking about the ‘cool kids’ part, obviously. It’s not the best Rush album, or the best-known, and it’s probably not – quite – my favourite, but it’s the one which sums up a specific and pivotal time in my life, and which chimed with me and where I was in life so exactly that it was always going to be Grace Under Pressure, or p/g as the cool kids call it. The main reason that I imposed a rule of ‘one album per artist’ on this list is that there would have easily been half a dozen Rush albums to write about, and probably half a dozen more I’d have tried to sneak in, leaving the list looking a little lopsided.ĭespite that, choosing this as mt representative Rush album was straightforward. I hadn’t specifically planned to land on Rush at the halfway point in this, but here we are.
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