Rush

Rush formed in Toronto in 1968 and spent six years getting its line-up wrong. The first version paired guitarist Alex Lifeson with drummer John Rutsey and bassist Jeff Jones, and Geddy Lee replaced Jones almost immediately. The band people actually mean by Rush did not exist until July 1974, when Neil Peart came in for Rutsey, four months after the self-titled debut had already been released.

What that trio could do was play arrangements which had no business working live with three people on stage. Lee sang in a register that split audiences on first contact while handling bass and keyboards at once, Lifeson built guitar parts around the gaps, and Peart wrote the words as well as playing a kit that needed a diagram. The lyrics were the genuinely unusual part. Peart wrote about free will, machinery, ambition and time, subjects no other hard rock band of the period wanted to be caught with, and he did it without irony, which is why the band collected devotion and mockery in roughly equal measure.

The discography reads as a long argument with itself. The mid-seventies records reach for side-long science fiction and peak with 2112 in 1976 and Hemispheres in 1978. Then the running times contract, and Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures find radio without giving up the odd time signatures. The eighties went synthetic, sometimes gorgeously and sometimes at the guitar's expense, before the nineties albums pushed the guitar back to the front. They kept going as far as Clockwork Angels in 2012, and the line-up held until 2015, when Peart retired from music.