Rush

Caravan’s parent album was the record that changed a lot of people’s minds about not liking Rush.

It’s parent album changed a lot of people’s minds about not liking Rush, as did this song in particular.

CARAVAN Rush From: Clockwork Angels, 2012

When Rush’s Clockwork Angels album was released in 2012, few suspected it would turn out to be the band’s final album, not least because it sounded like the work of a group that still had plenty of fuel in the tank. But what a way to close out a quite remarkable career. A muscular yet intricate concept record, it included some stonecold classics, led by the incendiary, one-two punch of Caravan.

If you didn’t ‘get’ Rush before, this was likely to be the track that converted you. For a band who often revelled in the polarising sides of prog rock, Caravan had an instant, swaggering sense of funk, while retaining the nuances and textures that had served them well for 19 albums already. ‘I can’t stop thinking big,’ Geddy Lee sang in the song’s soaring chorus (his voice now a little lower and arguably more palatable with age), conjuring the image of a world ‘lit only by fire’, over guitarist Alex Lifeson’s swathes of crunchy tone and an especially tasty blues-drenched solo.

“The concept of doing a concept album is an anxious one,” Geddy Lee told Prog. “Especially for me. I was so sensitive to going out there and be seen as being rooted in the past. I was so conscious of wanting to move forward. It’s a kind of sticky wicket, as you guys would say, and we wanted to make sure, by working all the way through with Neil on these lyrics, that there was a freshness and a vitality running through it.”

Given that their album sales in the US are right up there with The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, outside the prog world Rush kept a pretty low profile over the years. But by the time Clockwork Angels was due to be released their mainstream status had shifted noticeably. They’d been absorbed by popular culture. They enjoyed an affection reserved for only a handful of enduring rock bands (AC/DC are one that comes to mind). Forty years into their career, Rush were now reaping the rewards for being themselves.

“There have always been people with this fanatical reaction to Rush and people who just don’t get it at all – who are grossed out by what we do,” Lee says, laughing.

Neil Peart’s story for Clockwork Angels percolated through many literary seams, notably steampunk. Filtered through the Victorian fiction of HG Wells and Jules Verne, this idea of ‘a future as seen from the past’ was championed by current writers including Peart’s friend, Kevin J Anderson. On Clockwork Angels this was used, as the drummer put it, to “tell a story set in an alternate timeline, with alchemy, clockwork, and steampunkery”. And so, as listeners, we followed a character on a quest through an antique sci-fi world teeming with pirates, anarchists, explorers and carnival dwellers. It was a heady theme, and Rush cranked up their unrivalled power-trio smarts to set it to some of the toughest music they had made, of which Caravan was the ultimate rock earworm.

“Being progressive is what we’ve dedicated our lives to,” Lee says. “Trying to be interesting within our hard-rock framework. Moving it. Trying to make it a bit more interesting. It’s hard to look at it objectively, for me. I felt that we’d reached a happy medium in telling a story in a rock-opera style – and that’s a dangerous place to go – but telling it in a rock framework. But I think we’ve achieved that with this album.”

‘Clockwork Angels had some of the toughest music Rush had made, of which Caravan was the ultimate rock earworm.’