“The 80s was tough for me as a guitarist.”

Alex Lifeson looks back on the Rush’s progression through the 80s, aka ‘the keyboard era’.

The first 15 years of Rush’s recording career can be divided into clear chapters, each consisting of four studio albums bookended by a live album. Signals kicked off their third chapter – aka ‘the keyboard era’. Its successors saw Rush charting a slightly wayward course, torn between the synth-heavy sounds of the moment (largely down to Geddy Lee) and their traditional guitar-centred sounds (via Alex Lifeson).

“I guess I just fought for my guitar rights for years after Signals,” says Lifeson. “Of course, on the albums that followed, we really developed the whole keyboard character. But it was a bit of a fight.”

Grace Under Pressure (1984) – co-produced by Peter Henderson after U2 associate Steve Lillywhite blew out Rush to work with Simple Minds – went some way to restoring the balance, bringing Lifeson’s guitars further up in the mix.

“There’s something about the sound and the power and the songwriting quality that really strikes me,” says Lifeson. “I really love that record.”

Lee’s keyboard obsessions peaked on 1985’s Power Windows, an album that, sonically at least, came over like a more refined, glossy version of Signals. Lifeson told Classic Rock that he found the record “a challenge – but I thought, ‘Go with it, it will work out in the end.’”

It would, but it took a few more albums. Despite featuring Lifeson in a more prominent role (and one of the all-time great Rush singles in Time Stand Still), 1987’s Hold Your Fire has been written off by many fans as a bloodless misfire. The 1989 live album A Show Of Hands was a de facto end on the ‘keyboard era’, but Presto, released in the same year, felt like a continuation, though it was better received than its predecessor.

“The 80s was tough for me at times as a guitarist,” concedes Lifeson. “I missed the more direct hard rock approach. But I think we came back around to that for [1993’s] Counterparts.”