RUSH: The Upcoming Tour PROG Magazine Issue #166, January 2026 Words: Philip Wilding Portrait: Richard Sibbald

The irony is not lost that one of the best gigs this writer ever saw Rush play was their last. Or their last two, truth be told, both in California, both marking the end of the band’s R40 Tour, and depending on who you talked to, the end of the band.

Geddy Lee said it wasn’t over. He told me that in the back of our car as we drove to the penultimate show at the Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre. A strangely glorious setting for a long goodbye. I remember a roadie wandering past during soundcheck wearing a handmade R50 top, which must have seemed funny or hopeful at the start of the tour. Alex Lifeson said that it might be the end of the band, he doubled down on that later, and for Neil Peart, absolutely, he’d promised his friends one final tour, and this was it, you could see the finish line up ahead. His mood got brighter with each show, Ged’s a little darker as the road ahead began to run out.

Not that Neil was talking officially. He said hello to me backstage at both gigs and at the final aftershow, polite and warm as always, but he didn’t want to do a formal interview; why would he, what was left to say? Earlier, I’d stood by the pool of the London Hotel in LA on that hazy August day as rumours circulated that Neil had asked that his tour drums be shipped home after the last show and not back to storage for the next round of gigs. The circus was leaving town, the big top dismantled one last time.

I’ve written enough about that last show, not least in this year’s gargantuan Rush 50 box set, about how the band travelled back in time during the show, starting with Clockwork Angels and stripping away the layers until two hours later they were playing Working Man in front of a set designed to look like the high school shows they played before even Neil was in the band. It was brilliant, a fitting end to the band.

“Not that it was ever meant to be,” said Geddy when I brought it up later that evening. I nodded: the end-of-the-road R40 party went long into the night.

The only thing Geddy Lee asked me to do when I helped to present on his My Effin’ Life UK book tour was to give him the opportunity to tell the audience each night why the band hadn’t made it across the Atlantic for that last run. It was important to him that they knew it wasn’t by choice.

Fast-forward to early autumn 2025 and a chat about Rush during a dinner with Geddy in London. Contrary to what readers might think, our dinners rarely touch upon the band. They’re usually more about baseball, and we’d debated what the Yankees and Blue Jays might do as our thoughts turned towards the World Series. Turns out my dreams were dashed way before his. I knew that he and Al were jamming together at least once a week (I’d written about it at the start of the year) and I probably asked after Al and the stuff they were playing.

“It,” said Geddy with a sideways glance, “is evolving.”

And we went back to the bottle of excellent Riesling we were drinking, but that evolution was Darwinian. If it wasn’t going to be a reunion – how could it be? – then we were as sure as hell going to celebrate one of the greatest rock bands of the last four decades.

In a statement, Lee said, and I’m paraphrasing: “[We’ve] a lifetime’s worth of songs that we had put our cumulative hearts and souls into writing, recording, and playing. And so, after all that has gone down since that last show, Alex and I have done some serious soul searching and come to the decision that we fucking miss it.”

Though possibly not as much as we did.

And what of that fabled drum stool? I once sat behind one of Neil’s unfathomable kits in a rehearsal room in Toronto. He was about 10ft away, I hadn’t just hijacked them, and I did my very best to recreate the roll across the tom drums that ushers in The Temples Of Syrinx from 2112. Neil gave me a look that suggested he’d just stepped on a plug, so I was never really in the running for the role.

Geddy has a mind like a steel trap and is brighter than most stars (as in celestial bodies, not some goon musician), so when he told The Guardian in 2023 that he had “heard this drummer the other day, I think her name is Anika [Nilles]. She played on the last Jeff Beck tour, and I thought she was terrific”, we should have all probably been paying more attention.

Since then, pieces have begun to fit into place with talk of an extra keys player onstage – though Geddy will still be striking the familiar keyboard motifs Tom Sawyer and Subdivisions – and a tribute to Neil making up a centrepiece in the show signposted possibly to get ahead of the legion of Rush fans wailing and gnashing their teeth online, who could love any band to death with their misplaced ardour.

We’ve seen the initial run of shows across North America sell out and expand on an almost daily basis, with the internet shrieking about dynamic ticketing, though it appears most of those spikes in prices are in the resale seats, where opportunistic touts have bought up tickets and then instantly put them back on sale at an extortionate mark-up. There’s a special place in Hell for those people, and let’s hope Old Nick charges them extra to get in.

On a more personal level, my inbox has been noticeably busy, mostly from people who I’ve never met. Can I get them into the US shows to meet the guys? (Not a chance.) Can they take photos at the Toronto show? (Keep moving.) Why are tickets so expensive? (See above.) Are they going to play here? (Who knows? Maybe.)

One thing I do know, though, is that on August 1, 2015, standing among droves of people literally in tears at the thought of there being no more Rush, the Forum house lights coming up on their pain, as Neil had waved his bandmates goodbye one last time, in my heart I knew it was over. The 15-year-old in me crushed forever.

And now I think about one of the last things Geddy said from the stage that night, how they’d see us down the road some day. Somehow, somewhere around that far bend of blacktop and just out of sight, the unthinkable is being imagined. And now, before we even know it, that day will be here again.