Prog-rock legend Geddy Lee of Rush brings My Effin' Life to Portsmouth Guildhall on his spoken word tour

​But then two things happened in quick succession. In January 2020, the Canadian trio’s virtuoso drummer Neil Peart died of brain cancer – something he’d been fighting for more than three years but had kept from the public. Then of course the world went into a Covid-induced lockdown.

“I had been approached numerous times over the years to write a memoir, a biography-thing and it was like, go away, I'm far too young to be looking backwards, you know, I have way too much to do way too much ahead of me.

“But a number of things conspired to change that, number one and the most obvious one was the long illness and eventual passing of my friend and bandmate which put me in a very reflective mood and it was something I took quite hard. So there I was doing my grief work, locked down, and unable to see my mother who was in a building that was locked down and wouldn't let visitors in because that was the early days of Covid and people were really afraid for the elderly.

“Whenever I talked to her, it was getting increasingly difficult because she had dementia. All these things made me sort of become hyper-aware of the tenuous grip we have on our memory banks. And I thought, here I am not getting any younger.”

His friend Daniel Richler, co-writer of Geddy Lee’s Big Beautiful Book of Bass, started sending the musician short stories – remembrances of his father, the author Mordecai Richler.

"He'd send me these stories, a memory, what he called evocations. And he challenged me to write a story, a memory of my dad getting angry with me or something like that. We went back and forth like this for a while and it turned out that my stories were getting longer and longer and he said, Ged, I think you're writing a book. I said: ‘Really?’ He goes: ‘Yeah. And I think you should write a book’. So I kind of slipped into it like that.”

The resulting book is My Effin’ Life which follows not only the highs and lows of the trio’s 45 year career as they scored multi-platinum albums like 2112, A Farewell to Kings and Moving Pictures while pushing the envelope of what a rock band could do, but also his family’s background.

"Early on I was just enjoying writing the short stories and entertaining myself in lockdown. You have to remember after Neil passed, that had a powerful impact on me and it kind of quashed any ideas I had for making music. I did not feel like I had any music in me at that moment.

“I was kind of trying to gather myself. The idea of writing words, which I had tried, and I guess succeeded in a way on the Big Beautiful Book of Bass, I found that a very cathartic process. I like writing, I like the conversation with myself.

“I think I was just enjoying that and then eventually it grew into this thing and that opened a whole other can of worms.

"And of course, at first remembering all the early days of Rush was great fun. We look at those years of our youth through very rose-coloured glasses and it was a bit of a detective game for me, testing my brain – what happened in 1968? Was that when I first met Al?” Alex Lifeson, Rush’s guitarist, “Where did I meet Al? And then I started remembering all the long drives in the USA and when Neil came into the band and all the adventures we'd had on the road and all the drunken after show parties, all that typical rock and roll stuff.

Why write a memoir?

"When I really got to thinking about my life and what it means to do a memoir, I said, well, what is the point of doing this?

“People need to understand the writer. It's all well and good just to tell happy laughing, drunken rock and roll stories. But that's a bit of a cliche. And I'm not against that – I have a bit of that in my book! There's no question, there are some good stories about the rock and roll life in there.

“But I think one has to aspire to give the reader a sense of the person who's talking to them. For that to happen, they have to understand my childhood, they had to understand what formed this dude that they have right now talking to them through the pages. I felt it important on a number of levels to include my parents' story and how they survived the Holocaust and how they came to Canada.

“Without that, I wouldn't be here, there would be no Rush as it was. All those things are building blocks to creating a picture for the reader of the person who is hoping they'll enjoy the book.”

Geddy’s parents were Polish Jews who survived the concentration camps during the Second World War, emigrating to Canada soon after. This obviously had an impact on the family and their children’s upbringing, growing up in a Toronto neighbourhood.

"In families of the Holocaust, parents usually take one of two routes when dealing with their kids. I have a number of friends whose parents survived as well, so I speak of this with some experience. In some families, they don't talk about it, they can't talk about it. Some people are so badly scarred from it that it's too much for them to openly discuss. And my dad was kind of like that. My dad didn't talk much about the Holocaust.

“My mum, on the other hand, was a fountain of information about the horrors that she had survived. She spoke really openly about everything they'd gone through and how lucky she was and the ups and the downs and the miseries and the torture, and sometimes you'd be sitting there and you'd go to bed and have nightmares!

"I don't think it's in the parents' handbook on the best way to raise a child, perhaps. But in the end I'm thankful that she didn't hide that away from us that.

“We grew up knowing how lucky we were to be here and how hard and how fortunate they were to survive. That instilled some other kinds of values in me, I think, and my brother and sister, and the result is we're very close family still to this day. Say what you will about what you should and shouldn't tell your kids, but if they're resilient they'll process it.”

Getting into rock music

Geddy’s father died when he was 12. As the eldest son he was required to go to the synagogue every day for 11 months as part of the Jewish grieving process. This inadvertently proved to be a catalyst for him getting into rock music.

“By the time I was released from that duty I was dying to catch up to the rest of my friends that had moved on and were listening to all kinds of sixties rock. I couldn't get enough of it fast enough.

“To a very large degree, it made me so hungry for music that I started devouring records and I wanted to be a part of it. I think I wanted to make music because I thought it would be such a great escape from all that crap that I had grown up surrounded by.

“I begged my mom to loan me $10 to buy a guitar from the guy who lived next door who was selling it and then I just threw myself into it and I practiced all the time and played, you know, Yardbirds songs and Roy Orbison songs and Hollies songs and eventually I just knew that this was the life I had to lead.”

He moved over to bass after an early band he was in needed a four-string player when their resident bassist’s mum stopped him from hanging out with the “bad influences.”

"I went back to my mom and begged her to loan me $35 so I could go to buy a bass guitar, which she did thankfully. I was hooked, I was just hooked, I played that thing morning, noon and night.”

Neil Peart’s audition

The classic Rush lineup solidified when Peart replaced original drummer John Rutsey, shortly after the release of their 1974 self-titled debut album.

“Alex and I had this piece of music that we played, which we wrote in 7/4. So it was an odd time signature for rock band. Our first drummer John, he didn't want anything to do with it. He was a Simon Kirke (the Free/Bad Company drummer) type of player. He loved simple, straight ahead rock. He didn't want to mess around with time signatures.

“When we heard Neil play in that audition, and the power and the triplets he was playing and my God, he was just blowing our minds. We pulled out that piece and said, how does this strike you?

“We started jamming on it and of course, he played it like that,” Lee clicks his fingers, “and he played it brilliantly and that piece went on to become the song Anthem,” the opening track on their second album, Fly By Night.

“That was the first moment I went, ah, the missing link! That was the first ‘oh my God, this could really take us somewhere’ moment.”

Over the decades Rush dabbled in a variety of sounds, some more successfully than others.

"I look back at some moments and go, what the hell were we thinking?” he laughs. “But we definitely were the kind of band that had a curiosity that superseded everything else. So if there was a ska rhythm, or there's a song on the radio that has a vibe that is foreign to our vibe, somehow or another it made its way into our stew.”

During the ’80s, the band’s material featured heavy use of synths, and also gave them their biggest hit, The Spirit of Radio.

“The same with instrumentation. When the synthesizer revolution occurred, when the technological revolution occurred in music, I thought can we tame this? Can we bring some of this into our sound and make it part of a rock or a progressive rock-thing while retaining our metal edge, our kind of hard rocking love?”

"And that was tricky. Sometimes we went way over the edge on the keyboard side and had to be reeled back in. The mistakes we made, I feel, were honest mistakes. They were mistakes driven by experimentation and fortunately we stuck around long enough that we were able to rebound from some of those mistakes!”

In recent years, the trio have been much-lauded by modern rock acts as an influence.

"We were considered a fairly uncool band for the first 30 years!” he laughs. “But I would say in the last 10 years of our life as a band we had a lot of younger musicians coming to shows and expressing their respect for what we've done.

“I heard a lot of stories from these folks that would say things like I wouldn't be a drummer if it wasn't for Neil or I wouldn't have picked up the bass if I hadn't heard Cygnus X-1. Those things started happening later in our career and of course they are the greatest compliment a musician can get if – if something you did inspired someone to pick up an instrument, what else is there, really? It's just the ultimate.”

Getting back on stage

The first – and so far only time – Lee and Lifeson have performed publicly since Peart’s death was at the huge, guest-packed London and LA tribute concerts for Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins in September 2022.

"That was an amazing and cathartic experience,” recalls Geddy. “I had obviously sent Dave (Grohl, the Foos’ frontman) my condolences and we were all freaked out because we loved Taylor. He was one of those guys you can't help but love.

“Dave called me and said: ‘I think we're gonna do this tribute and you were one of his favorite bands, you just have to play.’

“I didn't even have to think about it. I said: ‘Of course, and I can speak for Al – he's right into it’.

“Dave was really considerate of how difficult it might be for us to get back on stage, he was very helpful. He said: ‘Well, first of all, you can't have one drummer because then everyone's gonna talk about that drummer being your next drummer’. So I said: ‘Okay, we'll get a couple of drummers to play a few songs, but you have to be one of them.’

“And he said: ‘Sure, no problem. Just don't give me the complicated stuff’. He was kidding, of course, because he can play anything.

“The evening turned out to be just one of the greatest days of music I've ever had in my life because here you had musicians of every stripe, of every level of success communing with each other without a tinge of competitiveness, without a fragrance of egoism. It was all for Taylor and everyone was grooving together and socialising together.

“Going back on stage was very difficult, but it also was very helpful in helping Alex and I realise that these are our songs too. They didn't just end when Neil passed away. We still own those songs. They're still a part of our heart and soul, so we should feel good about playing them whenever that moment strikes us."

Had he missed playing music?

“Of course, but it was uncomfortable to think about without our buddy.”

The future?

This if course begs the question Rush’s many fans would be keen to ask: Have he and Alex talked about doing anything else together again?

"About eight months ago we started jamming here at my house and it was fun and fruitful. But I have a lot of irons in the fire and he was working on some side projects, so it was one of those things where we said: ‘Well, we'll get back to this, won't we?’

“We see each other all the time. We're very, very close and I have no doubt at some point we'll, get back to that and see what happens.”

In the meantime he has the book tour, and a new TV show out now on Paramount+, Geddy Lee Asks: Are Bass Players Human Too?

The show sees Geddy visiting other bassists, including Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic, and Metallica’s Robert Trujillo among others, to see what makes them tick.

Describing the show, Geddy says: It was kind of spurred on by Sam Dunn of Banger Films who had done our first documentary,” 2010’s Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage, “and he's a bass player. He was fond of the Big Beautiful Book of Bass and wanted to see something come of it. So we came up with this wacky idea to try and prove to the world that bass players are actually interesting human beings....”

My Effin’ Life, a spoken word tour, comes to Portsmouth Guildhall on Sunday, December 17, doors 7pm. Tickets from £74.10-£126.30 include a first edition hardback copy of the book and an exclusive tour programme. Go to portsmouthguildhall.org.uk.

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