“They were all about Joy Division. They weren’t about Limelight.” Dave Navarro admits that he’s been sneaking his love of Rush into Jane’s Addiction songs for years without his bandmates ever realising
Jane’s Addiction‘s Dave Navarro has been harbouring a dark secret from his dear friend and musical soulmate Perry Farrell for years, but he can live a lie no longer: the truth is that the guitarist has been secretly channelling his love of Rush into Jane’s Addiction songs for decades, despite the group’s de facto leader actively hating the Canadian progressive rock trio’s music.
Navarro’s confession emerged during a new online interview with Rolling Stone. After being laid low for three years with Long Covid, and forced to sit out major tours, Navarro joined his bandmates – vocalist Perry Farrell, bassist Eric Avery, and drummer Stephen Perkins – at the band’s intimate show at London’s Bush Hall on May 23, reuniting the group’s classic line-up onstage together for the first time since 2010.
Interviewing Navarro for Rolling Stone, writer Andy Greene pointed out that so many iconic rock bands have called time on their careers in the past few years – Rush, Van Halen and Fleetwood Mac among them – and asked the guitarist if this changed musical landscape made him feel any obligation to keep Jane’s Addiction intact.
“I wouldn’t say I feel an obligation,” Navarro replies. “I feel a desire. But you mention Rush. What’s funny is that Rush were my earliest childhood influences. The same goes for Stephen Perkins. But oddly enough, Perry and Eric hated Rush. They just hated them. But if you listen to songs like Three Days, Then She Did, or Trip Away, and I could go on, you can hear the Rush influences that Stephen and I snuck in there, that they didn’t know about. L
“Let’s just put this this way, they were all about Joy Division back then. They weren’t about Limelight.”
Jane’s Addiction recently released a new single, Imminent Redemption, the first new music from the original line-up in 34 years. And the good news for fans, is that the guitarist believes that a new album is “more than likely going to happen.”
“I mean, we have recorded material,” he continues. “I don’t know specifically the model, if it’s going to be a song at a time, or if we’re going to drop a song, and then a record, or I don’t really know. I kind of stay out of that stuff. What matters to me most is that this stuff is on vinyl.”