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In 2015, Rush embarked on their farewell tour – just as everyone from Dave Grohl to Hollywood A-listers began proclaiming their love for the prog icons after decades as the uncoolest band on the planet. Ahead of their final bow, Classic Rock sat down with guitarist Alex Lifeson and bassist/vocalist Geddy Lee to look back on the band’s epic career.

It’s in the last couple of years that he’s noticed it happening: he’s been a famous rock star for decades, but in these past two years he’s found himself being recognised in public more frequently. Now it’s a little easier, he says, to get a table in a fancy restaurant. Even so, Alex Lifeson is not entirely sure he likes this new level of fame: “It is a little uncomfortable for me.”

As the guitarist in Rush, Lifeson is part of one of the most successful rock bands of all time. Since their formation in Toronto in 1968 they’ve sold more than 40 million albums. And yet, for much of the band’s career, they have existed, as Lifeson puts it, “under the radar”.

The three members of Rush – Lifeson, bassist/vocalist Geddy Lee and drummer/lyricist Neil Peart – have been playing together for 41 years now. Their brand of progressive hard rock and virtuoso musicianship – defined on breakthrough 1976 album 2112 and modernised on 1981 best-seller Moving Pictures – earned them a devoted following that has sustained them through the passing of punk rock and grunge and all that has followed. For many years, Rush have been known as The Biggest Cult Band In The World. Then the strangest thing happened: they got bigger. Rush were always a big band, but they are now bigger in a broader cultural context.

It started with the 2009 movie I Love You, Man, Lifeson says. In this “bromantic comedy” there’s a scene in which its leading characters are seen rocking out at a Rush show and embarrassing a girlfriend with their word-perfect lip-synching and air drumming: so very Rush and their fans. Then in 2010 came the band’s documentary Beyond The Lighted Stage, in which a cast of modern rock heroes such as Billy Corgan and Trent Reznor revealed themselves as Rush nerds.

And then, in 2013, came the induction of Rush into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame – at which their live performance was prefaced by the Foo Fighters playing the 2112 Overture in wigs and the kind of white satin robes that their heroes wore back in ’76. And for Alex Lifeson, that was the clincher. “The Hall Of Fame changed things,” he says. “It’s really given us a much higher profile.”

The irony in all of this is that Rush have become more famous at the very point at which their career is in the first stages of winding down. The band’s 2012 album Clockwork Angels was a huge success: No.1 in Canada, No.2 in the US, and widely acclaimed as a late-career masterpiece. This month, Rush head out on a 30-date US tour. But Peart has repeatedly stated that he is no longer willing to tour on a regular basis. He has a young daughter, and his priority is his family. He is also suffering from tendonitis. And he’s not alone in feeling the wear and tear of age; Lifeson has arthritis. He says simply: “Let’s face it, we’re coming to the end of our career together.”

On the eve of the US tour, it’s Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee who speak to Classic Rock about the present, the past and the future of Rush. Neil Peart is unavailable for interview. He has rarely spoken publicly in the past 20 years, and the reason for this is well documented. In the late 90s, Peart’s daughter Selena was killed in a road accident, and his first wife Jacqueline succumbed to cancer. In the aftermath, the band remained on hiatus for five years. Peart returned to Rush for the 2002 album Vapor Trails after he had remarried, but relinquished his role as the band’s chief spokesman in order to protect his privacy.

Lifeson and Lee have a small window in which to talk. After four weeks of rehearsals in Los Angeles, where Peart now lives, Lifeson and Lee are at their homes in Toronto ahead of a week of full production rehearsals back in LA.

Lifeson speaks first, and for the most part he is in typically upbeat mood. He is a frank and funny interviewee. Speaking to Classic Rock in 2014, he revealed that he had used ecstasy during the 90s, and he is similarly candid when discussing the complex dynamic within Rush in 2015. He admits that in recent months he has considered leaving the band, but when he talks about this US tour he’s buzzing. “The ticket sales went crazy from the start,” he says. “Some dates sold out in minutes. It sent a message to us that something’s going on.”

Could this tour be the last for Rush?

We’ll see. Right now the tour is what it is. Whether we add more dates, I think it all boils down to Neil, really. It’s a very athletic endeavour for him to go on tour. He’s sixty-two years old. Physically it’s difficult. And it’s the same for me.

Your arthritis – how bad is it?

I’ve had it for ten years, and this is the first time I’m really feeling it in my hands and my feet. That’s the way it goes. But it’s a lot harder for Neil. He’s got tendonitis in his arm. To be honest, I don’t know how he gets through playing the way he does, being in that sort of discomfort and pain. But he’s a very stoic guy. He never complains.

But there’s more to it than that. Neil has said many times that his first priority is his family, his young daughter.

I don’t think that’s something he even needs to talk about. I don’t know if sometimes he says these things because he doesn’t know how to come out and say it face-to-face to us that he doesn’t want to do it any more, that he’s tired of it, that he feels after forty years that’s a pretty good run and that he shouldn’t have to feel bad about not wanting to do it any more. He wants to spend more time at home and with his family. I get it. He’s never been keen about touring. It’s always a difficult thing for him.

Is Neil unhappy about doing this tour?

He was resistant to it until he started prepping and realised: hey, I can still play my drums pretty good! And then getting into rehearsals with us, there’s that whole camaraderie that he really adores. So when he’s back into the stream, he loves the swim.

Do you have similarly conflicting feelings?

The Clockwork Angels tour was pretty gruelling, as they’re all becoming more gruelling as we’re getting older. And then we had a year-and-a-half off. Having the time at home and disconnecting from being in a band, just being Al, hanging out with my grandkids, seeing my friends, all the things that people take for granted, it got me thinking: am I ready now to give it up? Can I be happy being away from it? And it really felt like I could be. Until we started to zero in on a tour. Once the machine got rolling I got swept up in it.

Where does Geddy stand on this?

Now, more than ever, Geddy wants to play. Whereas Neil probably would have quit years ago, if he didn’t feel that he owed something to us.

What do you mean by that?

I think Neil knows that we’re not ready for the end, and he doesn’t want to ruin that for us. Keep in mind: we’re like brothers. And we went through a terrible period with him inhis life and supported him and he’ll never forget that. I think he feels, as I would too, an obligation to us for having stood by him. So he’s not willing to let that go. Maybe now he is. And I get it. It’s not like, what a jerk, he doesn’t want to do this any more? I get it.

All three of you seem very reluctant to have an official farewell tour. Why?

Partly because it’s a cheesy thing to do, but also it puts you behind the eight ball if you decide that you’ve made a mistake and you want to go back on the road. We don’t feel like this is really a farewell. I’d love to make another record. It’s such a fun experience.

You feel confident there is another album in you?

Yeah, I think there is. I’m sure if we start coming up with some stuff, Neil would be right in there. He’d love that.

Going back to the very beginning, when you listen to the first Rush album what do you hear?

I hear so much promise, so much excitement. I remember those sessions vividly. I hear Led Zeppelin in it – who we adored. And I hear so much hope for the opportunity to do what we’d dreamt about doing for so many years.

When did you first feel like you’d made it?

We opened for the New York Dolls at the Victory Theater in Toronto in seventy-four. It was an old burlesque theatre, pretty run down and crappy, but to us it might as well have been Wembley.

Rush and the New York Dolls seems such a mismatch.

It was. That crowd was excited to see the New York Dolls; not so much a local heavy metal band. But it was exciting being around the Dolls. Watching them backstage it was all what you would expect. They were all drunk before they got on stage. They had girls back there. It was a whole rock’n’roll scene. We were typically Canadian and shy and stayed out of their way. I do recall after that gig I was hitch-hiking home with a friend of mine, I had my guitar with me. This couple picked me up, and we were chatting, and they said they’d been to the Dolls show at the Victory and they said yeah, they were great, but the opening act, God, they sucked. The guy’s girlfriend turned back and saw the guitar and saw me and her face just kind of froze. It was silent in the car, and I felt so crestfallen I said: “We’ll get out at the next block, please.” I got out of the car and I wanted to throw my guitar away. That was the first really bad review that we got [laughs].

Was Rush always a competitive band?

Maybe in the early days, when you were so full of piss and vinegar and so excited to play. You played with so many different bands on these two- or three-acts shows. Quite often it was competitive. You wanted to blow the other guy off the stage and be that much better. I remember we played with Heart once. This was very early, maybe 1975. It was at the Stanley Warner Theatre in Pittsburgh. There was so much talk about Heart and the Wilson sisters. We were really looking forward to meeting them. We were backstage, and Roger Fisher said to me: “We’re gonna blow you guys off the stage tonight, you just watch.” And I thought, wow, what a weird thing to say. But I think I played that much harder that night.

And Roger Fisher didn’t win that battle?

I guess, in the long run, no.

Are there Rush albums that you look back at and are embarrassed by?

Often people ask me that about Caress Of Steel. But I listened to it not too long ago and I felt proud of that record. It sounds to me like a bunch of twenty-two-year-olds trying to make a big statement. And ‘Caress Of Steel’ is such a great title.

I thought so. Around 1980 I had ‘Caress Of Steel’ written on my school bag. People laughed at me.

People laughed at us, too. You were in good company.

Are there particular songs you wish you’d never recorded?

Tai Shan was a little corny. We wanted to do something different, but maybe we had too much of a pseudo-Asian flavour to it. Maybe I should listen to it again. I don’t think I’ve listened to it since we recorded it [laughs].

A pseudo-Asian flavour like the borderline racist intro to A Passage To Bangkok?

Well, A Passage To Bangkok had a bit more of a middle-Eastern, Kashmir bent to it. Tai Shan was specifically about an experience that Neil had in China, whereas Bangkok talks about an experience we had all over the place.

You mean smoking pot?

That certainly influenced those early records. Less so as the years went on, but it was never completely out of the picture. We always made sure the tour bus was well-stocked with potato chips and cakes and things [laughs].

It sounds as if you were smoking a lot up to and including Hemispheres.

Yes, right through to Hemispheres and a little bit beyond… maybe Clockwork Angels.

Really?

Oh, sure. But Geddy gave up all of that a long time ago. He’s one of those really militant non-smokers. He leads a very clean lifestyle, although he does love his wine.

Unlike you, who got into ecstasy in the nineties. Did you tell Geddy and Neil they should try it?

I think Neil may have had one or two experiences with it, but I don’t think he liked that particular feeling.

What about cocaine?

It’s been so long now. There was a period in the late seventies and early eighties when we all sort of dabbled in that thing. But it’s such an alienating drug. I remember every time I ever did it I hated it. I loved it for that moment, and then hated everything else about it. It wasn’t good for conversation, friendship, anything.

And now you’re just a smoker?

I’m a pretty regular smoker of a very small quantity, for therapeutic purposes. I find it helps with inflammation and pain. I have my medical card for my prescription here in Canada, where medical marijuana is legal. And if we get rid of the Conservative government and get the Liberals back in, they have a whole policy about the legalisation of marijuana that is realistic and makes sense.

Might the problem with legalising marijuana be that much of Canada would slow down to the pace of the first Black Sabbath album?

Ha ha. Yeah. But is that such a bad thing?

You’ve always been characterised as the joker in Rush. How would you describe Geddy and Neil?

They’re both very funny guys, clever and smart. Geddy loves to learn about things, whether it’s baseball or wine or vintage bass guitars. He loves to get inside a particular subject. And Neil is a strange cat. He’s very bright, obviously, and thoughtful. But he’s also very private and inward, very shy. You’d be surprised at how easily embarrassed he becomes in social scenes. He can be great at a dinner party, but in a larger group he’ll be very, very, very uncomfortable, and he’ll be in a corner, nursing his Scotch, waiting to get out of there.

Was Neil always so withdrawn, even before the events of the late nineties?

In the early years he probably did more interviews than Geddy and I did. In many ways he was the band’s spokesman. Since that tragedy, he definitely did become much more private. He carries a lot of deep, deep scars from the things that have happened in his life. Most people who know what happened to him can’t even process it. But I think in general our fans do respect his privacy and know where it’s coming from. In this day and age, where nothing is private, it is a miracle that he has any privacy at all. A tragedy like that makes him more of a target.

In the late nineties, Neil said he was done with Rush. It was only in 2002 that you reunited and made the Vapor Trails album.

There’s so much emotion in that record. That took a big chunk out of our lives – that was a year of, oh, so many difficult things. Every time I listen to that record it takes me back to when we were recording it and how Neil was doing, and how poorly he was playing when he first came in the studio, and how he rose from those ashes – we all did. We were all so tentative and hurting. That album, more than any other album, has left a mark on the three of us individually.

If the band had ended in the late nineties, what would you have done with your life?

It’s so hard to speculate. I love art. Maybe I would have become a painter. Only last year I thought about taking a course at the Ontario College Of Art. It’s been fantastic to play in this band my whole life, but there is so much more out there.

Had the band ever come close to breaking up before then?

Yes. In 1989 we’d done a long tour and were mixing the live record, A Show Of Hands. We were so deeply exhausted that it just wasn’t fun any more. We wanted – all of us – to go our separate ways. It was nothing personal, just the pressure of work. Really, the stress and tension was tearing us apart. Fortunately we took a long break, and we came back renewed.

Being in this band for so long, what has it cost you on a personal level?

We were doing two hundred and fifty shows a year when my kids were young and when I should have been home with them. That’s a sacrifice that we’ve all made. But now my kids are grown up and they’re happy and content and proud of their dad. It’s worked out okay.

Looking back at your career, what are you most proud of?

I’m going to be sixty-two this year, and I’ve been playing with these same two guys longer than just about any other band in the world. That’s quite an accomplishment.

If you had to choose three albums to sum up the band’s career, which ones would they be?

2112, Moving Pictures and Clockwork Angels. I think that would cap what we’re about from beginning to end. Boy, that’s two concept records.

Well, Kirk Hammett from Metallica did call you “the high priest of conceptual metal”.

He was right! I knew he was a smart kid.

But, joking aside, when the end finally comes, how would you want Rush to be remembered?

Boy, how do you answer that without sounding kind of corny? I guess I want the legacy to be: they did it their way, and they were true to what they believed. We earned our independence from the music industry early on with 2112, and we’ve been free to do what we want. We were true to our art. I want to be remembered for that.

For Geddy Lee, being at home in Toronto for a few days between rehearsals is an opportunity to spend time with his family, and in particular his infant granddaughter. “Being grandparents is a new experience for my wife and I,” he says. “It took us a month or so to get our heads around that fact. We were sort of in denial.”

Currently, he divides his free time between Toronto and London, where he also has a home. When in Toronto, he and Lifeson are in frequent contact even when they’re not working. Around once a week, Lee says, they get together for dinner, just the two of them. Lee, a connoisseur, always chooses the wine. In the past they used to play tennis together, but not so much since Lifeson developed arthritis.

It was in Toronto that Lee and Lifeson attended school together. Peart met them for the first time in 1974, when he auditioned for Rush as they sought to replace original drummer John Rutsey. In a sense, Peart has always been the odd man out. After joining Rush, he lived in Toronto for a few years but later moved out to the country. When he relocated to Los Angeles it had little impact on his relationship with Lee and Lifeson.

“Neil was never really accessible,” Lee explains. “So the fact that he’s in California now is not a huge thing to overcome. When we need to talk, we talk.”

These days it’s Lee who is driving Rush forward. He wants to tour more. If he gets his way, the band will return to the UK and mainland Europe in 2016. Whatever happens next, he says, will be dependent on how the other two guys are feeling after the US tour: “If everyone’s really digging it, the way I think we will, then we might carry on.”

Right now, how are you feeling about the future of Rush?

I prefer to take the optimistic view. That’s my nature. But there are a lot of factors that are concerning the band at the moment. I would say that the three of us are in a different head-space about that.

Where do you stand on this?

I feel great about where the band’s at. I love playing and I don’t have any reason not to continue. Neil has a different view, due to his young daughter and what he has to put his body though in order to do a three-hour show. And Alex also has issues that he’s wrestling with. I would say it’s an ongoing conversation, about what the future will bring. Obviously there’s an elephant in the room. But the elephant is sitting politely in the corner. Sooner or later we’ll deal with that elephant head-on [laughs]. I don’t like to think of the end. I don’t see any reason for us to end until a point where we no longer can play well. But it’s clear that the concept of Rush as a massive touring band is fading.

Alex is struggling with arthritis, Neil with tendonitis. How are you holding up?

I’m fit as a fiddle. But for Alex the arthritis is not a small thing. Frankly, I’m a little surprised he talked to you about it. And really, if anything is going to mean that we can’t tour any more like we used to, it’s more than likely going to be the arthritis. Because that’s something that will directly affect his ability to play. And if I was going out on stage and I could not play the way I want to play, or the way I have played in the past, there is no way I would want to do it; I would not want to go out there and be a shadow of my former self.

This is clearly something that worries you as much as it does him.

You know, it kind of hurts me to see him when he’s having a bad day, physically. He’s one of my oldest and dearest friends. And when he’s been at rehearsal and he’s not playing his best, it’s not nice to see your friend suffer like that. This thing is in the back of his mind, and he’s afraid of it.

Neil is more vocal about his reluctance to tour.

Well, Neil has a more complicated life than Alex and I do, let’s face it. Our kids are grown up, it’s much easier for us to tour. When my kids were the age that Neil’s daughter is it was a much more difficult decision every time you walked out that door. What you also have to remember is what Neil has been through in the past. He’s been to hell and back. And now he’s got a second family that he’s trying to do the right thing by. There’s no one on earth that could blame him for that. It’s a matter of him being able to juggle what he can do with the band, and what his family can deal with, and how he feels in his heart about all that. I completely understand that.

How do you deal with such a delicate issue?

It’s an ongoing conversation; a difficult conversation, and one that we kept putting off before we got together for this tour. I think it’s hard for Neil to bring up some of this stuff, because he knows that no matter what happens he doesn’t want to feel like the guy who’s pulling the plug. It’s hard for him. And I accept that. But decisions have to be made. We have to get on with our lives. So that conversation was tough. But in the end we decided we would do a tour, and Neil was fine with that. Once he made that decision he was a hundred per cent there. There’s one thing I want to make really clear: there is no bad guy in this scenario.

If Clockwork Angels turns out to be the last Rush album, could you live with that?

Oh yeah. I’m very proud of that record. It’s certainly among our top three pieces of work.

How confident are you that you could make another?

Do I feel like we have the mojo to do more records? Absolutely. But I can’t tell you that the other guys agree. I’m not a hundred per cent sure that Neil agrees, I’m pretty sure Alex agrees.

He does. You should ask him – I did.

Ha ha. Okay. What did he say?

He said he would love to make a new album. So there you go – I’ve helped you with that one.

Thanks, Paul!

It seems that everyone loves Rush now. Is that a strange feeling?

First of all, it’s great. But yes, it is odd. The fact that more fans want to see us, and younger people are getting turned on to our music, that’s a very cool thing. It’s nice that people like us and feel okay about saying that out loud [laughs]. There’s really no negative in this whole new acceptance of us.

Do you have any idea why this has happened?

It’s hard to understand. Obviously longevity pays off. And I guess there’s an amount of passion and authenticity that we bring to our brand of music that must also mean something in this day and age.

It’s not just about the music. The documentary Beyond The Lighted Stage humanised the band.

That’s true. The documentary is what Rush is: it’s a story about three friends. By making that movie, by allowing people in, it’s shown a side of our personality that is appealing. The fact that we do get along so well, we do have a lot of fun and we love what we do, that has become kind of ‘a thing’, for lack of a better descriptor [laughs].

There are the caricatures of Rush: Alex as the joker, you the uber-nerd, Neil the professorial type.

There is certainly truth in all of that. The caricatures are a start.

And on a deep level?

I’d say that Alex is hot-blooded. If I put him in the context of Rush, he’s the raw emotion in the band. He’s the guy who’s going to freak out first, the guy who’s going to lose his temper. He’s also very sweet and lovable. He’s the guy in the band you want to hug most. He’s so funny and so considerate, but he can also be very irrational.

And Neil?

Neil is surprisingly goofy. This is the thing most people don’t realise about him. He’s this big, unwieldy guy, and when he gets in his goofy mood, it’s hilarious. The first day he pulled up for his audition, Alex and I thought he was the goofiest guy. We had no idea that lurking behind that goofiness was this professorial, serious man. We’re all more than what we appear, obviously. Or less [laughs].

You stopped doing drugs a long time ago. Those two guys did not. Are you comfortable being around them when they’re stoned?

If you hang around so long with people that love their weed, you get used to it. I’m just amazed at how good people are at functioning on that stuff.

You couldn’t handle that shit?

That’s why I stopped – because I became completely dysfunctional when I was high. I just couldn’t stop talking. I couldn’t stop pretending I was Woody Allen, or trying to take my pants off over my head. I kept trying to make people laugh, and it is easy and hard to make stoned people laugh. You’ll say something and they’ll laugh, and you’ll say something else and the room gets really quiet and it’s like, “Okay…”

Classic drug paranoia.

I was always okay when I was with the guys. What was hard for me was I’d go to my bunk on the bus and my brain would be going six hundred miles an hour. My problem is I can’t stop over-thinking everything. It doesn’t help me to have a stimulant like that. It aids my over-thinking. I prefer a glass of wine or two, that helps chill me out. That puts me in my happy place. I don’t need to be high. I feel like I’ve been blessed with a natural sort of high-ness.

So when Alex told you about trying ecstasy you didn’t feel like you were missing out?

Oh my God, I’m way beyond that. And I wouldn’t want to be a witness to it. I don’t want to be anywhere around that guy in that condition. The thought of it fills me with dread!

Are you embarrassed by any of the music that Rush have made?

Some of the early stuff makes me cringe a little. I hear a song and think: That was so Genesis-influenced. Like, what the fuck were we thinking? It’s so derivative. And the long instrumental things that we were doing back in the seventies, some of it seems so pretentious.

Long, instrumental, pretentious songs – that’s what I call ‘proper Rush’.

Okay [laughs]. I can see that. I have friends, musician guys, who say to me all the time that after Hemispheres there was nothing else of interest to them. So when you make that statement it makes total sense to me. In their minds that was proper Rush. And you saw that kind of thing in our documentary. I loved the fact that Trent Reznor got more interested in us post-keyboards, yet Tim Commerford hated anything post-keyboards. That kind of says it all.

The pretentiousness in those early songs has a lot to do with the lyrics that Neil wrote. Perhaps most pretentious of all was Xanadu, its lyrics inspired by the Coleridge poem Kubla Khan.

‘I have dined on honeydew’ [laughs]. Try singing that! Try singing about Kubla Khan, for Christ’s sake.

You pulled it off.

Oh yeah. I loved it! I was into it. But after a certain time, I guess you could say I became a little more objective about lyrics.

Were there lyrics of Neil’s that you rejected outright?

Oh yeah, absolutely. Sometimes it just doesn’t work, and I can’t get behind it.

Did that cause problems between you and him?

In the early days it was harder. We were just becoming songwriting partners, and that was a rapport and a trust that took years to develop. But he’s a remarkable songwriting partner, in the sense that he does not have the requisite ego that comes with the work.

In later years Neil has written some beautiful lyrics about the human condition, for songs such as Afterimage and The Pass. Is there a song that speaks to you more than any other on that deep level?

I like The Pass as well. It’s one of my favourite lyrics. And I find The Garden, from Clockwork Angels, one of the most beautiful things he has written.

It’s now forty-one years since the first Rush album was released. Back then, how big were you dreaming? Did you think you were going to be the new Led Zeppelin, or were you aiming a little lower – the next Budgie, perhaps?

Ha ha. Well, who dreams small? Nobody does that. Especially when you’re young, you dream big. You wanna be the next big thing. You want to be the next Deep Purple. But really, you don’t ever equate your meagre talent with your favourite bands. Especially with us being Canadians. We’re far too modest for that leap of faith.

In all the years since then, have you ever thought about leaving the band?

No. Never. I can honestly say I have not one day ever thought about quitting.

You’ve dedicated your entire adult life to this band. Any regrets?

I wish I had not been so obsessed with the band when my son was young. I wish I had been more in the moment for him. So yeah, I do have regrets about the early part of his life. But my son and I are very close now. And when my daughter came around, fourteen years after my son was born, I made myself way more available to her. You live and learn, you know?

And if the band was to end soon – for all the reasons we’ve talked about – could you accept it with a sense of gratitude for what it has given you?

I’ll be honest. I don’t like the idea of it ending. But obviously the conversations of the last year have forced me to come to terms with mortality – mortality in the sense of the band. If there is a time when we become a non-functional creative unit, then it will be hard to move on to other things, but move on I will.

August 1, 2015 is the date on which Rush conclude their US tour, at the Forum in Los Angeles. Beyond that, the band’s future remains undecided. During this tour the difficult conversations between the three band members will be continued. For now, only this much is certain: they have not yet reached the end of the road, but the end is in sight.

Geddy Lee says it is in his nature to be optimistic. Even so, he remains pragmatic. “Right now,” he says, “I’m just trying to enjoy the ride. Can we go on forever? Clearly not. We don’t know if this is the end. And if it is the end, it’s going to happen in bits and pieces. If we can’t go out and do a massive tour in the future because everyone can’t agree on that, there’s nothing to say we can’t do another record or one-off shows here and there. That’s the best way I can describe it.”

And for Alex Lifeson, there are mixed emotions. After a lifetime spent on the road, Lifeson, like Neil Peart, wishes to devote more time to his family. But he is acutely aware that if the band is going to go out on a high, it has to happen soon.

“I want to know I can play as good as I always have, or at least close to that,” he says. “I love it when people say: ‘You’ve got to see these guys, they can really play.’ That’s a legacy that I’d like to keep intact. That’s what the essence of Rush is. It’s these three guys that have always loved playing together. I know that we’re coming close to the end, but I still have so much fun playing with those two guys. When time comes, it’s going to be hard letting that go.”

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 211, May 2015

Freelance writer for Classic Rock since 2005, Paul Elliott has worked for leading music titles since 1985, including Sounds, Kerrang!, MOJO and Q. He is the author of several books including the first biography of Guns N’ Roses and the autobiography of bodyguard-to-the-stars Danny Francis. He has written liner notes for classic album reissues by artists such as Def Leppard, Thin Lizzy and Kiss, and currently works as content editor for Total Guitar. He lives in Bath – of which David Coverdale recently said: “How very Roman of you!”

Deftones were there at the beginning of nu metal with 1995’s landmark debut album Adrenaline, but by the end of the decade they had left the scene behind. In 2014, singer Chino Moreno and guitarist Stephen Carpenter looked back on the chaos and glory of the band’s early years.

There aren’t many bands in modern rock who’ve gone through as much as Deftones. Through inner-band conflict, substance abuse and the death of bassist Chi Cheng in 2013, , they remain one of the biggest bands within our stratum. They’ve outlasted nu metal, emo, metalcore and screamo (and they’ve been labelled in just about all of them) without ever altering their core sound. Ol’ Blue Eyes says he did it his way, but Deftones are the real deal.

Their seeds were sown in 1988, during seventh grade at a school in Sacramento, California. Abe Cunningham and Chino Moreno were classmates who would sit in lessons and spend their time like most other high-school students: by taking apart a pair of headphones and running one ear up each of their sleeves and playing the then recently released …And Justice For All by Metallica over and over again.

“I knew Abe played drums but there was a song on that record that he said he could play all the way through,” laughs a reminiscing Chino Moreno. “I was like, ‘No you can’t!’ I went to his house and he played the whole song. I had to take him to meet Stephen [Carpenter].”

Hailing from the same modest suburban neighbourhood of Sacramento as Chino, teenage guitarist Stephen had already taught himself how to shred. By this point, he was able to rip on the likes of S.O.D. and Death Angel, and following Chino introducing the pair, the musical chemistry between Abe and Stephen was instantaneous.

“They were locked in straight away. Stephen’s jaw just hit the ground when he heard Abe play,” says Chino. “I saw Abe at school a few weeks later and he said he and Stephen had been jamming for a few weeks and they’d written a few songs and Stephen wanted me to sing.

“I didn’t know anything about heavy metal really, apart from a couple of Metallica records, so I didn’t know how to sing like that,” admits Chino. “I didn’t know how to sing but in junior high school, I used to rap. I loved The Smiths so I’d try to sing like Morrissey, and I’d rap too, so I had no identity at all. All of those things are still in me and that’s made the uniqueness of what I do, I guess.”

With bass player Chi Cheng completing the Deftones lineup, the young band wrote everything from reggae-rap to straight-up, balls-to-the-wall heavy metal in a crusade to cement their sound. Honing their craft locally in Sacramento, they formed their signature sound and hit LA to get themselves a deal, meeting fellow newcomers Korn in the process. After recording a demo with soon-to-be nu metal über‑producer Ross Robinson, Chino says people were already starting to spit jibes at the band and label them ‘baby Korn’.

“We were definitely grouped in with Korn,” says Stephen. “The only similarity was that we both made heavy music and we were both doing something that people considered exciting at the time, but I liked what those guys were doing.”

“We had to take our own road and not attach ourselves to any scene,” agrees Chino. “That’s something that’s always been our thing.”

Recruiting Pantera and Prong producer Terry Date and signing with Madonna’s Maverick label, Deftones recorded and released their debut album, Adrenaline. Alongside Korn and Incubus, Deftones were cited as pioneers of the burgeoning nu metal scene, and riot-starting tracks like 7 Words and Minus Blindfold sound as fresh and club-ready today as they did upon their release back in 1995.

“I’m not sure our mental capacity has ever been forward-thinking,” says Stephen, who laughs and reveals that his downbeat turn of phrase has earned him the nickname Negatron among his bandmates. “We try to do something that sounds good to us and that’s just about it. There’s never a masterplan behind what we do.”

“I couldn’t even say that we put that much thought into that record,” says a modest Chino. “We captured an energy and a youthful spirit that you can still hear and that still shows today, but we were just excited to be recording an album.”

If the band fired early warning shots with their debut release, their sophomore effort, 1998’s Around The Fur, blew the fucking doors off. Maintaining the zip and bounce of their debut on the dancefloor-filling My Own Summer (Shove It), the band also began to extend their journey into the world of atmospherics, with Chino’s otherworldly vocal delivery growing in stature tenfold on an album that’s rightfully regarded as one of the most essential rock records of the 90s.

“It’s funny, people always think it’s me who brought that other side to the band,” Chino shrugs. “It was Stephen who wrote Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away) and started building on our sound in that way, and it just kind of worked for all of us.”

“I wrote Mascara too and that’s pretty mellow, right?” laughs Stephen. “I don’t always write the heaviest music. I write what I feel. I just feel the heavier stuff more often than not because that’s how I am as a guitar player.”

Riding universal acclaim for their bold leap forward on Around The Fur, follow-up White Pony saw the band branching out further than ever before, with Chino adding second guitar to the writing process. However, due to his amateur ability, this also added an age to the band’s recording process.

“It slowed us down incredibly because he didn’t really know how to play guitar,” says Stephen. “That time when he was learning to play guitar was when we went from taking a year or less to make a record to two years or greater.”

“I sucked at guitar,” admits Chino. “I was learning to play and I didn’t really know what I was doing and I still don’t, but Stephen only recently admitted that it made him mad.”

“I still joke around with him about how I wish I could have learnt to play guitar in a band that was signed already,” Stephen says.

Through this sense of frustration, there were allegations within the press that a power struggle was starting to emerge between Chino and Stephen during the album’s creation.

“There wasn’t a power struggle,” says Stephen with point-blank directness.

“People don’t realise that me and Stephen wrote a lot of that record together and we were in the same headspace at the same time,” asserts Chino. “It wasn’t that I took control and mellowed out the band at all. We write well together because we’re both looking to push ourselves. It’s not that we want to outdo each other but we do try to outdo ourselves.”

Through all of the alleged creative control issues and added time to the band’s schedule, Deftones created what is commonly considered their finest hour with White Pony. Fearlessly experimental and a true journey of an album, it’s a record that is rightfully revered as one of the best rock albums of the last decade and the essential purchase for anyone interested in alternative metal.

“Towards the end of the making of that record, we knew we had something special,” admits Chino. “When we were listening to the final mixes, we knew we were doing something that nobody else was doing, that we had pushed ourselves, and I felt great about it.”

White Pony saw Deftones hit new heights. The album landed at Number Three on the Billboard charts and the band’s headline arena shows in the UK included A Perfect Circle and Linkin Park as support acts at Wembley Arena and the now-defunct London Arena in Docklands respectively. They also beat Pantera, Iron Maiden and Slipknot to win Best Metal Performance at the 2001 Grammys.

If it seems alL rags to riches for Deftones’ nu metal years, we’ll leave you with one of the biggest and best untold stories in the genre’s history. While recording White Pony, the band’s label began to start getting impatient as Deftones strived for the perfection that their artistic vision deserved. In point blank fashion, Maverick told the band that if they didn’t deliver the record in time, they would be fined $1,000,000. One. Million. Dollars. Think about what you could do with a million dollars. Wow. So, as the band toiled away on delivering their magnum opus, this deadline came and went. We heard this story and treated it as some sort of urban legend but, just to clear it up, we asked Chino if his band have ever been fined the amount of money that most people could retire on.

“It’s true,” he says, looking at the floor, and we imagine him fantasising about himself throwing stacks of dollars in the air, laughing maniacally. “They just took it from us. There was nothing we could do because it was our fault. I mean, it’s a million dollars and I can’t act like that’s nothing but at least people liked the record and it’s gone down historically the way it has. Can you imagine what a million dollars looks like?”

No, Chino, you maniac. No, we can’t.

Originally published in Metal Hammer Presents The Story Of Nu Metal, January 2014

Journey have never been short of drama, from numerous line-up changes over the years to public spats between band members. But when Classic Rock say down with the shortly after the release of 2008’s Revelation album, it looked like they’d steadied the bought with new singer Arnel Pineda, who they discovered crooning cover versions of their songs on YouTube.

When Journey played the reconstituted Monsters Of Rock festival at Milton Keynes in 2006, it was their first appearance on a British stage for more than 25 years. There was barely a dry eye in the house.

“You’re telling me grown men were crying during our performance?” laughs guitarist Neal Schon. “I really had no idea. We weren’t that bad, were we? Ha-ha! Right now you’re seeing me with no glasses on, because I’ve had laser-vision treatment. But back then I couldn’t see more than 10 feet in front of me. Even if people were crying I wouldn’t have noticed it.”

Since that triumphant return, Journey haven’t been such strangers to Britain. Only trouble is, every time they come back to tour it seems to be with a different singer. First Steve Augeri. Then Jeff Scott Soto. Now Arnel Pineda. And always with the spectre of Steve Perry, their talismanic frontman in the tux-tail coat, the guy who warbled on all their wimptastic hits, lurking in the background.

“It wasn’t intentional for us to have a revolving door of vocalists every time we visited Europe, it’s just that things didn’t work out quite the way we’d planned,” Schon sighs. “But Arnel has no reason to worry because, well… there are no more vocalists.”

Schon, Pineda and Classic Rock are gathered together in a private meeting room just off the foyer of London’s five-star Royal Garden Hotel. It’s the morning after Journey’s recent show at the Hammersmith Apollo – Pineda’s debut UK performance with the band, and a resounding success all round.

So, have Journey, with Pineda – this diminutive geezer from the Philippines who Schon discovered crooning cover versions of their songs on YouTube – finally managed to exorcise Steve Perry’s ghost? It certainly looks that way. Schon simply shrugs: “Arnel? Yeah, he’s got what it takes.”

Shortly after the ’06 Monsters, Journey played the Sweden Rock festival. It was here that an eagle-eared Scandinavian sound engineer speculated that Steve Augeri – Journey’s singer at the time – might be lip-synching. Classic Rock has quizzed Journey about this in the past and always received evasive answers.

This time, however, Schon is a trifle more open: “Y’know, people get in trouble and they do what they gotta do to get through shows. Augeri had serious problems with his vocals. He had a yeast infection in his throat that was incurable. He couldn’t get the gunk off his throat, so he couldn’t get anything out of it. Anybody in the band who knows what he sounded like when we first got him knew he was hurting.”

So, Journey were actually trying to bolster up Augeri by the use of extra added ‘vocal assistance’, shall we say?

“No comment. You’ll have to talk to him [Augeri] about it. In all seriousness, this is such old news.”

Whatever, Augeri exited soon enough, to be replaced by Jeff Scott Soto.

“Jeff did a great job,” says Schon. “He came in, got us through a tour and got paid very, very well for it. But personality-wise he was not right. After we asked Jeff to leave it got nasty and he decided to sue us. Which was a shame as he’d already been taken care of very well.”

Did Journey always regard Soto as something of a stop-gap frontman?

“I think for a second we thought it was going to work,” Schon admits. “He was a very good showman. But what turned my head around was when we wrote a coupla new songs. We sent them to Jeff, he laid down some vocals… and it didn’t sound like Journey at all. Jeff didn’t have to be a clone of Steve Perry, but his register was more like a baritone. We needed an alto-tenor… that timbre of voice that everybody’s used to. So that was the problem. It didn’t sound great. It didn’t sound like Journey. It was just very nondescript.”

In June 2007 the phone rang at Arnel Pineda’s home in Manila. Amazingly, Schon – or “Mr Neal Schon” as Pineda is wont to call him – was on the other end of the line.

“It was a very unbelievable experience because I never thought that a guitar god like Mr Neal Schon would call up someone like me,” marvels Pineda. “So first off I had to make sure it was actually Mr Neal Schon. I kept on asking him: ‘Are you really who you say you are?’ The whole of July I was processing my US visa papers so I could get to San Francisco, meet these guys and have an audition with them.”

You’ll have noticed that Pineda has been pretty quiet up until now. That’s because he’s rather shy, somewhat overawed by the interview experience, and his grasp of the English language isn’t that great. He’s also, Classic Rock is surprised to learn, 40 years old. Sitting curled up on the armchair in front of us, all jet-black hair and boyish features, he doesn’t look a day over 20.

When Pineda flew into Frisco for his try-out with Journey, did he have an inkling it was going to develop into such a remarkable opportunity?

“No, I was actually quite negative about it because I wasn’t making really good singing for the first few days. I think the defining moment was the two days’ recording session with them.”

Schon concurs: “The first day Arnel was obviously a little under the weather because his hours were out of synch; he wasn’t acclimated at all for the time zone. The second day he got much better, and by the third day he got even stronger. When we went in the studio he was just nailin’ stuff.”

Has Pineda ever been outside of the Philippines?

“Yeah, I was in Hong Kong for 15 years, playing the bar circuit with a band called New Age. We’d relocated there from the Philippines. I’ve also been to Singapore, Japan and Thailand. But I’ve never been to Europe. London reminds me of a better Hong Kong. It’s a big city. The buses, the establishments that you see here, they’re all there also in Hong Kong. The only ones that are missing are the tall buildings that you see on the shores of Hong Kong.”

What’s the music scene like in the Philippines?

“There’s a real split between bands who do originals and bands who do cover songs. The bands who play covers are the ones you can always see in the bars, where they get paid 500 to 1,000 pesos a night [a mere £5.70 to £11.40, according to Classic Rock’s ready-reckoner]. Then there’s these regional bands that does their own stuff. I used to sing in another band called Zoo and we were unusual because we mixed originals and covers together. But in general it’s very difficult in the Philippines. There’s a lot of places where people are starving.”’

We ask Pineda for his favourite singers (besides Steve Perry, of course) and the names spew forth: “Robert Plant, Bono, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Barbra Streisand, Nat King Cole… a lotta great singers. Ann Wilson of Heart and Robin Zander, the singer of Cheap Trick. Lovin’ Every Minute Of It – was that Mike Reno? Yeah, of Loverboy. Phil Collins, Dio. It’s a lot out there. I’ve listened to all of them and then I have followed them. It became my icon, my model, just to become what I am right now.”

Is Pineda concerned by the rapid turnover of Journey singers?

“I am also concerned about that because of the type of vocal prowess that you need to show with these guys. I’m just human, and the vocals they’ve got for their music is just, like…”

“He’s got what it takes, though,” Schon repeats. “Out of Steve Perry, Steve Augeri and Jeff Scott Soto, Arnel has what it takes because he’s very musical. He doesn’t have to burn out singing all the high stuff every night. Steve Perry skated… he used lower notes that sounded just as good. They weren’t the high, soaring notes. When you have to, you have to. Robert Plant does it, everybody does it. Arnel’s got very good musical sense to just ad lib when he needs to, and make up whatever notes he wants to go to that night. And some people don’t. So he’s gonna be fine.”

Journey recorded their latest album, Revelation, with Pineda in tow – and they didn’t hang about.

“It was very fast, pretty much a live performance in the studio,” Schon confirms. “Originally we were going to have four new songs and fill up the rest with Arnel singing our greatest hits. But then I thought we’re going to end up with egg on our faces if we do that, so I pushed management and talked the band into writing more new stuff. I’m happy that we did because I think there’s much more interest in the new stuff than in remakes of the old stuff. Having said that, when people hear Arnel singing the old material they realise, wow, he can obviously cover that.”

“I wish I had a longer time,” Pineda mutters.

Schon isn’t worried if people are sceptical about the whole YouTube find-me-a-new-singer process.

“You can’t be concerned about what people think,” he insists, “you just go with your gut instinct. With Arnel we’ve got the link that’s been missing in the band for quite some time. Had I known Arnel back in the 1980s when Steve Perry decided to go, I would’ve called him.”

With Perry out of the equation after 1986’s Raised On Radio, Journey went on a 10-year hiatus. They reunited in the mid 1990s for Trial By Fire but it didn’t last long.

“Trial By Fire was received very well,” says Schon. “It got to No.3 in the Billboard chart and we had a hit single with When You Love A Woman. But Perry had physical issues [the singer went on a hiking holiday in Hawaii and cracked his hip; he claimed he needed a replacement] and didn’t want to do much touring. So we asked him: ‘Do you want to write a new record? Do you want to sing a song for a movie? Do you want to play at an awards ceremony?’ ‘No, no, no,’ came the answers. At that point you’re wondering, why did we even bother putting Journey back together?”

Nevertheless, with big-time reunion tours all the rage at the moment, wouldn’t it be tempting to get Perry back in for one last humungous paycheck?

“I would be in the front-row seat if that ever happened,” Pineda chips in.

Schon declares: “No, Steve wants nothing to do with us. It’s been like that for years.”

The last time Schon saw Perry was in January 2005 when Journey were given a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame.

“It was a great day. I was really happy to see everyone. I think they all showed up except for [ex-keyboardist/vocalist] Gregg Rolie and Herbie Herbert, our former manager. I suppose there were some sour grapes. But everyone else was there.”

Schon says he’s looking forward to writing a bunch of new songs with Pineda: “This summer we’ll be travelling on the same tour bus. [Journey will be touring the Stateside sheds, along with Heart and Cheap Trick.] I’m going to have an acoustic guitar in there and we’re going to knock out some stuff.”

“I like songwriting,” says Pineda. “It’s one of my hobbies. Most of the time I like to be alone and just think about all of the melodies in my brain.”

“I wanna write with Arnel and I believe we’re going to have some great chemistry,” Schon continues. “I’m going to push next time to have no more than two ballads on a record, because that’s all you really need. And Arnel’s voting with me.”

“I agree with Mr Neal Schon. We should rock,” says Pineda. “We should rock more. The whole band should agree with rocking more.”

These words might return to haunt us, but as our interview winds down Classic Rock is convinced Arnel Pineda is here to stay.

“Joining Journey has been a good joyride so far,” says the small-town Filipino boy. “I hope it continues for a long time.”

“When we were recording Revelation, our producer, Kevin Shirley, said: ‘Don’t treat Arnel so good. He’ll he happy with a sandwich,’” Schon chuckles.

Pineda leaves us clutching a big, black, gift-wrapped box. It’s large enough to contain several dozen sandwiches. We wonder what’s actually inside.

“It’s a present to me from our drummer, Deen [Castronovo],” says Pineda. “A brand new watch.”

Sheesh, we remark, judging by the size of the box it must be one helluva watch.

“Yeah,” Pineda smiles, cradling the box in his arms. “Welcome to The Big Watch Club.”

Originally published in Classic Rock magazine issue 122, July 2008

Geoff Barton is a British journalist who founded the heavy metal magazine Kerrang! and was an editor of Sounds music magazine. He specialised in covering rock music and helped popularise the new wave of British heavy metal (NWOBHM) after using the term for the first time (after editor Alan Lewis coined it) in the May 1979 issue of Sounds.

Black Sabbath may have laid down the template for what became doom metal, but in the late 70s and early 80s and bunch of American bands picked up the baton and ran with it – and chief among them were LA’s Saint Vitus. In 2012, as these doom legends prepared to release their first album in 2017, Hammer sat down with linchpin guitarist Dave Chandler to talk about the band’s monumental legacy.

When we’re talking Saint Vitus, the word ‘influential’ just seems too small. Formed in LA in 1978, first as Tyrant, before switching to Saint Vitus in 1980, they were arguably the first outfit to revive the stripped-down, street-doom sound of early Black Sabbath just as Sabbath themselves were losing their way. Throughout the 80s and early 90s, they issued a series of whacked-out, ultra-lo-fi albums and EPs to almost universal indifference.

Fast-forward to the present, however, and you’ll find their very name the stuff of legend, uttered in awed, reverential tones. Their scattered discography is now at the black heart of any serious doom collection, and their infamous ‘V’ insignia has been transmuted into an alchemical talisman, worn with pride by the righteous and the worthy. As career turnarounds go, it’s been a real nose-bleeder.

In the wake of the band’s split in 1996, talk of a possible Saint Vitus reunion remained little more than chatroom chatter until the classic lineup of vocalist Scott ‘Wino’ Weinrich, guitarist Dave Chandler, bassist Mark Adams and drummer Armando Acosta (RIP) got together in 2003 for a one-off performance at Chicago’s Double Door club. It would be a further six years before they actually went back on tour, but when they hit the road at last, it was crystal clear that the band born too late and down on their luck had finally found home. Greeted by the kind of rapturous reception they could only have dreamed about back in the day, clamour for a brand new Vitus album inevitably followed. But a lingering shadow of doubt remained. Seventeen years on from the band’s swansong, Die Healing – a cast-iron classic by any reckoning – could the reactivated Vitus really rekindle the magick of yore?

“I had reservations about the writing process,” admits Dave Chandler. “I hadn’t tried to write in the Saint Vitus style for so long. Could I still do it? The expectation surrounding this actually fucked with me. I drove my wife out of her mind because I was such a prick while I was writing. I wanted to do something special and not just throw it together. But all the bull- shit that I put her and everyone else through and the pressure added to the realism of the record. We had one new song we were playing live – Blessed Night – and I had a few riffs floating around in my brain and I got them down. Then when we got together, everything worked out real quick and I was like ‘Yeah, this’ll work.’

“An album wasn’t expected when we did the reunion but people kept asking me about it. Then we played Roadburn and Hellfest and the response was overwhelming. That’s when people started asking about a new record. As we got more and more shows, we started thinking about it more. So it was completely unplanned although we’re very happy with the results.”

If bands are ever truly products of their time, then Vitus are sons of the 70s just as they are sons of Sabbath. The challenge facing them, which soon became a struggle, was just how to be a 70s band during the 80s. In many parts of the US and Europe, the 70s was a decade of grim austerity and it’s no surprise that it produced some of the grittiest and most memorable music, cinema and literature. The 80s, by contrast, were dominated by glitz, glamour and Gordon Gekko’s hollow creed, ‘Greed is good.’ In the world of metal, thrash and glam bestrode this wasteland wreaking Godzilla-like mayhem to the cheers of the (m)asses. To say the least, it was not a good time to be a doom-monger, reflecting society’s ills back on itself with an unflinching glare.

“We were definitely a 70s band stuck in the 80s,” agrees Dave. “That’s what the song Born Too Late is about. I used to say that if we’d started ’69 instead of ’79 we would’ve been better accepted. Eighties metal was definitely not what we were doin’! Especially out in the Hollywood area. We weren’t aware of anyone else like us. We’d never heard of Pentagram or Trouble. We finally started hearing about bands like that through friends and still hadn’t heard about Pentagram until we met Wino.”

Scott ‘Wino’ Weinrich hooked up with Vitus in ’86 following the departure of original vocalist Scott Reagers. His first album with the band – the mesmerising Born Too Late – took them still deeper into the everyday horrors endured and inflicted by humanity and ever further from the zero-sum zeitgeist of the era. As a result of their disenchantment with and rejection by the mainstream rock scene, Vitus wormed their way into the hardcore punk underground, a risky and unlikely move that played out surprisingly well. Sharing stages with, amongst others, fellow Californians Black Flag, Vitus soon found themselves signed to guitarist Greg Ginn’s record label, SST.

“We ended up getting into the punk rock scene ’cos the metal people hated us!” laughs Dave. “Bands like Black Flag started comin’ up around the same time and signing with SST was really good because none of the metal labels would touched us. We liked Black Flag and they were listening to Sabbath too, which is how they ‘got it’. They put us on stage with every SST band and every band that came to town. They threw us at the punks’ feet. Eventually, after we took their shit and kept coming back, it endeared us to them and they became our fanbase. We’d do a show in LA and the only long-haired people there would be our friends. It helped our reputation ’cos we were like this weird, crazy, slow band that played to punk crowds, so it was like ‘Don’t be fucking with them!’”

It’s not difficult to imagine how a punk crowd, at first perhaps bemused and maybe even bored by Vitus’s wilful obscurity and torpid tempos, might subsequently warm to their screeching feedback squalls and scathing social comment. Depression, degradation and death not withstanding, Vitus commented on nothing more often than drugs. The mind-expanding highs and soul-crushing lows of substance (ab)use have been a recurring theme throughout their career, the title of their comeback album Lillie: F-65 a reference to Dave’s childhood drug of choice (besides pot, of course) – a powerful barbiturate to which he was addicted for a while.

“A lot of it is personal experience,” he reveals. “In the 70s, my high school was like a drug store! We tried everything and it became a big influence. We saw a lotta people screwin’ up by doin’ certain drugs and I later came to write about it. Clear Windowpane is showin’ how cool it is to trip but then something like Shooting Gallery is like, you do this one and you’re gonna wind up getting gutter water to shoot up. In the 80s, drinking songs were all just about partying and having a good time and then here come Saint Vitus with Dying Inside ha ha ha! I’m not trying to preach to anyone, just talk about what’s happened to me and what I’ve seen. I don’t see any reason to bullshit people and I can’t stand people who write about stuff they’ve never experienced. I’ve never shot up heroin and I never will, but I know people who have and seen bad things happen to them.”

In keeping with the timeless and familiar themes it explores, Lillie: F-65 effortlessly recreates the signature Vitus sound; thunderous drums, throbbing bass and, of course, the day-after-Dresden drone Dave calls his guitar tone. It sounded fucked back in the 80s, but now everyone’s looking for ways to get their setup just that little bit shittier.

“We wanted to get a real heavy, bassy sound,” Dave recalls, “so I decided to just turn the bass on my guitar all the way up and take all the high out of it. That gave the rumbling sound I wanted for the power chords but when I played a lead, you couldn’t hear it. So I experimented with equalisers and treble boosters but the best solution I found was just to step on the fuckin’ wah-wah pedal! A lot of guitarists have come up to me and said, ‘I’d love to get your sound!’ and I’m like, ‘Well, just turn your treble off!’”

It’s no secret that, in the past, things weren’t always sweetness and light in the Vitus camp. The creative drives of power axis Dave and Wino clearly complemented each other but there was conflict too and, eventually, an acrimonious divorce. In 2012, the band’s long-awaited date with destiny, older and much wiser heads are in control.

“Wino and I always got on well but we butted heads creatively here and there,” says Dave. “It was a good thing as it created an oil and vinegar situation. Unfortunately, when he eventually left, nobody was getting along with anybody and we didn’t talk for a few years. This time around, we’re all on the same head level or same page or whatever. It’s really cool and a much better atmosphere. People see us and they’re like ‘You guys are smiling! What’s wrong?’ It started out good and now it’s come full circle and is even better than it was in the past.”

If there’s a certain irony in these doyens of despair grinning like Cheshire cats and getting along like a church on fire, it’s surely eclipsed by the love and respect being lavished upon the band’s legacy like so many Hawaiian garlands. Influential is one thing, iconic is another, but the guys are enjoying these precious moments with humility and good grace. Facing our own impending doom, the rest of the world has finally caught up with Saint Vitus.

“It’s flattering but a bit overwhelming,” sighs Dave. “We didn’t expect this. It’s weird – we had years of people ignoring us and then during the time we broke up, I started noticing us in books and stuff. Then we started hearing about all these doom bands coming up, saying this and that. I like the fact that doom is thriving in the underground because when we started doing it, we didn’t even know the term. There was no genre. And of course it boosts your ego when you walk into something like Hole In The Sky and people are like, ‘Whoa!’ That feels good. But stuff like us will never be main- stream. We’re still the outsiders but now we’ve got a bunch of good people outside with us!”

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 230, April 2012