This was the last concert I attended by Rush.... I thought for ever... and certainly the last one with Neil Peart.
It was the Time Machine tour. They played the whole of 'Moving Pictures' including the Camera Eye, which they had rarely played live. They repeated that in one of their shows at the Kia Forum with Annika Nilles on drums.
Half way through the concert I decided to relocate to a new place at the back of the arena which had spare seats as my view was affected by other people. I saw several other people then having the same ideas as the concert progressed.
This was one of the final concerts that I also parked at a pub in the Sheffield area of Attercliffe called the Cocked Hat. This was a super pub in an area which had quite a few dodgy ones. It no longer exists...
To the left of the entrance was a bar billiards table - you don't see those in pubs very often... I loved having a few games of this with a nice pint of Landlord. Through the back were lots of small boothed seating areas - a great place to sit. From there, you would walk past the stadium built for the World Student Games, where I saw U2, and which was visited by bands such as the Rolling Stones.
Similarly, it no longer exists. Using Street View you can go back to 2008 when it was still there...
After that it was past hotels and restaurants to get to the Arena and the Don Valley Bowl, where cricket was played.
Across the car park from the arena - now called the Utilita Arena - is a pub called the Noose and Gibbet Inn, with an interesting pub sign.
The man hanging outside, looking down at passersby with a mournful expression on his pale, lifeless face, is the notorious highwayman Spence Broughton. He was sentenced to death in 1792 after robbing a mail boy delivering the post to Sheffield and Rotherham. A judge, wishing to make an example of him, ordered that his body be hanged on a gibbet on Attercliffe Common and left on display there as a macabre warning to others. His corpse was left to decompose within a cage and it became a ghoulish visitor attraction, reportedly drawing 40,000 people within the first few days of its appearance close to the road between Sheffield and Rotherham.
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