Aug 4: 2007

Rush released 'Snakes and Arrows'.

I saw the tour in support of this album at the Sheffield Arena.

There are fewer memorable songs on this album than most of the other Rush albums.

Lifeson had met guitarist David Gilmour during Gilmour's tour stop in Toronto who inspired him to write on an acoustic guitar as an indicator of how strong a tune is. 

Gilmour is thanked in the liner notes of Snakes & Arrows.

The track Hope was one result of this conversation.

Several instrumental tracks from this album feature in their live set.

Peart was inspired to write lyrics on various themes including faith, fear, the association of religion and war, hope and despair, and the religious billboards he saw on his motorcycle journey across the United States which he detailed in his fourth book Roadshow: Landscape with Drums – A Concert Tour by Motorcycle (2006), written during the R30 tour (which I also saw). He was also inspired by Robert Frost's epitaph: "I had a lover's quarrel with the world". The album's producer had previously worked with Foo Fighters.

Source: Wikipedia

Mike Oldfield ventured into classical music with his 'Music of the Spheres' album. The live world premiere of Mike Oldfield’s Music of the Spheres took place in the Atrium of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The Basque Orchestra was the formation chosen for the world launch of the British musician's first inroads to symphony music.

Arrangements for orchestra: Karl W. Jenkins
Conductor: Enrique Ugarte
Artists: Mike Oldfield, guitar; Hayley Westenra, soprano; Bilbao Choral Society.

I had visited the Guggenheim several years previously. It's an amazing building...

I was very keen to go along to this event and looked into the possibility of getting there, but it was difficult time wise to guarantee to fit around teaching... 

What were your favourite albums from the year 2007?

Let me know in the comments.

Jun 17: Ticket Stub #10: Rush

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.

Source

My friend Rob Hindle has written a poem-sequence about the incident - details from Longbarrow Press here.