RUSH's 'Vital Signs' Was Inspired By A Fake New Wave Band Made Up As A Joke

There's no doubt that the new wave movement began to make an impact on Rush in the late-'70s and early-'80s.

Rush was always influenced by sounds beyond their own hard rock purview, but in a conversation with George Stroumboulopoulos on the latest Strombo Show, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson explained how they sometimes went about channeling those musical ideas.

Rush had a habit of inventing fake side projects with silly names. When they had downtime between takes in the studio, the trio would attempt to perform a song by one of their imaginary bands. Perhaps the most significant of these bands was a new wave outfit called The Fabulous Men.

"Fabulous Men were very new wave," Lee said. "They were fabulous. And they were men (laughs)."

"And I do have the tapes," added Lifeson.

"And there are some tapes that shall remain [secret]," Lee said.

While The Fabulous Men (and their imaginary contemporaries) were made up to amuse Lee, Lifeson and Neil Peart, sometimes those jam sessions would have an impact on Rush's music.

"Well, 'Vital Signs' is a direct influence by the Fabulous Men," Lee noted. "There's no doubt about it. ...It was inspired by our Fabulous Men persona. ... It was fun. If it pushed us and influenced us, that was accidental. But fun is contagious. Especially for a band that writes about 'heavy' topics, if you can ingest a bit of fun in it, that's all the better."

Many recording sessions would grind to a halt when the engineers had to attend to something in the control room. That left Lifeson, Lee and Peart to entertain themselves until they could get back to work.

Lifeson adds that there's another "classic" Rush song that the band performed in a variety of different genres, just because they were bored waiting for Moving Pictures producer Terry Brown to finish a call with his mother.

"The point is you let yourself go because you can't just sit and wait, you're pent up, you're ready to record and you just start jamming," said Lee. "You vent your frustration through the microphone."

Rush is celebrating Moving Pictures with a 40th anniversary reissue of the album, which arrived last Friday. Get a closer look at the new Moving Pictures box set here.