Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson has been opening up about life after Rush and has revealed that he and Geddy Lee still meet up and play “once a week.”
In a new interview with Tom Power on Canada’s CBC Radio One, Lifeson gave an insight into the two men’s relationship: “Geddy’s my best friend. We do so much stuff together. We play tennis together. Often we drink a little too much wine together," he confirmed.
"So I'll go over to his place, and we'll just hang around. Invariably we'll go downstairs into his studio and we'll play and for fun we play some Rush songs - just the two of us, just jamming, really. We've been writing music together for 50 years.
“Honestly, he's my best friend. Why wouldn't I wanna hang around with him? So that's our relationship. And the rumours fly and all of that stuff - of anything, a new album and whatever. But we just really, really enjoy each other's company. I talk to him almost every day and have forever."
Rush effectively ground to a halt in 2015 when drummer Neil Peart quit after their R40 Live Tour. Five years later he died, bringing an end to any remaining possibility the band could reconvene.
Lifeson reflected on how it all ended: “Neil was adamant that he was done. There was a time where he was thinking that maybe we could stretch it a bit, but then he had a problem with his feet and he was done. Ged and I were disappointed. We felt like we had a lot of gas in the tank still.
“We wanted to go to Europe desperately. We had a lot of fans there and we never got there - in the UK especially. So I think Ged and I were very disappointed. I'd say we were, to be honest with you, maybe a little bitter that it ended that way. But what could we do? Neil did it for 40 years. He absolutely had the toughest job in the band. And he felt like if he couldn't play a hundred percent, then he was done."
Since then, Lee and Lifeson haven’t recorded any new music under the Rush name, although both have confirmed that several drummers reached out to them after Peart’s death in the hope they would be carrying on. Instead Lifeson has embarked on a new project, Envy Of None, who recently released their second album, Stygian Wavz.
