“Tom Sawyer” exemplifies Moving Pictures’ modus operandi, with its gleaming, spacious, digital production, new-dawn synth, and a ringing, valorous chord sequence aimed at the far horizon. (Following its release, on February 12, 1981, Moving Pictures went Top 3 in the UK and US, and all the way to No.1 in the band’s native Canada.) Here was function, assuming a gratifyingly popular new form. In doing so, they subtly broadened the horizons of doggedly polarised rock fans who considered pop/new wave/other to be frivolous, flimsy, and beneath contempt. If, in 1981, the skinny ties of the era looked slightly incongruous on Rush – bassist/vocalist Geddy Lee still sported a commendably abundant hairstyle – they nevertheless pulled off the small miracle of combining the snapping energy, urgency, and ruthless self-editing of “the new music” with the grandstanding, absurdly agile musicianship which represented their essential selves, swinging their double-neck axes in a stadium firestorm of thunderflashes and laser tracery. A mid-point between past and presentĪs the steely focus of 1980’s Permanent Waves had already demonstrated, Rush had been genuinely enthused and rejuvenated by the infusion of fresh blood supplied by the nominal New Wave ( The Police, XTC, Talking Heads), but it’s Moving Pictures that stands as their most graceful, perfectly weighted mid-point between a past that resembled a Roger Dean cloud map and a clean, straight-edged, digital present that fancied itself as Piet Mondrian thumbing a lift in a Tron cityscape. Rush, for one, had been listening very carefully indeed. But it would be wrong to assume that all old prog hounds were grimly set in their ways by the tail end of the 70s, deaf to the alarms raised by the changing guard, heedlessly blundering towards an unlamented demise behind the Diminishing Returns store. Concision was a key differentiator, whether this applied to song duration, hairstyle, or hem width. Certainly, by 1981, it didn’t seem at all unreasonable to conclude that the hirsute “dinosaur” rock bands who had tottered at inordinate length across prop-littered stages were laughably antithetical to the antsy, sharply-etched, pop-conscious combos who succeeded them.
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