Geoff Barton
UK music newspaper Sounds’ journalist Geoff Barton’s road to Rush was the same as many youngsters. “I used to devour Moorcock books and Tolkien,” says Geoff. “Robert E Howard, ‘Conan The Barbarian’, all that sort of stuff was very wrapped up in that crazy, crazy era.” It was the fantasy themes that Geoff picked up when he first heard Rush, as a journalist working for Sounds in the UK. “With ‘Fly By Night’ and the glorious sword and sorcery visuals, it just was the right thing at the right time,” he says.
When Rush caught Geoff’s attention, most of the records were only available on import. “In those days even Kiss albums would come out in the UK six months after they came out in the States,” says Geoff. “We knew what niche that we were trying to establish in the pages of Sounds; it was really important to buy all those import albums and try and persuade your boss to pass your expenses!” Indeed, at the time, Geoff was one of the few journalistic voices that backed bands such as Rush. “99.9% of writers were down the Roxy every night, watching Generation X and the Pistols. I was blithely unaware of punk even though it was all exploding around me. Luckily Sounds allowed me to do what I was most interested in.”
Without too much forethought, Geoff struck a chord with the Sounds readers and established a following of Rush fans. “Like punk, the rock thing was another working-class movement that appealed to Sounds readers, rather than the slightly cooler, slicker NME, Melody Maker approach,” says Geoff. By the time the band came over to the UK there was a pre-packaged fan base ready to welcome them in – a fact which the band were delighted to discover. “I always remember Alex ushering me out and thanking me,” says Geoff. “We did get a lot of bullshit from a lot of musicians and you didn’t quite believe them, but Alex was just so genuine, he said, thanks for all the support you’ve given us in the UK, it’s really made a lot of difference.”
Geoff went on to coin the phase ‘NWOBHM’, or the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, something Rush played their part in inspiring. As the movement grew, in 1981 he launched Kerrang! magazine out of Sounds, becoming editor of Kerrang! in 1984. A few years later he left the music world to write about sport and work on a car magazine, before returning to the fold in 2003 as editor-at-large for UK magazine Classic Rock. While his favourite Rush era is pre-‘Kings’, he will always have a soft spot for the band. “There’s not a lot of pretensions about them although ostensibly their music can be pretentious,” says Geoff. “As individuals there’s a degree of honesty, a tremendous amount of musicality. There’s also the feeling that they’re still an underground band over here, that people don’t know about, even though they play Wembley!”