Making Memories
At the tender age of 22, I encountered for the first time a human being who smoked faster than me. He also played drums faster than me, and by all accounts better than me, and everyone else. In Modern Drummer Magazine’s influential yearly poll, he won ‘Best Rock Drummer’ in 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983,
1984 and 1985, and then in 1986 they invented the ‘Honor Roll’ to make him ineligible for the annual award and ensure he didn’t win it every year until 2112.
As a young journalist on Rhythm Magazine, to me Neil Peart was God. I met him in person once only, in a cavernous room at the Mayfair hotel on a damp Friday in April 1988, the morning after Rush’s first gig at Wembley Arena since the New World Tour of ’83.
A nervous PR seemed slightly taken aback at my dishevelled state (I had failed dismally to sleep on a friend’s floor in Streatham after the gig) as Neil shook my hand and then lit a cigarette, a procedure he repeated every four and a half minutes
