There are occasions in every great band’s life when their creative forces culminate to a degree where they can no longer be contained and it is time to turn all this imagination and musical nous loose on ever more ambitious arrangements. Rush had reached that point by 1978.
If we’re going to be telling the story of how the legendary Canadian prog trio applied the coup de grâce to Hemispheres by playing us out with La Villa Strangiato, an instrumental just shy of 10 minutes long, inspired by the REM activity of guitarist Alex Lifeson, then we have to go back a year, to the summer of ’77, when they arrived at Rockfield Studios, in Wales, fully prepared to execute their most-daring musical high-wire act yet, tracking Xanadu in one take.
