If there was any question of how well Anika Nilles is settling in with Rush, the onstage pranks she’s started playing on bandmates Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson answers it.
She endured a difficult year of rehearsals as the band prepared for their Fifty Something tour, 11 years after the late Neil Peart’s retirement signalled what was thought to be the end of their career.
But with Nilles and keyboardist Loren Gold, the band are enjoying a new lease of life – and the drummer’s light-hearted show-end jokes demonstrate how much they’re enjoying it.
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In the latest video clip, below, Nilles leaves Lee and Lifeson holding the final chord of “Working Man” and grabs a bag of chips, eating a few herself before offering them to her waiting colleagues. When they signal “no, thanks” she puts them away and attempts to surprise them by hitting her last notes without warning…but they’re ready for her.
That moment – in Little Caesar’s Arena in Detroit on Aug. 26 – follows at least 10 pranks assembled by YouTuber Rush101 in the video below. In the first, she simply pulls a bewildered face as Lee and LIfeson pull faces at each other, shrugging and mouthing, “okay,” before finishing the song.
Later she gets her phone out and takes a selfie of the trio. At another show she takes a newspaper out to read while the guitarists are ringing the last chord. At another show she put on a replica of legendary Rush character The Bag.
Anika Nilles’ Hard Year of Rehearsal
Nilles’ light moments are hard-earned, as Lee recently observed. “She had to learn something like 43 songs in the course of a year, and those are not easy drum parts to learn,” he said. “[S]he was working as hard, I think, as she’s ever worked on anything.
“[S]he would work really hard on her own, then she would come to Toronto sporadically. … I think she found it much easier to work with us in person, because there’s a chemistry that we have, and we can reassure her, ‘This part is right, this part is this long, and no, you have to play this part this way.'”
He added: “We played a full show 24 nights out of 27 days. We’ve never worked that hard in our entire lives. And I’m thankful for it, because opening night, we were all a bit of a nervous wreck. [But] all that rehearsal paid off.”
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Gallery Credit: Eduardo Rivadavia
