The album Neil Peart wanted to turn into a movie
Plenty of prog rock masterpieces lend themselves well to the silver screen. Outside of the narrative concepts around the best work by the likes of Yes and Genesis, many artists have tried their hand at adapting their pieces of music into a full cinematic experience, including Roger Waters, who made a mission to turn The Wall into a film. While Rush had always relied on making dense narratives within the span of a few minutes, Geddy Lee remembered Neil Peart wanting to get a movie version of Clockwork Angels off the ground.
From the first day that Peart joined the band, conceptual songs were never out of the question. Throughout his time as the band’s drummer and primary lyricist, Peart was known to make songs with complex stories that normally stretched well beyond the typical length of a song, either going after people who did him wrong or writing pieces of prose that the rock world had never heard before.
Even though a song like ‘The Fountain of Lamneth’ made for an engaging story on the page, it never exactly translated into album sales, resulting in the band’s most dismal reception and putting them in danger of breaking up over the creative tension. Once their label started breathing down their necks, Peart got back at his higher-ups by doing what he did best, writing a song about it.
Channelling all his energy into the album 2112, the title track was centred around a tale of a man being forced to keep in line with what the high priests of The Temples of Syrinx want him to do. As much as this could have backfired spectacularly, it would become the model for what Rush songs would be like for the next few years, having another mind-bending story on every album before streamlining their sound.
By the time the band finally got to the end of their career, though, Peart was finally ready to take on a full conceptual piece. Closing the door on their recording days, Clockwork Angels was the band’s first fleshed-out story across one album, telling the story of a wayward traveller trying to find his way in a steam-punk-inspired environment.
Peart still had plenty left over, even when the final lyrics and sonic vignettes were made, making a novella of the same name that was sold separately from the album. As Lee recalled, though, Peart had more in mind for his musical masterwork that wasn’t tied just to the musical medium.
In conversation with Louder, Lee remembered Peart always wanting to turn the album into a film, saying, “I know Neil always wanted to bring the Clockwork Angels story to the screen in some way or another. It was a big deal for him, and he had done some work in the hopes he could make something like that happen. Maybe one day”.
Though the band has not had any plans to do a big-screen debut of their final album as of late, the music itself seems tailor-made for a stage production as well, especially with the epic scope of songs like the title track and ‘Headlong Flight’. If this kind of movie would actually come to pass, though, the surviving band members need to make at least some sort of cameo in the film.
