Fans have been puzzling over the interlocking symbol popping up all over Rush‘s “Fifty Something” reunion tour — on merchandise, stage designs and even Anika Nilles‘ drum kit. Now the artist behind it, longtime Rush collaborator Hugh Syme, has explained where the crescent-based logo came from, and admitted its origin is a little stranger than fans might expect.
Rush launched their “Fifty Something” trek earlier in June, reuniting for their first shows together in 11 years with a four-night run at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles. The dates marked the full concert debut of drummer Anika Nilles, who stepped into the seat once held by the late Neil Peart.
The band’s official store hinted at the symbol’s roots, noting that Rush have long leaned on the number three in their visuals and that they asked Syme to build something around it. Syme, who has worked with the band for more than five decades, a partnership that began with 1975’s Caress Of Steel, said the request came with a specific inspiration in mind.
“I got word from Allan [Weinrib, Geddy Lee‘s brother] that Geddy really liked that Led Zeppelin, they all had distinct symbols,” Syme told Ultimate Classic Rock. “[It was similar to how] Prince later had his own symbol that kind of became his quasi-name. But when I heard that he wanted something that indicated three, I started looking at Celtic lore and Celtic imagery that embodied the whole idea of three elements.”
The design Syme landed on came with a quirk he spotted right away.
“We came across [the symbol that’s being used], and my first thought was, ‘Well, I think that’s also a hazard symbol, like a hazardous material symbol,'” he said. “But it didn’t matter, Geddy liked it, so we rendered it in bronze, we rendered it as a watercolor. [There’s also] the metal one with the rivets [that] is on Anika‘s drum kit.”
That resemblance came back to bite the design in one instance. Syme recalled putting the symbol on the side of a coffee cup in a poster he was working on, only to get pushback.
“We just stumbled into it as a symbol [for those particular purposes], but later on, I was doing a poster, there was a coffee cup in [the design] and I put that symbol on the side of the cup. There was some pushback, saying, ‘Well, that’s where you don’t want to have [something that looks like a symbol for] hazardous material, is when you’re about to drink something, so that combination didn’t work,” he said.
Syme also broke down the main tour graphic that surfaced when the reunion was first announced, a design he says was easy to read once you knew the thinking behind it.
“I knew that we had to have some kind of image that spoke to, it’s a go again. We’re on again. Somebody gave it a green light, you know? I thought, ‘green light, Oh,'” he said. “So I very literally put a stop light together with the green light shining brighter than the other two.”
The stoplight also gave Syme a way to weave in a quiet nod to Peart, who died in 2020.
“It was quite evident that meant that it’s a go. The sparrows were an afterthought,” he revealed. “I’d already used that motif on some artwork that I did in one of the box sets of Tom Sawyer walking on a fence and sitting on the fence are two sparrows, but flying slightly away from the fence is one sparrow, obviously an allusion to Neil having taken flight.”
He added: “So I used the sparrows again on the wire that held the stoplight. That’s where that main image came from, but then all the other imagery that came along for the stage show and for the rear screen projection, were all just Allan and I working together on concepts.”
For Syme, the stoplight tied neatly back into the band’s lifelong fascination with the number three.
“The motif of three [with] Hold Your Fire [as an example], we’ve used that motif of three throughout their whole career pretty openly and pretty brazenly, actually. So the fact that it was a stoplight, the fact that green is for go and I realized that somebody had greenlit this new tour. I immediately thought, green light, three light. It was kind of a no-brainer that it ended up being a stoplight.”
Rush recently postponed two upcoming performances at Dickies Arena in Fort Worth, Texas. The sudden scheduling changes came after founding frontman and bassist Geddy Lee was diagnosed with laryngitis and bronchitis, forcing him to take immediate vocal rest.
The affected performances, which were originally slated for June 30 and July 2, have now been pushed back to July 11 and July 13, respectively. Frustratingly for fans and the crew alike, the July 2 concert had already been rescheduled once before. That specific show was originally supposed to take place on June 24, but was moved after travel and border-related delays severely impacted the band’s touring production earlier in the month.
