A Show of Hands
The Video Concert Linernotes
by Neil Peart
A Show of Hands The Video Concert DVD Insert, 1989; transcribed by Eric Hansen
 It is time. Through the sudden darkness we run to the stage, the intro tape drowned
in a roaring wave of welcome. Our tension is fed by the audience's anticipation for this
long overdue return to Britain, and by the presence of another, silent audience - the
microphone ears and camera eyes which will focus on our performance.
For a band with high standards, a perfect show is impossible, and an excellent show
is rare. You hope that the norm is "good". To deliver a really exceptional, comfortable
performance before a recording truck or film crew has been our unfulfilled dream of many
years. Always it seemed that as soon as the machines started rolling, we forgot how to
play and our equipment forgot how to work. Any tiny inaccuracy seemed magnified to
staggering immensity by an internal vision of spinning tape-reels, malevolent machinery
capturing that damned millisecond forever.
But for these two nights, the gods smile. The ears and eyes of technology open to
capture the responses of the audience and the players to the music, to the atmosphere, to
each other. The panorama of faces alone mirrors a novel's worth of expression and
emotion; intense, playful, concentrated, abandoned, pained, laughing, serious, and
downright silly. Shifting beams of colored light animate the stage and follow the player's
every move, while the audience is picked out in tinted pools, a sea of shining faces.
Cartoon backdrops spring to life behind the band, then leap out to fill the screen. Lasers
slash and stab at the darkness. A filament of shared tension and release connects the
musicians, the audience, the music.
And the film becomes not just a concert, but a symbol - for the band a scrapbook, an
autobiography, an era frozen in glacial clarity. For the audience, it can be an enduring
souvenir, and if it can't quite capture what it was like to be there,, it is a way of seeing
through many pairs of eyes, of shifting one's vantage-point around and above the players
in a way no mortal could.
Hands perform, and hands respond. Hands gesture, and hands respond. A show of
ears and eyes, a show of hearts and minds. A Show of Hands.
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