VI- Hugh Syme: Exploiting the Words

RUSH - 'Signals' (1982)

Hugh Syme is the appointed creator of album covers for the Canadian group, RUSH. Based most of the time on puns that refer to the titles of the songs or album, his images, photographs or drawings are highly creative prints with a sense of humour. When RUSH changed its style on its album, ‘Signals,’ Hugh Syme photographed a Dalmatian ‘marking his territory’ near a fire hydrant: a strong image with aggressive colors which, once seen, remains in the memory.

For the album cover of RUSH’s ‘Moving Pictures,’ a photo taken in front of Toronto’s Queen's Park Building shows a literal moving of pictures (including one of the ‘witch’ Jeanne d'Arc, a reference to the song title, ‘Witch Hunt’), and all the ‘threes’ in the photo - three paintings, three arches, three pillars, three characters in black, etc. – refer to the fact that RUSH is a trio.

Other symbols are certainly hidden here, but that is how Hugh Syme works in ‘exploiting’ the words : following the famous example of the cover photograph for The BEATLES’ ‘Sgt. Pepper ’ album, RUSH’s album covers are true enigmas which their fans have fun decoding down to the finest detail. On the technical level, the photograph is irreproachable and required a considerable amount of technical deployment - to such a degree that the record company refused to pay the extra cost of staging the photo, which RUSH had to pay out of its own pocket.