RUSH Plays “A Farewell to Kings” for the First Time Since 1979 at Forum Closing Night

The fourth and final night of RUSH’s Forum residency on Saturday ended with a quiet piece of history. The band performed “A Farewell to Kings” for the first time since June 4, 1979, when it appeared at the Pinkpop festival in the Netherlands. Forty-seven years of setlist silence broke inside the Inglewood arena as the song closed out a four-night stand that had already restocked the live catalog with deep cuts.

The “Fifty Something” North American reunion tour turned each evening into its own narrative. Night two brought back the full seven-part “2112” suite, and on Saturday that arc was repeated, now alongside tour debuts for “The Pass” and “The Anarchist”—songs that had been absent since 2013 and 2015 respectively. Aimee Mann joined for “Time Stand Still,” one more marker of a tour that draws from the band’s entire timeline without sliding into nostalgia for its own sake.

The Forum run is over, but the tour stretches through December. The fact that “A Farewell to Kings” finally surfaced—not at a festival or a one-off, but in the middle of a sold-out residency—says more about the tour’s internal logic than any setlist trick. RUSH is treating its own catalog as a working document, not a museum piece.