Triumph's reunion show features cutting-edge visuals and plenty of old-school pyrotechnics.Tom Pandi/Scotiabank Arena/Supplied
It’s all about the songs.
The version of April Wine that is opening concerts on Triumph’s 50th-anniversary reunion tour is a glorified cover band − none of the original members are with the group any longer. The reason they were on stage Friday night at Scotiabank Arena warming up for the headliner is as plain as the writing on the setlist: Oowatanite, You Could’ve Been a Lady, Say Hello, I Like to Rock, Enough is Enough, Just Between You and Me, Sign of the Gypsy Queen and Roller.
All those April Wine singles cracked the Top 100 in Canada during the 1970s and early 1980s. The music evokes nostalgia among an audience that remembers stubby beer bottles, roller disco and wood-paneled basements. “I like to rock,” as the song goes. “I like it, you like it.”
Concert promoters like it too.
At Scotiabank, the substitute frontman paid tribute to the late April Wine bandleader and chief creative force Myles Goodwyn, who, before he died in 2023, gave approval for April Wine to continue without him.
April Wine, the band that built Montreal-based Aquarius Records, hit the road last year with Bachman–Turner Overdrive, which is just Randy Bachman under a better brand name. This summer, Bachman and Burton Cummings are touring as a reunited Guess Who after legally acquiring the band name back a year ago from a pseudo-Guess Who that had been operating dubiously under the banner for years.
Goodwyn wrote April Wine’s Rock n’ Roll is a Vicious Game, with a line about how things change over time: “Songs that moved us so easily, no longer make us cry.”
He may have gotten that one wrong. Songs stay with us, and the music industry trades on that emotional attachment by selling tickets to see bands under suspicious pretenses. Goodwyn saw rock ‘n’ roll as a vicious game; I call what April Wine is doing these days a crummy scam.
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Triumph does not fall under that description.
Touring for the first time in three decades, the showy prog-anthem trio who fought the good fight while wearing spandex and who believed in the magic power of soaring choruses, lightning-quick guitar work and helium-high vocals in the 1970s and ’80s now consists of original drummer/singer Gil Moore and singer/guitarist Rik Emmett, supported by guitarist Phil X, bassist/vocalist Todd Kerns and drummer/keyboardist Brent Fitz.
Health issues prevent original bassist Mike Levine from taking part in the band’s Rock & Roll Machine Reloaded tour of North America that includes 10 Canadian dates.
Phil X, left, and Rik Emmett shred the guitar during Friday's show.Tom Pandi/Scotiabank Arena/Supplied
Pre-tour rumours that Emmett and Moore would be part-time players within a quasi-tribute band were unfounded. They were the stars and heavy lifters, taking only occasional breaks. Kerns, the Saskatchewan-born bassist, took over lead-singer chores on Spellbound sensationally and even wore a hockey jersey in the tradition of Levine.
Tradition also calls for spectacle − even as a bar band starting out, Triumph was outfitted with arena-rock effects. The current show features cutting-edge visuals, along with enough old-school pyrotechnics that may have had local authorities consulting the building’s fire codes.
In short, the concert was high-tech with heart; a strongly-amped trip down memory lane.
“When people come to see Triumph, they’re coming to worship at our church of rock ‘n’ roll,” Moore told me in a video interview he and Emmett took part in earlier in the week. “Whatever we do on stage that is bringing them there, it’s our job to make them feel great. And we’re not mailing it in.”
There were concessions: some songs were performed in a different key to ease the strain on the throats of Emmett and Moore. Melodies were modified slightly for the same reason.
“My ego is not going to get in the way,” Emmett said in the interview. “It’s not about self-glorification. It’s about this music.”
Emmett’s guitar exchanges with Phil X (a.k.a. Bon Jovi lead guitarist Theofilos Xenidis, of Toronto) were highlights.
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Triumph’s bombastic high-wire style is long out of fashion, and the leading rock critics of the day never bought into Emmett’s arena-rock romanticism. He didn’t believe the cynics then; still doesn’t. He told the Scotiabank crowd that he wrote a song 47 years ago to get the band on radio and find an audience.
“Look what happened,” he said, before singing 1979’s Hold On: “Music holds the secret, to know it can make you whole / It’s not just a game of notes, it’s the sounds inside your soul.”
The main set ended with Magic Power, from 1981. “She’s young now, she’s wild now, she wants to be free,” Emmett sang. “She gets the magic power of the music from me.”
Before the concert, the woman next to me told me the first concert she attended was at Canada’s Wonderland in the 1980s as a 15-year-old. I told her mine was April Wine and Styx in 1979. She looked around the arena and said there were a lot of old people here.
“Not us, though,” I told her.
Triumph’s Magic Power can be considered a sister song to Rush’s The Spirit of Radio, released a year earlier. Rush’s Geddy Lee sang Neil Peart’s lyrics: “All this machinery making modern music can still be open-hearted / Not so coldly charted, it’s really just a question of your honesty.”
It is 2026, and the question still holds. I like Triumph’s answer.