Rush's Neil Peart identified a Pink Floyd concert in Toronto as one of his greatest concert experiences, profoundly influencing his approach to live performance and songcraft. This reflects how Pink Floyd pioneered treating concerts as performance art spectacles rather than simple song recitals, an innovation that shaped the ambitions of subsequent rock bands to create immersive, memorable experiences for their audiences.

Peart attended a Pink Floyd show in Toronto in 1970 or 1971, and another at London's Rainbow Theatre in 1972. Pink Floyd set the standard by turning their concerts into artistic experiences, famously playing previously unreleased pieces and creating cinematic moments. Inspired by this approach, Peart and Rush sought to replicate that immersive experience through their own elaborate stage presence and complex, thematically ambitious songwriting, with Peart delivering drum solos of nearly superhuman technical difficulty to push the boundaries of what audiences expected from live rock performance.