It was half-a-dozen songs into their concert at the Saddledome Friday night when Triumph launched into the nine-minute song Blinding Light Show.
Unless you are a scholar of Canadian hard rock, you may not know that the song is the final track on the band’s 1976 self-titled debut. It is a product of its time, a shape-shifting prog-rock number that begins with the puzzling lyrics “And from where I stand, I reach my hand to catch a love blow.”
For all but the most devoted of devotees, Blinding Light Show may be a bit of a slog these days; the sort of meandering, bloated excursion that could have single-handedly hastened the arrival of punk rock had anyone actually heard it back then. There’s a good chance it already sounded hopelessly dated back in 1976. At the same time, it is probably an appropriate memento for Triumph to trot out on its 50th anniversary. It showcased the band’s determination to reward loyal fans with a complete picture of the act. Fifty years ago, Triumph started a strange journey that would eventually turn them into bonafide rock stars on both sides of the border, which was just as rare back then as it is now.
Fuelled by raw nostalgia, the so-called Rock & Roll Machine Reloaded stadium tour has been creakily making its way across the country and has placed the band back in its natural habitat. Led by guitarist-vocalist Rik Emmett, who is still surprisingly youthful at 72, and vocalist-drummer Gil Moore, the band revisited all of its hits with cheerful bombast and technical prowess, offering a sturdy reminder why they once dominated classic-rock radio. Bassist Mike Levine, who co-founded the band with Moore and Emmett, has been absent from the tour but received a nice tribute. The lineup was buoyed by guitarist-vocalist Phil X, drummer Brent Fitz and bassist-vocalist Todd Kerns, who all proved to be capable pinch-hitters when Moore and Emmett needed to take breathers. For Calgary fans, many who have possibly been following the band for a good part of its 50-year history, Friday’s show was a polished and crowd-pleasing treat. If nothing else, it was an interesting reminder of a specific time and place. Whether memories of the band in its heyday make you smile, smirk, cringe or laugh, Triumph once embodied the sort of stadium-rocker mould that no longer exists: the spandex jumpsuits, the flying V guitars, the toothy grins, the toothless anthems about believing in yourself and following your dreams.
Canadian rock band Triumph performs at the Scotiabank Saddledome in Calgary during their 50th Anniversary tour on Friday, May 8, 2026. Dean Pilling/Postmedia Calgary
There were a few hints early on that the band isn’t against having fun with its early image. The concert began with a montage that featured footage from its endearingly cheesy videos of the late 1970s and early 1980s before the five-piece band ripped through a convincingly high-octane version of 1982’s When the Lights Go Down, capably sung by Moore, and the hit Somebody’s Out There, one of the tunes that showcased Emmett’s sure hand at penning danger-free anthems that classic-rock radio loved in the mid-1980s. Emmett is also undeniably one of the country’s great guitar players.
Many of the highlights Friday came from his dexterous shredding and the ferocious two-guitar assault he produced with Phil X. The two conjured genuine heat on the razor-sharp intro of Allied Forces and the instrumental excursions of Rock & Roll Machine. Granted, some of the stadium-friendly throwbacks seemed to go on a little too long, including a plodding retread of Joe Walsh’s Rocky Mountain Way, a tune that helped launch the band’s career back in 1977 when they turned it into a homegrown hit.
With nostalgia running the show, Triumph couldn’t have opted for a better opening act than fellow Canucks April Wine. A quick nine-song set included all the hits: Oowatanite, their version of Hot Chocolate’s You Could’ve Been A Lady and Elton John’s Bad Side of the Moon and the thundering Enough is Enough. Fun fact: I had a K-Tel compilation cassette was I was a kid that featured Enough is Enough, which was my introduction to April Wine.
Canadian rock band Triumph performs at the Scotiabank Saddledome in Calgary during their 50th Anniversary tour Friday, May 8, 2026. Dean Pilling/Postmedia Calgary
I’m definitely not immune to feeling fleeting pangs of nostalgia when hearing it on classic-rock radio these days.
Speaking of personal nostalgia, I have my own Triumph story. When I was a teenager, I saw the band — Emmett, Moore and Levine — at the Kingswood Concert Theatre at Canada’s Wonderland in Toronto. It was 1988 and the show would prove to be Triumph’s final performance before Emmett left for a solo career and didn’t speak to his bandmates for 20 years. I was 16 at the time and had already discovered the Tragically Hip, The Band and Blue Rodeo, so I probably considered myself far too cool to be at a Triumph concert. Nevertheless, I was inadvertently witnessing CanRock history.
The band’s tale is told in Sam Dunn and Marc Ricciardelli’s touching and entertaining 2021 documentary Triumph: Rock & Roll Machine. There is something fundamentally Canadian about the underdog story: Band emerges from the suburbs and dominates the world only to split and vanish after a musical divorce that was somehow both acrimonious and kinda boring. Nevertheless, they have re-emerged to fill stadiums again in 2026. On Friday, Emmett suggested that new fans are discovering the act because those old feel-good songs offer a balm in troubled times. Are a new generation of fans finding comfort in the fortune-cookie platitudes of Hold On, Follow Your Dreams and Magic Power? Who knows. But it would be a nice career coda for the band if they were.
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