David Gilmour Solo tour, Highly recomended

[wellREDman]

Ive just done 2 days spot operating on production rehearsals for David Gilmour's upcoming solo tour,  really pleasantly surprised at how good it is, If you're a Pink Floyd fan I'd highly recommend it

  Ive seen Floyd in various incarnations and fragments before and they are obviously  epic but I've really enjoyed the slightly stripped back and almost jazzy arrangements of old familiar songs. Lots of slide guitar, lots of sax from a really deft backing band.
 
on a professional note the light and video show is really good , not a huge rig but the range that they get out of it  is impressive and some of the onscreen animation is both beautiful and haunting

Looking forward to the first show with an audience tomorrow

[Highlander]

Nice... he's local to me, sometimes... at least for the next week or so...

Enjoy...!

Taking my daughter and boyfriend to see the Foo Fighters tomorrow... Iggy and Royal Blood as support...

[wellREDman]

plus he got extra double bonus points for soundchecking with Postman Pat (all the verses and everything) yesterday and Le Freak today

[Highlander]

Postman Pat...?
Hope he wasn't abusing Jess...!

Quite a number of years back, at a pub in Hounslow called the White Bear, a certain flamboyant tall blond keyboard player used to do a turn for the old folks at Christmas, literally saying lines like "you hum it, I'll play it", doing anything from Roll Out The Barrel to Any Ol' Iron to what ever they could think of... real Chas-n-Dave years before they were doing it...
Used to catch him popping in for a pint of Pride before going to matches at Brentford too, then fly back to Switzerland... life was hard, back in the ol' days...

[uwe]

Darn, I had one of those ultra-rare tickets (the one gig in Germany sold out within hours) and now can't go because my band is having a gig on exactly that date. What sacrifice!

I console myself with having seen original Pink Floyd on the Animals tour.   

[Highlander]

I saw the pig at the power station, both times, but that's as close as I've been to Floyd (excluding bumping into Gilmour in a local pub)

If you're not playing, then being on the crew is as cool as it gets...

[uwe]

I thought the pig dumb then and now. And if truth be told, I didn't even like the concert at the time, I slammed it in a letter to a German music paper and they printed it (headlined as "Pink Rubbish") and the next thing I get is physical violence threats from all those peacenik Pink Floyd fans.  What put me off was the Floyd's seeming arrogance at the time, they came across as totally aloof, they did not even introduce Snowy White as their 2nd guitarist. No stage announcement the whole evening, they first played Animals complete, then had a break and proceeded to play Wish You Were Here (the album) complete (with some nice extended Gilmour solos) and then left stage without a word to encore perdictably (again without a word) with Money and Time. In hindsight this was of course the time where Waters felt the alienation from the audience especially strongly which then prompted him to lick his wounds with The Wall (which I find hugely overrated to this day, I'm a Wish You Were Here guy myself with its krautrockish ambience music).

But that was long ago, these days I can appreaciate Mason's heartthrob drumming, the voice of Gilmour's English blues school guitar playing, Wright's warm keyboards and Water's acerbic wit. While I find a lot of Water's solo work (and I include The Wall with that) as unbearably self-centered and masturbative, Floyd without him degenerated to just a pleasant sound landscape with an excellent guitarist, but without any real lyrical depth and or that Waters edginess which prevented Pink Floyd from becoming the Moody Blues II and kept you on your toes as a listener.

[Highlander]

I'm take them or leave them but really rate some stuff... the solo in Comfortably Numb really works for me... and some tracks are indelibly stamped on my psyche for some reasons... one being when I saw the Who in '76... it was p'ing down with rain and during the Alex Harvey set someone had climbed one of the stadium lighting towers (it was a football ground, after all) and knocked some of the mirrors set up for the Who's laser light show, and the DJ between the sets made it quite clear that the idiot up the gantry would be delaying the start of the Who's set, and played a song specially for him ... One Of These Days ... the audience went along with it with rapturous approval, giving a rousing chorus of a popular football chant ... "You're gonna  get your f'ing head kicked in..." repeated until he came down, into the loving arms of the local Constabulary ... 

There were several pigs ... one was pushed out into a gig and got shredded ... my sister came home with a piece but Gawd knows where that went ... and frankly, I don't give a damn ...

Back to the packing...

[Alanko]

All before my time. If I had to pick a favourite, I love the era of Pink Floyd from 1968 to the US tours of 1970. The Saucerful - More- Ummagumma - Atom Heart Mother era of the band. Some corners of the Saucerful album have this really dark, creepy gothic atmosphere. Oddly the band consistently fail to acknowledge any of the real innovation they made during this period; German bands like Guru Guru, Amon Duul II, Tangerine Dream (pre sequencers), Ash Ra Tempel, Xohl Caravan and Popol Vuh took the Stoogy jamming of the live cuts, and the electronic weirdness of the studio cuts from Ummagumma and built an entire genre on that sound. I wish Gilmour and co would take some of the credit for this!

[Denis]

All before my time. If I had to pick a favourite, I love the era of Pink Floyd from 1968 to the US tours of 1970. The Saucerful - More- Ummagumma - Atom Heart Mother era of the band. Some corners of the Saucerful album have this really dark, creepy gothic atmosphere. Oddly the band consistently fail to acknowledge any of the real innovation they made during this period...

I'm with you on this though I will extend my favorite time period to around 1972. I love that stuff and can listen to it over and over (and have).

[the mojo hobo]

I saw the pig fly over Soldier Field in Chicago. It is still one of my favorite concerts.

Also noticed that the 2 big venue concerts in Chicago are split by a show in the Chicago Auditorium where another of my favorites was, King Crimson from the first row of the first balcony.

[Highlander]

Nice...! what lineup of KC...?

[Chris P.]

I guess Guy Pratt will play bass?

[the mojo hobo]

Nice...! what lineup of KC...?

Fripp, Wetton, Cross, Bruford.

[gearHed289]

Fripp, Wetton, Cross, Bruford.

Oh man... Ive been on a binge lately. Singing Starless in the car every day and listening to the Great Deceiver box set.