Okay, here’s my (not so brief) review of the Australian Pink Floyd show I saw on Saturday night! Here's the setlist:
Astronomy Domine
Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts I-V)
Time/Breathe (Reprise)
The Great Gig In The Sky
On The Turning Away
Wish You Were Here
Us And Them
Any Colour You Like
Brain Damage
Eclipse
The Happiest Days Of Our Lives
Another Brick In The Wall Part 2
---INTERMISSION---
Pigs (Three Different Ones)
Learning To Fly
Hey You
The Fletcher Memorial Home
What Do You Want From Me
Sorrow
One Of These Days
Encores:
Comfortably Numb
Run Like Hell
It was a great setlist, with several surprises. It was quite funny to have a mix of songs from Animals and The Final Cut with those from Momentary Lapse and The Division Bell. I couldn't quite imagine Roger and David agreeing long enough to do that!
Quite remarkably, they did not play Money! I’d assumed they were saving it for the encore. To be honest, it was only when they started Run Like Hell (which I knew would be the last song) that I realised they wouldn’t be doing it.
Band lineup:
http://www.aussiefloyd.com/the-band
The two guitarists – Steve Mac and David Domminey Fowler – both mostly played Fender Stratocasters, the former’s ‘favourite axe’ was black whereas the latter’s was cream. I was surprised when I found out they had a dedicated singer, who didn’t play any instruments save for acoustic guitar on Comfortably Numb. This seemed unusual for a Pink Floyd based show, but worked surprisingly well (he was off stage for the longer instrumental sections). They also had a saxophone player who only played on two tracks.
The only thing I did know in advance was that they would start with Astronomy Domine. This was great. It sounded most like the PULSE version, but had the mellow organ part in the middle like the Ummagumma version. Even better was to follow as the next song was Shine On You Crazy Diamond. As you probably know I absolutely love this song and it was great to hear the intro riff to part 2 (quite possibly my favourite bit of music, ever). Shine On had a video of a boy and a girl in a field and also photos of Syd. During the chorus they also showed an adapted version of the Wish You Were Here album cover with a pink kangaroo shaking hands with. The image disappeared and the sax player then came on stage.
This was a very difficult song to follow up, but Time was every bit as good. Like the main singer sung on the verses, the bassist on the chorus like David and Rick on the original. The guitar solo on Time was absolutely spot on! Spine-tingling stuff. I think it was probably my favourite performance of the night. Next was Great Gig In The Sky, and another very fine rendition. All three backing singers had parts on the screaming/wailing, and a great little film featuring ocean waves and photos of Rick Wright added more to the performance.
On The Turning Away isn’t really a favourite of mine – Pink Floyd and power ballads don’t mix well for me – but they did a pretty good job with it. I was a bit bemused by the intro to the next bit, which had film and audio clips of AC/DC, Kylie Minogue and Skippy the Kangaroo amongst others – the references were all clearly ‘Australian’ but it only then clicked that this meant the next song would be Wish You Were Here. I have to say that although they did it quite well, I think most of the other performances were a lot more impressive – because it was acoustic it was a bit more obvious than with most others that it wasn’t Pink Floyd themselves, I guess. Still very enjoyable though!
It was a return to Dark Side with Us And Them, which was a great performance. This was immediately followed by Any Colour You Like. This was more like the record and PULSE than the more bluesy extended jams of the mid-70s performances. This too flowed straight into Brain Damage. The video for this song featured both of the US presidential candidates (including a quite brilliant bit showing Trump on a golf course set to ‘the lunatic is on the grass’!) and also deserves a shout for a clip showing piles of tabloid newspapers. I think Don H would have liked this part!
They then introduced Another Brick by saying they were playing a song about school and teachers (it was obvious which song they meant, but I joked that they were going to play Welcome To The Machine!) I was delighted that they played Happiest Days in full as an intro, and even better they had a film during Happiest Days and Another Brick showed CGI animated versions of Pink, the teacher and the other schoolchildren based on Gerald Scarfe’s original animation. Overall it was most similar to The Wall tour version, but there were some similarities with PULSE; the backing singers sung the second verse. Uniquely, the lead guitar player used a Les Paul for the main guitar solo, not a Strat. Then went into an organ solo and then another guitar solo to end. The only slight shame was that it didn’t feature the teacher shouting ‘Wrong! Do it again!’ and the other bits at the end.
There was then a 15 minute interval. Me and my Dad both predicted that the first song after the intermission would be One Of These Days. We were very surprised when it turned out to be Pigs (3 Different Ones)! Interestingly, the main singer did the first part of each verse up to the second ‘ha ha charade you are’, then the bassist sung the rest of each verse. The song featured the talk box solo like the original record, and the middle section (my favourite part of the song) and final solo were immense.
Then came Learning To Fly, which I was impressed by – that song has only started to grow on me recently, but I really enjoyed their rendition. Next was The Fletcher Memorial Home. The guitar solo was great, but the vocals were even better, the singer really sounded like Roger in the way he veered from a quiet voice to an almost manically intense one. It was quite funny to hear this very Roger Waters track being immediately followed by two of the later Gilmour era songs, What Do You Want From Me and Sorrow. The latter was particularly good, to me the song itself isn’t that great but the guitar work is and that aspect of it meant it worked well live. On One Of These Days, they showed the bassist playing the one-note bass line on the big screen, which I thought was cool. In the background, a giant pink kangaroo (seriously, it was massive!) was inflated which spoke the threat just as the pig appears to do on Delicate Sound of Thunder, and then bounced up and down during the rest of the song. They had lap steel as played by Gilmour in the 1980s and 90s. It was a great end to the regular set ahead of the two encores.
The first encore was Comfortably Numb. What can I can say? Those guitar solos… wow!
David would have been proud. They did a much better job with the verse vocals than the post-Waters Floyd did too. Next up, as on the PULSE live album, was Run Like Hell. I’ve always found it to be terrific live and I took great pleasure in chanting ‘run, run, run, run!’ Luckily everyone else was singing, so hopefully no one had to hear my awful, awful singing voice. The vocals were shared as with The Wall tour, Delicate Sound and PULSE versions.
Overall it was a fantastic evening! The music, the band and the show were spectacular. It was a long set – they played for 3 hours with just a short break. It was also unique for me so far as it was the first big production rock show I’d seen. Of the only other two rock concerts I’ve been to, neither Don nor Neil Young had anything much in the way of videos, pyrotechnics or special effects. I really would recommend going to see them if you’re Floyd fan, it was a truly inspired salute to a great band. I didn't even hear anyone shout 'play Money!'