by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
My “feature” last night was a KPBS pledge-break special with
the rather awkward title The Australian Pink Floyd Concert: Eclipsed by the
Moon. The Australian Pink Floyd are a Pink
Floyd tribute band founded in Australia in 1988 (which seems pretty early in
the day for a Pink Floyd tribute, given that the real Pink Floyd — though
without their principal songwriter, Roger Waters, who’d had a hissy-fit with
the others in the mid-1980’s and had angrily left — were still a going concern
at the time), and I suppose I should give them credit for a relatively simple
name instead of “The World-Famous Pink Floyd” (Charles and I still can’t get
over the absurdity of a PBS New Year’s special that featured a Glenn Miller
tribute band called “The World-Famous Glenn Miller Orchestra,” which suggested
to us that there might be rivals called “The Intergalactically Renowned Glenn
Miller Orchestra” or “The Universally Acclaimed Glenn Miller Orchestra” — names
that actually sound science-fictional enough they might be better applied to
bands doing tribute to Pink Floyd, or Sun Ra for that matter). Their three core
members were vocalist and guitarist Steve Mac, bassist and vocalist Colin
Wilson, and keyboard player Jason Sawford, who’ve been with the project since
its founding even though drummers and others have come and gone. In 1996 they
got some sort of ultimate accolade for a tribute band by being hired to play a
private gig at the 50th birthday party of David Gilmour, lead
guitarist for the real Pink Floyd
(“Well, it was his birthday — he
wanted the evening off!,” Charles joked). Gilmour had seen them perform in
Croydon in 1994 and been sufficiently impressed to invite them to the party
celebrating the end of the tour for The Division Bell, the last “official” Pink Floyd album. I had seen
the promos for this show on KPBS — they’re also heavily pushing a gig The
Australian Pink Floyd are doing at the San Diego State University Open-Air
Theatre on September 5 and giving away tickets to that show for people who
respond and make donations (at that show their opening act will be another
tribute band, Led Zeppelin 2 — a billing that boggles the mind because one
can’t imagine the real Led Zeppelin being invited to perform on a bill with the
real Pink Floyd, not only because both were mega-draws on their own but their
musical styles were too different to make them a logical pairing) — and it
sounded vaguely interesting even though I’m somewhat back of scratch watching a
Pink Floyd tribute since I’ve never been that big a fan of the real Pink Floyd.
I never actively disliked them but they weren’t a band I went out of my way to
keep track of (or buy their LP’s) either, and I don’t think I’ve ever in my
life heard The Dark Side of the Moon
straight through, start to finish. (Then again, I’d never heard Michael
Jackson’s Thriller start to
finish until I got the boxed set on Sony right after Jackson died — though the Thriller songs were so ubiquitous, with seven of the nine album tracks becoming single hits, I
really didn’t need to.)
For me the most interesting Pink Floyd was the early
stuff with their original vocalist, lead guitarist and principal songwriter,
Syd Barrett, who until his acid-fueled meltdown just a year into the Floyd’s
career (David Gilmour was brought into the band for the same reason Paul
Whiteman hired Andy Secrest in 1929 — just as Secrest was brought in to fill in
for Bix Beiderbecke whenever Bix either missed a show or was too “under the
influence” to perform, Gilmour was brought in to backstop Barrett and ended up
replacing him) contributed most of the band’s material and brought an edgy
sensibility that when he left got replaced by an exquisite dullness only
occasionally broken by moments of fire, as if occasionally the Floyds got bored
by their heavily self-referential music and wanted to remind the world that
they could still rock. Though some of the Australian Pink Floyd shows perform a
single Pink Floyd album start to finish (they did a DVD of their performance of
The Dark Side of the Moon and
have also done complete concerts of the next two Floyd albums, Wish
You Were Here — the band’s quirky tribute
to Barrett — and Animals), this
one was a sort-of greatest-hits medley containing “Money” from Dark
Side, the title track of Wish You
Were Here (though, alas, not the album’s signature song, “Shine On, You Crazy
Diamond”), “Another Brick in the Wall — Part 2” and “Comfortably Numb” from The
Wall (Roger Waters’ mega-concept which he
performed as part of an elaborately staged event during which the titular wall
was built between the band and the audience as the show progressed, only the
band members smashed through it at the end) and a few other songs I didn’t
recognize. The show came from two concerts filmed in Trier and Oberhausen,
Germany on April 12 and 13, 2013 (ironically Trier was also the birthplace of
Karl Marx) and on TV it looked like a competently staged modern rock concert,
with a circular video screen as part of the stage set that showed film clips,
including one of the wall being constructed during “Another Brick in the Wall,”
and a few laser beams at the back of the stage but nothing especially
spectacular-looking in the staging (though it’s possible the experience is more
exciting “live”). I was hoping — but really not expecting — that they’d do the
real Floyd’s first breakthrough hit, “See Emily Play,” as a tribute to the
Barrett years. They didn’t, and by leading off with “Another Brick in the Wall”
and “Money” (the two strongest Floyd songs they played all night) they risked a
precipitous drop in the energy level from which the rest of the show suffered.
To me it was ironic that one of the hosts for the KPBS pledge breaks said what
she liked about Pink Floyd’s music was how emotionally intense it was — Pink
Floyd was about the last band I’d
go to looking for emotional intensity (after all, the second single from The
Wall — and a song that was on The Australian Pink Floyd’s set list last night —
was called “Comfortably Numb”!), and though I can’t really assess how well The
Australian Pink Floyd compares to the original I did get the impression that if anything they were erring
by trying to add emotion to songs
that didn’t originally contain it (whichever one of their singers did
“Comfortably Numb” seemed to be trying to put some soul into a song that Roger
Waters deliberately wrote as a paean to disinterested detachment, and sang that
way). Indeed, the best singing all night came at the beginning of an odd piece
called “The Great Gig in the Sky” (though I’d have had no idea what the title
was if one of the pledge-break hosts hadn’t thoughtfully provided it) which
doesn’t have any lyrics, and didn’t feature any singing by the band members,
but did feature wordless
vocalizing by three or four women backup singers, and the one who sang at the
beginning was tall, white, with long blond hair, and had one of the greatest
white soul voices I’ve ever heard — enough for me to want to hear her do more
conventional repertory for her kind of voice. The other songs were “Into the
Sun,” an instrumental that was probably from Animals because the band brought in an inflated balloon of
an animal (a kangaroo, says PBS’s official program note, though it looked more
like a rabbit to me) and lowered it from the flies to the stage during the song
in a position that made it look like it was a second keyboard player, and the
finale, a song called “You Better Run” that was the band’s most convincing rock
’n’ roll of the night. The Australian Pink Floyd Show: Eclipsed by
the Moon was a reasonably entertaining
program but, like the music of the band they were copying, aspired to and all
too often achieved a level of exquisite aesthetic dullness that made me feel
like I wanted to sleep — instead I followed it by listening to some old Carl
Perkins records and reminding myself what rock ’n’ roll is really all about!
