One of the hardest things any artist can do is try to capture what they do live. The audience can be in the moment as they’re making their masterpieces, but some songs simply don’t translate well when making their way onto vinyl. And for a technician like David Gilmour, there were bound to be a few missed opportunities.
When Pink Floyd were at their peak, though, Gilmour was already looking for something more than what the traditional lead guitarist role was supposed to be.
He had spent the first few months of his career trying to do a half-hearted version of Syd Barrett, so when they hit on pieces like ‘Echoes’, there was a lot more musical adventures for them to take half the time. Life didn’t have to be the same old rock and roll tropes, and with Dark Side of the Moon, the whole musical world turned to colour in more ways than one.
The prism on the front of the record shouldn’t even be considered a joke. With the album revolving around themes of everyday life and those on the brink of insanity, a lot of what Gilmour and Roger Waters came up with involved bringing different shades to modern living, whether it’s the meditations on ‘Time’ or the inherent greed that comes from corporate pigs on ‘Money’.
And it’s not like the band didn’t get a helping hand from their record company. Since they didn’t gain much traction from Meddle, their label decided to go all out on promoting Floyd’s new record, turning it into one of the most emblematic albums of the 1970s and keeping it on the charts for over a decade. However, for Gilmour, the only thing missing was the live show element.
The band had already workshopped the album onstage, but even when touring for it, Gilmour felt it would have been much better had they recorded the whole thing, saying, “We were kind of sorry we never recorded it live, or filmed it. It was a great show back then.” So instead of doing their usual greatest hits on their final official tour, Gilmour had plans to play the album from beginning to end for the first time in years, for the album Pulse.
Although the show is a bit different with Gilmour singing nearly everything and covering up for Waters’s vocal lines, it does have its fair share of surprises. The plane sequence in the middle of ‘On the Run’ gives a lot more excitement to the sound design going on throughout the piece, and compared to Gilmour’s bluesy wail on many of the classics, hearing Durga McBroom, Sam Brown, and Claudia Fontaine sing their interpretations of ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ is a sound to behold.
Gilmour also ensured he checked with Waters before doing anything, saying, “We did discuss it with Roger [Waters], as we were getting more and more grumpy with each other. We said we should put together Dark Side just so we had it on film for posterity.” And for all their bad blood at the time, the frontman did manage to give Waters his flowers at the end of the night, thanking Waters for his contribution to the group and reminding everyone that they wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for him.
However, the fact that they managed to give the entire album the live treatment should really provide them with the incentive to do the same with some of their other classics. I mean, The Wall was made to be a fantastic live show, and no matter how much Waters performs it with special guests during his solo tours, nothing is going to compare to releasing the footage of Gilmour trading lines with him on ‘Run Like Hell’ or singing ‘Young Lust’.
