David Gilmour was never one to back down from a challenge in Pink Floyd.
It was already going to be a strange balancing act trying to take over for Syd Barrett in his early days with the group, but even when they started making conceptual albums, he didn’t think twice about going into unknown territory, even if it meant him standing on top of a wall while playing ‘Comfortably Numb’. But for all of the massive stadium shows that would have all of us shaking, the hardest thing that an artist of that calibre can do is get intimate.
By the start of the 1980s, every member of Floyd had practically become numb to working in stadiums. Roger Waters already wrote The Wall to get over the more obnoxious people coming to their shows, and even when Waters was out of the picture, the massive band that was behind them for live records like Delicate Sound of Thunder did take some of the edge off of Gilmour as the main frontman.
But by the time that the mid-1990s rolled around, Gilmour was content to play the frontman and run through his greatest hits on their final tour. Although Pulse was never considered their official farewell tour by any stretch, there was a feeling in the air that this was the final hurrah, especially with the song ‘High Hopes’ bringing an end to the classic version of the band so poetically.
That’s not to say Gilmour couldn’t get up to some more interesting moments in his solo career. Later albums like On an Island showed that he was capable of making fantastic tunes with the help of people like Phil Manzanera of Roxy Music, but In Concert was a much more subdued concert than anything he had done in a while.
Floyd had made arenas and stadiums their second home for years at that point, but this was as close to a traditional Unplugged concert as Gilmour would ever give. The energy of the night is pretty mellow, and even when he brings out the old Floyd classics, ‘Fat Old Sun’ ends up fitting in a lot better than both versions of ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’. Gilmour did have a few tricks up his sleeve, though, and that came from the covers he was working on.
Covering tunes by Barrett and Richard Thompson go over pretty well, but the guitarist knew tackling a piece from an opera like ‘Je crois entendre encore’ would be a much different beast, saying, “That one was seriously frightening. It was very tough to sing, and difficult for me to imagine that I wasn’t kidding myself in even attempting it. Luckily, when I got the choir in my home studio, they instilled a lot of confidence in me because they immediately sounded so great. Still, both my wife and I broke into cold sweats just before the concert.”
Music from an opera isn’t the first thing that springs to mind with a band like Floyd, but Gilmour pulls it off much better than anyone could have predicted. After all, Waters and Gilmour had written songs with an operatic slant to them in the past, and since Waters was dipping his toes into the classical world with Ca Ira around the same time, this was a great complement to that record while still keeping the spirit of Pink Floyd alive.
While In Concert is no Live at Pompeii or even on par with Pulse, songs like this are a better indicator of what Gilmour wanted to do. He had done the gargantuan rock and roll stadiums, and this was a chance for him to put on a show that was as mellow as he could have been at the time.
