Pink Floyd

Pink Floyd (formed in 1965 in Cambridge, England) are a British progressive rock band, noted for their progressive compositions, sonic experimentation, album art and live shows. Pink Floyd is one of rock's most successful acts, having sold an estimated 250 million albums worldwide.

Live performances

Pink Floyd are renowned for their lavish stage shows, combining over-the-top visual experiences with their music to create a show in which the performers themselves are almost secondary. In their early days, Pink Floyd were among the first bands to use a dedicated travelling light show in conjunction with their performances, projecting slides, film clips, pyrotechnics (exploding flashpots and the exploding gong and fireworks) and psychedelic patterns onto a large circular screen (dubbed "Mr. Screen"). Their early combination of music and visuals set the standard for subsequent rock tours on both sides of the Atlantic. Later shows featured oversized balloons (notably a giant pig balloon which floated over the audience during performances of Pigs from the Animals album), a plane crashing into the stage at the end of "On the Run", a giant flowering disco ball a projection screen which could be retracted and tilted, more than 100 multi-coloured robotic 'dancing' spot lights, and multi-coloured lasers.

Related Topics:
Light show - Projection screen - Lasers

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The lavish stage shows were also the basis for Douglas Adams' fictional rock group "Disaster Area" (creators of the loudest noise in the universe, and making use of solar-flares in their stage show) in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. Douglas Adams was a personal friend of David Gilmour and made a one-off guest appearance, on guitar, on the Division Bell tour (October 28, 1994), purportedly as a present for Adams' 42nd birthday.

Related Topics:
Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - 42

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The Wall Live

Pink Floyd mounted their most elaborate stage show in conjunction with the tour of The Wall, in which a band of session musicians played the first song, wearing rubber face masks (proving successfully that the individual members of the band were practically anonymous to the public). Giant inflatable characters designed by Gerald Scarfe, including fully mobile giant puppets of a teacher and Pink's wife, with menacing spotlights for eyes, took the traditional inflatables to a whole new level.

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During the first half of the show, a huge wall was built, brick by enormous brick, between the audience and the band. The final brick was placed as Roger Waters sang "goodbye" at the end of the song "Goodbye Cruel World". For the second half of the show, the band were largely invisible, except for a hole in the wall that simulated a hotel room setting, where Roger Waters "acted out" the story of Pink, and an appearance by David Gilmour on top of the wall to perform the climactic guitar solos in "Comfortably Numb". Other parts of the story were told by Gerald Scarfe animations projected onto the wall itself (these animations were later integrated into the film version '). At the finale of the concert, the specially-constructed wall was 'demolished' amidst sound effects and a spectacular light show.

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The Wall concert was only performed a handful of times each in four cities: Los Angeles, Uniondale (Long Island), Dortmund, and London (at Earl's Court). The primary 'tour' occurred in 1980, but the band performed two more shows at Earl's Court in 1981 for filming, with the intention of being integrated into the upcoming movie (the resulting footage, however, was deemed substandard, and scrapped; years later, Roger Waters said that he had tried to locate this footage for historical purposes, but was unsuccessful, and he now considers it to be lost forever). Gilmour and Mason attempted to convince Waters to expand the show for a more lucrative large-scale, stadium tour, but because of the very nature of the material (one of the primary themes is the distance between an artist and his audience), Waters insisted that such a tour would be hypocritical.

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Roger Waters later re-created the Wall show in 1990, amid the ruins of the Berlin Wall, joined by a number of guest artists (including Bryan Adams, The Scorpions, Van Morrison, The Band, Tim Curry, Cyndi Lauper, Sinéad O'Connor, Marianne Faithfull, Joni Mitchell, and Thomas Dolby).

Related Topics:
1990 - Berlin Wall - Bryan Adams - The Scorpions - Van Morrison - The Band - Tim Curry - Cyndi Lauper - Sinéad O'Connor - Marianne Faithfull - Joni Mitchell - Thomas Dolby

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