Venue: Teatro degli Arcimboldi, Milan, Italy
Concert date: 24.03.2006
Attendance: 3
Ticket price: 13,000.00 – 25,000.00 SIT
Wot’s…Uh the Deal!!! Three full buses, led by our rock-solid leader, the fearless Concert Freak, in total action mode! The invasion of Milan had begun. By around 5 PM we were already loitering and milling around the city of sin. We killed time in a nearby entertainment and shopping mall that looked a lot like our Kolosej, and as such it even had a few restaurants. Out of the whole bunch we picked one that serves wine only by the bottle, not by the glass. So bottled wine was on offer, while wine poured into a modest deciliter glass was something you just couldn’t order. We’re talking about an American Steak House, even though we were craving a plate of spaghetti. The paradox of globalization, I guess,… Ah, that American (mostly) “trash” carelessly scattered all over the Earth,… sometimes it really has no equal.
Okay, let’s get to the point. I won’t write a biography of a rock giant who turned 60 on 03.06.2006, but this was in fact one of the absolute highlights of this year in the music world. With Gilmour on stage, this is really the most authentic continuation of Pink Floyd-style touring, which went dead after 1994.
Teatro degli Arcimboldi is a hall in the style of our Cankarjev dom, with room for just 2,500 people. Prices were salty as hell, and the cheapest were 13,000.00 SIT, if you “modestly” dug in for a seat in the second-floor gallery. Of course the Teatro was boiling like an anthill, the original items of the official “merchandise” had gleefully inflated prices, while outside “nomadic” vendors were selling quality T-shirts with tasteful designs for just €10.00.
Thank God there was no support act. Those always eat my nerves with all the waiting. Besides, finding a legit support act for Gilmour would be a lifetime’s work worthy of an Oscar nomination. All of a sudden the lights in the hall went out. The crowd let out a damn loud roar of excitement in one voice that nearly blew out both my eardrums. Hell, I got scared it would be like that for the whole concert, though with temperamental Italians that’s nothing special. Meanwhile the hall was already flooded with the sounds of Castellorizon. The moment the first guitar note rang out, a beam of light fell on a familiar face, an old friend from the “Floyd” days. The people once again answered in one voice with a fresh barrage of applause and loud, almost delirious, screaming. On An Island, and the whole band on stage with David. The gray gentleman on keyboards? He looks damn much like Richard Wright, David’s Pink Floyd partner. Next to him Jon Carin, another keyboardist who once worked with Pink Floyd. On Gilmour’s right Guy Pratt, the bassist, who can boast the same tenure as Carin, and further to the right the one and only legendary Phil Manzanera, otherwise the guitarist of Roxy Music, while the lesser-known Steve Di Stanislao sat behind the drums. The band’s sound was a touch too loud during On An Island, and the people in charge fixed it after the middle instrumental. Before the second song, The Blue, David said that he and his crew planned to play the new studio album “On An Island” in its entirety in the first part of the show. As true perfectionists, they had prepared everything needed so the music would blend seamlessly with the stage design (the “light” show), which was the one David had carried over from his old band. This visualization together with the music took us straight into another world. Straight to the island. The blueness was contagious and you couldn’t resist it for very long. To bring Dick Parry himself onto the stage as soon as possible, Gilmour flipped the song order a bit, and instead of Take A Breath they kicked off with the atmospheric instrumental Red Sky At Night. Fittingly, the stage was flooded with dark crimson light, focused of course on the legendary saxophonist who played for Pink Floyd as far back as the album “The Dark Side Of The Moon” (1973). After that the guys jump into the excellent “bluesy” tune This Heaven, where Gilmour takes his fearsome thimble for the first time that night, the finger slide (if I try to Slovenize it), lays the acoustic guitar flat on a stand, as if putting a baby in a cradle, and starts dragging it along the strings. Yeah, yeah, “Meddle” sounds, brrrr… the goosebumps were doing their thing. Then came Then I Close My Eyes with a simple but impressive “delay” motif, out of which the band built a grandiose atmosphere, so that by the end it all sounded in the hall as if a whole philharmonic orchestra were on stage. Only then did the band first fire up in a more serious “rock” way, and finally it was time for the already mentioned Take A Breath, which brought absolutely new feelings and atmosphere to the stage and the hall. The stage went up in flames. The unmistakable “Floydian” shimmer sucked us into the song. The band suddenly got very lively on stage and took us with a solid “rock beat” into ever more intense swaying in our seats. Smile flipped it all back into a new gentle, fragile floating, with Gilmour again with the “finger slide” and acoustic guitar dragging “looooong slides” along the strings. During the next song, A Pocketful of Stones, we literally froze, because the song is ice-cold, obscurely dark, yet with an exceptional psychedelic moment. The first part was closed with the final song Where We Start and lasted a whole hour. Gilmour and his crew managed to conjure up a unique world in the manner of true Floyd magic, a world that sent me into a trance, and when the musicians left the stage, I shuffled out into the corridor and stared at the big lobby for 20 minutes, which people had filled in a hyperactive frenzy. My head was completely empty and it felt like I was in some movie, or dreaming a strange dream. Everything was flickering in front of me, little people were running around below me, buying T-shirts, ordering coffee and water and feverishly polluting the air, pardon, filling up the restrooms…
Okay, let me draw a line under the first part and come back down to earth. Despite the voluptuous bliss we were treated to, the first part wasn’t optimal or what I would have wished for and expected. First, the sound at the start of the concert. The band was too loud. They fixed it quickly and pulled the faders down in the middle of On An Island to a more ear-friendly number of decibels. Second, David Gilmour’s singing isn’t what it used to be either. Especially in the high register he’s no longer convincing, and quite a few times he kind of “cracked” or ran out of voice before he could hit a decisive, properly tuned note. The solo in On An Island wasn’t perfect either. The magnets didn’t pull the way they should and during the long “pull-offs” the notes faded too quickly, so the solo lacked the necessary continuity, and the song thus lost the lofty mood it carries on the studio album and which the master of slide guitar can otherwise bring to life so effectively. So I hope the roadies and Gilmour will connect the sustainer to the magnets more carefully next time, so it “pulls” the way it’s supposed to.
The second part. Darkness on stage. The first silhouette was Rick Wright. A Mellotron opens the continuation. An intro, then. What on earth could follow it. “Pliiiink” … That’s Shine On You Crazy Diamond, no doubt. Fantastic, no two ways about it. Gilmour on guitar of course, Parry on sax, Wright perfect on keyboards. It all works flawlessly, until… yes, until again. Until Gilmour opened his mouth. The drums go quiet and the track turns into a ballad exactly where the verses come in. Gilmour twisted the vocal lines and led them along the paths of his own improvisation, lower, so he could handle them. Of course the mood went up in flames at every solo and the hall roared like crazy. People literally stomped on the floor a few times so that it shook properly, but the vocal performance faltered just a bit. A nice surprise followed next, when Rick Wright took over lead vocals and Pink Floyd, pardon, Gilmour et al. started on Wearing The Inside Out. Pink Floyd didn’t play that song on the “Division Bell” tour. I kind of missed the female backing vocal lines of the original in the chorus, which “sit” in it perfectly, since patching them with male voices somehow wasn’t a proper replacement. The leap to Syd Barrett’s legacy and the acoustic song Dominoes from Barrett’s second solo album “Barrett” (1970) was a very kind and endearing move, and Fat Old Sun was in no way behind it in that. This song has aged beautifully over the years, as it’s 36 springs old now, since it came out in 1970 on the Floyd album “Atom Heart Mother”. The first part was acoustic, with Gilmour of course front and center, in the second part the rhythm section actively joins the track, and at the end everyone treats themselves to a short outro “jam” that lit up the stage brilliantly. On certain nights of Gilmour’s tour, the set list swaps these two songs for Coming Back To Life and Wot’s…Uh the Deal.
You could feel the auditorium was downright ecstatic. And the moments of ecstasy and excitement jumped up the instant a (pre-recorded) schizophrenic scream and its echo swept the stage. It melted into a thick, massive E minor that announced Breathe. That worked flawlessly! Perfect. Everything was in sync. The sound, the vocals, the backing vocals, Gilmour and that unmistakable guitar playing with a one-of-a-kind stamp, an unrepeatable, or hard-to-repeat, trademark. The perfection didn’t let up in Time either, which still suits Gilmour vocally very well. The mighty bell that adorned the drum set meant only one thing. High Hopes! I was left speechless, thoughtless. Gilmour devoted himself to playing the classical guitar, and as he sang, the unmistakable sound of his nylon strings stepped forward after the end of the exceptional pastoral intro. A song of many atmospheres, with an exceptional middle instrumental section. It literally lifted me out of my seat, I could barely keep myself in a normal psychophysical state. Gilmour of course didn’t forget the outro and the “steel pedal” guitar, where he colorfully glided across the strings the way only he can. The ending was superb. The “steel pedal” spontaneously went quiet and the melody that had previously only held the background of the composition (Wright’s and Carin’s keyboards) suddenly filled the hall. The artists artfully, with a primal feel, led a completely gentle “fade out” ever quieter, circle after circle, into total silence. Almost total silence, because the hall was once again hit by an avalanche of feverish excitement from the temperamental Italians. They were damn loud, and for a moment I wished I could tie everybody’s hands together and tape their mouths shut with impermeable Scotch tape. Silence is an important part of the Floyd world, “come on, Italians, don’t you get that!”.
To finish, Gilmour took the audience up to heaven. A sound. A familiar sound. Is there a submarine nearby? I can’t believe it! It was Echoes… that 23-minute work of art of the kind that was popular 35 years ago, and it was played grandly above all else. Out of everything, it brought Pink Floyd closest. Of all the compositions that evening, its performance truly shone the brightest. I was afraid the guys would play some kind of “medley” and just tease us lamely with those opening sounds from Echoes. And then the vocals come in. The unmistakable duo Wright – Gilmour. Brrrr, goosebumps again. After a “billion” years, Echoes back on stage, from the mouth and guitar of David Gilmour. A song of many motif changes, of many moods. They could have broken it off at any moment and switched to, say, Another Brick In the Wall pt. II and instantly sold their intellect, but they didn’t. They played the whole song from start to finish and the hall was flooded with the unique magic of music, enriched by a striking “light” show.
A true fan has to be swept away by a real feeling of happiness. After the concert I chatted with a man who’s just a little younger than Gilmour, and he couldn’t get a grip on himself after witnessing a performance of the song that marked his generation 35 years ago. He was overjoyed and nearly in tears, visibly moved! Gilmour and company left the stage thick with fog, they had played Echoes perfectly, but the “thank you” at the end didn’t belong there at all. Even the crowd’s cheering alone badly tarnished the beautiful new world the guys had created and left behind on stage as they walked off. An unforgettable catharsis.
After a few sips of fortifying water, they came back on stage and gave the crowd what they could give. Wish You Were Here! A standard “flawless” performance. At the end Gilmour announces the closing song and deeply thanks everyone in the hall for all the support. Probably one of the most beautifully classically composed songs in Pink Floyd history with one of the most heart-piercing solos David ever put together in his career, Comfortably Numb. This time Wright sings the “lead” vocals in the pre-chorus, without any backing vocals, which brought the song closer to the original from the album “The Wall” (1979), and the band also didn’t use the heavily “compressed,” siren-like “overdistorted” sound at the start that marks the versions Pink Floyd played on their last two tours. In the chorus Gilmour and Wright swap lead vocals. And of course I was waiting for the outro solo, which is a chapter of its own, just like so many a Gilmour solo is a chapter of its own. Gilmour is like, say, Knopfler. He hits a single note and you immediately know who’s holding the guitar.
And so the show was over. Everything has its end. Sometimes it’s really hard to come to terms with that. Once again I was in another world and in a state where, for the first half hour after the concert, I was spouting some sensationalist superlatives, which meant I needed grounding as soon as possible to function normally. That came very soon on the bus ride back, when we unexpectedly got lost and wandered along local roads around Bergamo, because the Italians had decided to close a motorway section and renovate it at night of all times. Without marking the detour beforehand, of course. That’s Italy for you. A traffic horror show! So we got to Ljubljana a little before ten. But it will be interesting to see how Roger Waters answers Gilmour’s challenge in Verona in June. Gilmour’s tour is one of this year’s highlights of the rock scene. Not only that. It’s one of the most important events of this year. The question is whether such a joyous opportunity for an authentic revival of Pink Floyd will ever come up again. Dreams came true! Let’s hope they happen again someday.
Setlist
1.Castellorizon
2.On An Island
3.The Blue
4.Red Sky At Night
5.This Heaven
6.Then I Close My Eyes
7.Take A Breath
8.Smile
9.Pocketful Of Stones
10.Where We Start
—-intermission (approx. 20 min)
11.Shine On You Crazy Diamond
12.Wearing The Inside Out
13.Dominoes
14.Fat Old Sun
15.Breathe
16.Time (incl. breathe reprise)
17.High Hopes
18.Echoes
—encore
19.Wish You Were Here
20.Comfortably Numb
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