It’s the great round screen above the stage that does it. It triggers in veterans of Pink Floyd-related shows an instant tribal recall, filled with visions of flying clocks, prisms and crashing Spitfires. Already, you’re primed. Plenty of bands have history, but only a few have their own myth system of symbols, themes and visual language.
It lends a necessary boost to the homeopathic Floyd of David Gilmour’s new album, Rattle That Lock; not at all disagreeable, but reliant for a purely psychological effect on the memory of its elements. That vast, hefty, glossy, string-bending sound is his to dispense as he pleases. But it is, for instance, the remarkable warzone animation to which In Any Tongue serves as a soundtrack that gives the song power.
The Floyd numbers themselves, though ... if you ever thrilled to them, you will now, as they rumble over the hall like giant waves. Nothing aches with loss like Wish You Were Here. Nothing rivals the stately, elegiac grace of Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts I-V), aptly prefaced by way of tribute with Astronomy Domine, a Syd Barrett song on which Gilmour didn’t originally play. The gliding nursery-rhyme remonstrance Us and Them has a force lacking in many more complex protests at inequality. And Run Like Hell, evoking fascist mobs in the street, is simply the most evil-sounding disco-rock tune ever recorded, which makes those happy conga lines in the aisles slightly incongruous.
It is all, as ever, note-perfect, each tune a colossal version of its studio self, which is why the Floyd songs inevitably tower over the somewhat sluggish others. The exception is the climactic Comfortably Numb, on which David Crosby sings the verses alongside Graham Nash. The slight variation prompts one to wonder how great this music might be if it ever got messy. But it is surely many decades too late for that now – and the immaculate version has familiar joys of its own.
- At the Royal Albert Hall, London, on 25 September and 2 and 3 October. Box office: 020-7589 8212.
