Pink Floyd steal the show at Live 8 |
Written by Matt | |
Saturday, 02 July 2005 | |
Hopefully many of you managed to catch at least the majority of Pink Floyd's amazing set at the London Hyde Park Live 8 concert last night. With the concert overrunning two and a half hours past its extended finish, the band didn't manage to hit the stage until around 11pm, but it was worth the wait. Many reports in the media attested to the fact that the Floyd, reunited for this one, special occasion with Roger Waters, were one of the bands that stole the show at Live 8. Despite the late running of the show (which was to eventually finish at midnight last night), the band performed their complete rehearsed set of Breathe/Breathe Reprise, Money, Wish You Were Here, and Comfortably Numb. And what a performance! The band were stripped back down to a basic line-up, with only the addition of Tim Renwick on guitar, lurking in the shadows, Dick Parry on sax for Money, and a backing singer during Comfortably Numb. UPDATE: On carefully analysing the BBC broadcast of their performance, Jon Carin can just about be seen, heavily to the rear of the stage, unlit, shrouded in smoke, playing keyboards during their set! To see and hear the band back chiefly to their core unit was a sheer joy, and got even the non-Floyd fans in the audience applauding for more. In one touching moment, during the introductory guitar work of Wish You Were Here, Roger said: "It's actually quite emotional, standing up here with these three guys after all these years. Standing to be counted with the rest of you. Anyway, we're doing this for everyone who's not here, particularly, of course for Syd." A full report of the show will follow as soon as we've caught up on our sleep - the very late ending of the show caught out a lot of people, with public transport links home having finished, and your Brain Damage crew were no exception! We'll also be including some of the comments that have been made by Brain Damage visitors about the show. Finally, we hear that the US MTV coverage, and Canadian coverage, of the Floyd section was sadly lacking - in the case of MTV, cutting away from London right in the middle of Comfortably Numb, and in Canada's case, not even showing that song. We've received a lot of angry emails from viewers dismayed at this terrible handling of their performance. The Floyd's performance will be on the forthcoming Live 8 DVD, due in November from EMI, and for the next six weeks AOL.com will be streaming all the shows free of charge. So, whilst no way as good as seeing the performance live, there will still be opportunities to catch Comfortably Numb from the show. Our thanks to everyone who has already written with their thoughts of the show - the performance made a big impact on virtually everyone, and has led to thoughts in many minds of what the future might hold for the four musicians. Look for our full show report, and the views of many Brain Damage visitors, in the next few days, along with a load of additional pictures from the event. |