Floydian Slips Debut “Echoes” on New Year’s Eve

On New Years Eve last week, my Pink Floyd tribute band The Floydian Slips played for close to 1,200 people as we entered our 12th year as a band. That is longer than my oldest kid – who is in 5th grade – has been alive. Clinton was President when we started!

The band only plays a couple of times a year, so it stays very fresh. The other thing that helps is that we don’t let the song list get too stale. The band started out all those years ago by performing The Dark Side of the Moon all the way through. After a couple of years of that, we did The Wall end to end (that was fun and I’d like to do it again soon). But that too got a bit stale after a while.

So next, we did what the real Floyd had been doing, which is to just play a bunch of songs, and to make that interesting we delved into the back catalog, learning One of These Days and Set The Controls for the Heart of the Sun, as well as Learning to Fly from the Waters-less Momentary Lapse of Reason.

Our latest full album was Animals, and we have been doing that for a year or so. Dogs is one of our faves by far, and Sheep is a new fave.

But for New Years Eve, we decided to give Animals a rest too, and embarked on an endeavor we had talked about for years but thought might be too daunting – to play the 20-plus minute Echoes – side two of the Meddle album for those who still spin vinyl.

We’d seen Floyd do the piece as a simple band of four musicians on the Live at Pompeii movie, but it still seemed somehow too epic for us eight musicians to pull off. But everyone did their homework and we were all pleasantly shocked at how fast it came together.

Due to Arctic Blast 2008 in Portland, we were not even able to rehearse until two days before the show. So, the videos below represent our fifth complete run through of the song. I think we did OK but I am looking forward to playing it more so we can get to that state where you are not really thinking, you’re just playing.

Not sure when our next gig is, so for now enjoy the below videos. I had to split it into three parts due to YouTube’s video length limitations. And apologies to Asher on the keyboards, as my camera slid on the tripod a bit and therefore periodically cuts him off when he is on the Hammond organ on the far right of the stage. D’oh!

Part One


Part Two


Part Three