Roger Waters, David Gilmour Wall Reunion Video Posts

This a real treat to watch. Six minutes long, though -- I want the unedited footage, man!

Tell you what though, it warms my heart that these guys buried the hatchet from so long ago. It also gets me revved up to see The Wall as the show comes to Portland on Tuesday. I saw it last year - review posted here - and it's amazing.

Unreal David Gilmour Live Video from 1978

Everyone - have a great weekend and enjoy these.



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Backstage Details and Hi-Res Video of Floyd "Reunion" Emerge

As discussed earlier and known by any Floyd fan who has had their ear to the ground this week, David Gilmour and Nick Mason shared the stage with Roger Waters at a recent Wall show in the UK last week.

Waters has been pretty transparent about posting high-res video clips of the appearances (below), and now Rolling Stone has published a short article with an interview with Mason, here. Some of the more interesting tidbits:

When Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason got to London's O2 arena last week, he had no idea that he'd be walking into David Gilmour and Roger Waters performing "Comfortably Numb" in a soundcheck for Waters' show that night. "It hadn't ever been quite finalized – there'd been talk about maybe playing in Paris or something else," Mason tells Rolling Stone. "So it was very nice to get there and see that [David] was there."

After soundcheck, the three took seats at a table in a backstage room and had a light dinner. "We were all just a little bit nervous, because it was a pre-show moment so it wasn't that sort of totally relaxed, 'Let's all chat about everything.' Since [David] hadn't played the track in so long, he was probably worried about the technology of lifting him up on the Wall. It's quite scary up there – I've been up there once and it's a long way up."

Next, Mason retreated to his seat on the floor of the arena, where fans greeted him enthusiastically, and watched The Wall for the first time as a spectator. "It was mind-blowingly good," he says. "It's a shame in a way . . . if you could turn the clock back and have access to that sort of technology, 40, 30 years ago, it would've been fantastic. I mean, it's interesting because I think The Wall has been brought up to date. When you look at the stage sets and the lighting that goes on now, it so eclipses what we used to do."

This is all great but it really made me miss Richard Wright because you know he would have been a part of this too. It would have been so cool for the original four guys to get together one more time, and in front of that giant Wall. Makes me all that much more thankful for Live8 (also below).

Enjoy:

Outside The Wall


Comfortably Numb


Live8:

Waters and Gilmour Reunion Video - Comfortably Numb and Brick 2

David Gilmour's official YouTube page just posted full versions of the four songs played in July at The Hoping Foundation Charity Event. For sure not the best picture or audio quality but damn it's great to see these two together again! The below is video of the latter two songs - Comfortably Numb and Brick In The Wall Part 2. Enjoy:

Video of Rogers Waters and David Gilmour Reunion

I posted last month about the great burying of the hatchet on July 10, 2010 where David Gilmour invited Roger Waters to appear with him at a charity benefit for an intimate audience of 200 lucky-assed motherfuckers. Waters agreed, then hedged, but in the end did it after Gilmour upped the ante and said he'd play on Comfortably Numb at an upcoming to be determined Wall gig. Wow!

Today, Waters sent an email to his fan base with a two minute snip of the performance, saying:

"Hi everyone,

Here is a two minute taster of the gig David and I did together for The Hoping Foundation back in July. The sound quality is crap but it was a great night for me, and for him, and also for "US and THEM".

Please support the Hoping Foundation; they are doing great work for refugee children. David and I have given the charity the whole 29 minutes and I'm told they're going to put it up at approximately 5 pm BST on Monday, August 16.

Go to HopingFoundation.org to see the full video and please support the charity if you can."

Vimeo won't let me embed the video yet but you can see it here.

Gilmour to Play on Waters' Wall

Wow. I go off the grid on vacation for a week and Pink Floyd get back together. Well, not really, but close.

According to a Billboard article a couple of days ago, the recent Gilmour-Waters reunion at a charity gig came as an offer from Gilmour, who said if Waters joined him at the gig to do the obscure "To Know Him Is To Love Him" by the Teddy Bears, Gilmour would join Waters onstage for ONE Wall gig to rip his Comfortably Numb solo, presumably from the top of the wall just like in the old days.

Oh please do it in San Jose! Ha ha.

Here are some choice quotes from the article:

Waters says Gilmour emailed him with a tongue-in-cheek offer for them to collaborate at the 2010 benefit on the Teddy Bears' "To Know Him Is To Love Him," in a nod to the pair's famously rough-and-tumble relationship. Waters says he "loved" the idea, and the duo agreed to also round out their set with the Pink Floyd classics "Wish You Were Here" and "Comfortably Numb."

The only trouble: Gilmour began sending Waters "a number of very musical and eloquent demos of how we could do the song in two-part harmony." Waters then got cold feet and told Gilmour performing the song in that fashion was "way outside my vocal comfort zone," to his "eternal shame."

According to Waters, Gilmour then made him a better offer. If Waters would agree to perform "To Know Him Is To Love Him" at the Hoping Foundation Benefit, Gilmour would guest on "Comfortably Numb" at a to-be-determined show on Waters' upcoming tour featuring Pink Floyd's "The Wall" being performed in its entirety.

"You could have knocked me down with a feather," Waters says. "How f*cking cool! I was blown away. How could I refuse such an offer. I couldn't, there was no way. Generosity trumped fear. And so explaining that I would probably be sh*te, but if he didn't mind I didn't, I agreed and the rest is history. We did it, and it was f*cking great. End of story. Or possibly beginning."

The plan is for Gilmour's appearance to be a surprise, adds Waters.

Are you kidding me? This is a fantastic development and I hope it leads to further collaboration between the two. Hopefully Gilmour will have such a blast on his one show that he'll do a few. WOW!

The audio to the below is from the Live 8 reunion but there are lots of great photos from last weekend:

Waters and Gilmour Unite in Charity Gig

Logged into the "I swore I'd never see this happen" file is the news story I saw on Spinner.com this morning.

Roger Waters and David Gilmour performed four songs together over the weekend at a charity event for the Hoping Foundation Benefit Evening at Kiddington Hall in Oxfordshire, England.

The duo were backed by longtime side guys Guy Pratt (bass and acoustic guitar), Harry Waters (keyboards), Andy Newmark (drums), Chester Kamen (guitar) and Jonjo Grisdale (keyboards). The line-up performed in front of 200 people, raising some £350,000 for the foundation.

They played "To Know Him Is To Love Him," (a cover) "Wish You Were Here," Comfortably Numb" and "Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2), and of course this was the guys' first time back together onstage since the Live 8 reunion in 2005.

This is obviously notable because despite the 2005 reunion, the two have not been totally complimentary of the other and most held out little hope of them playing together again.

This totally begs the question, will Gilmour join Waters to rip out his Comfortably Numb lead on top of Waters' giant Wall on any dates on the upcoming tour? Let's hope so!

Sort of DVD Review - David Gilmour at Royal Albert Hall

This is a "sort of" review because a buddy loaned me just the bonus DVD and I have not seen the actual concert DVD. This bonus DVD is loaded with songs from other gigs on the tour and a very good film about the On An Island tour in general. I wanted to suggest watching this bonus DVD for a few reasons:

--There is a very interesting encounter with Roger Waters that is captured on film. This is after the Live 8 reunion but they sure still don't seem very comfortable around each other.

--The film reinforces what I already thought, which was that On An Island is a return to pre-Dark Side Pink Floyd, mood-wise. The tour is also a showcase for Rick Wright, who plays better than ever and is shown in the most light-hearted manner I have ever seen in a film. He always seemed cautious and guarded but not here. Given that he dies the next year, it's a bittersweet observation but still worth watching.

--The guest appearances are very interesting. David Bowie, Nash, Crosby etc. Makes me want to watch the actual concert to see how they performed. The backstage stuff in the bonus film is fun. Bowie is a kick.

--Gilmour comes off as a very cool dude. For example, at some point on the tour, people start futzing around with playing wine glasses at a restaurant. One thing leads to another and some of the band plays the keyboard parts to Shine On on wine glasses at a festival gig in front of thousands of fans, as a dare by Gilmour, and it takes a life of its own from there.

Gilmour also decided to bust into On The Turning Away at a show, but fails to tell the rest of the band, some of whom have never played the song before. Hearing a bootleg of it recently, it's classic. Gilmour forgets the end of the second verse and starts laughing on the mic. Come to think of it, like Iron Maiden with A Matter of Life and Death, Gilmour decides to do his whole new album live on this tour, despite the fact that everyone wants to hear old Floyd hits. He busts out oldies like Echoes, Fat Old Sun and Wots...Uh the Deal. Good for him. Very few bands have the balls to do that. Porcupine Tree is doing it now with their new album The Incident.

Anyway, this has been out for a while but if you haven't seen it and you dig Gilmour or old Floyd, check it out. It's a good bookend with the Live at Gdansk CD/DVD from the end of this same tour, which I reviewed here.

Nick Mason Interview Completes Floyd Reposts on ClassicRock.com

I posted earlier about ClassicRock.com re-publishing some fairly revealing interviews with David Gilmour and Roger Waters from 2000, when the Floyd released the live version of one of The Wall performances, called Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live.

The publication has now posted a typically witty chat with drummer Nick Mason from the same time period. Mason's dry humor is always a nice counterpoint to the seriousness of the other two guys. I didn't get as many new nuggets of info in Mason's interview, but it's worth a read.

Oh and by the way, if you don't have Is There Anybody Out There? and are a Floyd fan, you need to get it. Roger Waters shouting at the crowd to "Clap! Come On! Have a GOOD TIME!!! ENJOY YOURSELVES!!!" at the front end of Run Like Hell is worth the admission alone.

Plus, you get the song "Last Few Bricks," which is a medley that was inserted before "Goodbye Cruel World" to give the crew a chance to finish placing the last few bricks in the wall at the end of the first set. Many of the other songs are extended. "The Show Must Go On" has an extra verse, for example, and "Empty Spaces" is totally different from the album version.

I recently found a bootleg of one of the rehearsals for these Wall shows and Waters barks orders left right and center at band, crew, sound guys, the guys building the wall across the stage. He is large and in charge! Pretty classic.

Read Mason's interview here.

CD Review - David Gilmour Live In Gdańsk

I enjoyed David Gilmour’s solo album On An Island very much but didn’t really find myself coming back to it a lot. But while at Costco the other day, I noticed Gilmour’s spanking new double live CD Live In Gdańsk.

This was recorded during the 2006 tour, where the recently departed Richard Wright was in the band and Gilmour did On An Island end-to-end live. Which made quite a few Floyd fans upset. They thought it was excessive and too much new material. They wanted more Wish You Were Here and less Take A Breath.

But I gotta say, the live version of the new album is fantastic. If you are a fan of Meddle-era Floyd, most of this CD will be pleasing. The live version of On An Island (the song) is particularly good, with a couple of very epic effects-laden solos. In fact, the CD really picks up when it gets to the new material.

The CD opens with Breathe – Time – Breathe from Dark Side, and while it is great to hear Gilmour and Wright reprise their vocal and instrumental roles, we’ve just heard these songs so many times, they lose their luster a bit. But given that Wright just passed away, it’s pretty chilling to hear his vocal spots in Time (every year is getting shorter/never seem to find the time…).

But then we hit the new album, and off it goes. After a few listens, this live version of On An Island is kind of like a new Floyd album, with Wright very present in the mix. Lyrically it can’t touch Waters in his heyday of course, but musically it’s very ethereal, spacy and well, Floydy!

It sounds somewhere between Meddle, Wish You Were Here and The Division Bell. Could easily have been a Floyd album, had Gilmour chosen. I did not get that feeling from the studio version but this live version is of that caliber. The instrumentals are particularly good – Then I Close My Eyes could have come off of a Wright solo album. Very dreamy and mellow with great Gilmour/Wright solos. Smile is from the same songbook at Fat Old Sun. Just gorgeous.

And it does not get much stonier than the live versions of the instrumental Red Sky At Night or the very sleepy but mesmerizing The Blue.

Or does it? Just when I am preferring the solo Gilmour tunes over the re-hashed Floyd, we get to disc 2, where he busts out Astronomy Domine, Fat Old Sun and oh yes, a 25 minute epic version of Echoes – hearing Gilmour and Wright lay out those vocal harmonies one last time is worth the money right there. And the two trade solos in the extended jam section in the middle of song. The delicate end outro with Wright’s keys and Gilmour’s noodlings is a fitting end to that musical partnership. Sad, but beautiful.

Outside of Echoes, Gilmour changes some of the classics up a bit, preferring to take the verses of Shine On right down to just guitar and vocals, and to rock the hell out of the end of Fat Old Sun, for example. On his solo material and the Floyd he chooses to do, it sounds like Gilmour is far more comfy singing mellow songs like Fat Old Sun over angry stuff like Run Like Hell. The end result is a set that has much more to do with Obscured By Clouds and Meddle than The Wall or Animals.

And that works for me. I have felt in the past that Gilmour has made albums with a conscious effort of trying to sound like Floyd (Momentary Lapse) or just maybe being weighed down by the baggage of the Floyd brand (Division Bell). By stripping this project of the name “Pink Floyd,” he liberated himself, played how he felt, and hey what do you know – it sounds like Floyd! And for Wright’s last recorded appearance, it is a fitting swan song.

This show was recorded at the Gdansk, Poland shipyards, and the band is accompanied by the Baltic Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. I only really hear them in the outstanding A Great Day for Freedom and the obligatory Comfortably Numb, though.

The version I got has an accompanying DVD of most of the live set, which I am eager to watch. There is also a very cool feature where you access Gilmour’s Web site via the DVD and obtain free extra downloads – one every month until September 2009. So far you can get another live version of Shine On and a live version of Wot’s…Uh The Deal from Obscured by Clouds! Hopefully one of the upcoming ones will be Wright’s Wearing the Inside Out, which was played on the tour.

One last comment on Wright. Just this week, Gilmour picked up an award for Outstanding Contribution to Music in London. He dedicated the award to Wright and said, "I'm going to dedicate this, if you don't mind, to my old friend and colleague Richard Wright who died a couple of weeks ago, (and) with whom I had worked for 40-odd years now. That's now come to an end. There's all sorts of music that I will not be able to play again without him. That's a source of sadness for me. He deserves this as much as I do. You could say that he was in the position of second fiddle, slightly behind some of the pushier chaps in the front. But his work was mighty important to our entire careers."

Amen.