Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
It is a problem that can flummox the most ardent or even the most casual of music lovers in Liverpool, that nowhere in the U.K., with perhaps the possible exception of London with its network of collected villages all rolled up into a Westminster empiric bag, can offer so much music in one night to its populace that audiences can be split through loyalty, nostalgia and shared love.
On one of those evenings in Liverpool where the music was truly king above all else and with no side attraction in the city’s other love distracting the sound of a thousand guitars being played, Brit Floyd came back to the Liverpool Echo Arena and gave such scintillating and spine tingling display of Pink Floyd tracks that the memory and the visual sensors were lovingly overloaded and the sound so reverberating that it would have only served as a possible offering of musical peace in every other venue in which legends stalked the stage and the lyrics flowed like nectar.
In a year in which Pink Floyd returned to the national conscious with the release of their first studio album in 20 years, the songs of the past, of the days of Syd Barrett and the four treasured beasts of albums which cemented the band’s dominance of the vinyl album, Brit Floyd took their audience through the very best and some previously unheard in decades live, of the master’s work.
Tracks such as Shine On You Crazy Diamond, the gifted surprise of Childhood Ends, the danger of Learning To Fly, Another Brick In The Wall Part 2, the darkness ensuing Pigs (Three Different Ones), Money, the attention grabbing Young Lust, the resonating feel of The Fletcher Memorial Home, Time, Wish You Were Here and arguably one of the finest songs ever written in Comfortably Numb were all played with due respect and deference.
The evening was, as ever, poignant, with images from Pink Floyd’s vast past and the starkness of memory. Perhaps never more so than in the back drop for The Fletcher Memorial Home. This song in a nutshell on the night cracked open for many, the enduring success of Pink Floyd. The way in which a band can harvest the imagery of a certain moment in time, the images of a decade’s worth of lunatics and power hungry maniacs in charge of Governments and institutions, now all finally food for the worms and consigned to dust.
Technically superior in every way, Brit Floyd offers the chance to relive every single available and prestigious note made by the kings of the undisputed Kings of the Progressive Rock movement, Pink Floyd. An evening of immense musical satisfaction and detailed, astounding memory rolled up into a collection of songs that re-ignites a psychological revolution in the minds.
Ian D. Hall