I went to see David Gilmour at the Albert Hall a couple of years ago. The tickets said the concert was going to start at 7:30 pm. Yeah, right, I thought. Either there'll be some dire support band on first, boring us to death with dodgy sound quality, before the guitar maestro makes his entrance some time after 9, or there won't be, and we'll have to wait in mounting excitement as roadies scuttle about on a darkened stage for an age before the thing gets under way. So we bought ice-creams from a van outside and wandered leisurely into the venue at about 7:35. Strangely, there was no one around and... what was that? The bended notes of a Fender could be plainly heard emanating from the auditorium. Bloody hell, Dave had started on the dot of 7:30. Crikey. It's not like the old days. Now the sexagenarians want to do their troubadour thing before getting back home in time for cocoa and an early night.
Older and wiser, we made sure we were on time for Roger Waters at the O2, otherwise known as the Dome, or that monstrous billion pound white elephant near London City Airport. After all, we had been warned. The tickets actually said "7:45 pm prompt", though I overheard in the gents some informed people say that in fact it was going to start at 8. Much more likely. There aren't many events that start at a quarter to the hour. Still, sitting in our seats at 7:40, everyone seemed to be adopting a very relaxed attitude to being on time, as the spacious arena was half empty. 8pm came and still the audience couldn't really decide if it was going to show up or not. People milled around with pints of fizzy beer in aimless fashion, not giving the impression that they were over-bothered where their seat might be. But at 8:10, Roger had clearly had enough of waiting for his fans to get themselves sorted out; the lights went down, the band appeared and we found ourselves listening to In The Flesh from The Wall.
That Waters has a strong sense of irony has never been in doubt. It was surely no coincidence that he sang the lines "I've got some bad news for you sunshine/ Pink isn't well, he's stayed back at the hotel / And they've sent us along as a surrogate band / We're going to find out where you folks really stand". He needn't have worried. Pink Floyd concerts being as rare as hen's teeth these days, this was as close as most people were going to get to seeing them. We all secretly wanted to see the Floyd, but if we couldn't, then Mr Waters' tribute band would do nicely, just so long as he didn't do anything weird, like not playing the songs note for note, and no idiosyncratic interpretations please, now that the other members weren't around to stop him. Well, it would appear that Roger's days of sneering at his audience are truly over. More crowd-pleasing would be hard to imagine. Note for note renditions of the Floyd is what we got, and just as well. You could almost feel the tension as the David Gilmour stand-ins, Snowy White and the astonishing Dave Kilminster, played the famous guitar solos with an attention to detail and phrasing that Gilmour himself could not be guaranteed to come up with live. The only slight deviation from orthodoxy came during the encore for Comfortably Numb with the guitarists sharing the famous guitar solo and Snowy White, in keeping with his credentials as an almost honorary member of the Floyd – after all, he was already touring with them in 1975 – allowing himself some improvised licks. But otherwise, Dave Kilminster gave you the impression of one of those guys you see on You Tube, playing in their bedrooms, practising for hour after hour the world famous solos of the master. He even managed to sing in that superb tired voice that characterises Dave Gilmour's vocal style.
In terms of staging there was nothing much to criticise either. As you would expect in a Pink Floyd concert, we got pyrotechnics, colourful and meaningful back projections, and the trademark inflatables, with both a remote controlled astronaut and the pig doing the rounds of the arena over the audience's heads. Lasers even made a welcome return, shining spectacularly out of the Dark Side of the Moon pyramid in rainbow colours.
So what was lacking? The only bum note in the evening was down to the audience. The milling around didn't stop at late arrival; it went on all through the concert. Many of the fans displayed the attention spans of a nest of bluebottles, finding it necessary to accompany their evening with plastic glasses of lager which they ferried down the gangways in a never-ending tide. The venue helps them in this, as not only are the bars open all through the concert, but the staircases are illuminated to make sure they don't trip up with their precious cargo. The constant movement and the extraneous lighting, meant that no matter how gripping things were getting on stage, you just couldn't help being distracted by an unhealthy number of your fellow concert-goers. Even many of those who didn't confuse going to see a major artist with a night down the boozer, were more intent on capturing the event on their mobile phones than actually absorbing the experience first hand. This seems indicative to me of the digital age, where life is increasingly experienced vicariously via some gizmo or other, so that when faced with a real event, people feel the need to record and own it rather than just living it. OK so call me a boring old fart, but you know you are living in the noughties when during encores, the crowd hold up their mobile phones when only a few years ago they would have held up their lighters. Still, no reason to get nostalgic about that – it always looked completely naff.
Did I give the impression that Waters didn't play any of his own material? Well he did, and it was good too, but he kindly kept it to a minimum. After all, not many of his albums have sold as well as Dark Side of the Moon.
