ORCHESTRAL PINK FLOYD
Tribute show called ‘epic’
The Pink Floyd business is a lucrative business to be in. If you doubt that, just ask Richard Petit. He is the driving force, along with his business and creative partner, Michel Bruno, in a series of Pink Floyd tribute shows that he figures have sold close to 300,000 tickets over the past six years. There’s no shortage of Pink Floyd tribute acts out there — notably the Australian Pink Floyd Show and Brit Floyd — but Petit insists his is the best in the world. It all began with Petit dreaming of putting together a show that faithfully re-creates the classic Floyd album The Wall. He had gone to see former Pink Floyd singer-songwriter Roger Waters here in 2007, and the gig included several songs from The Wall. This was three years before Waters embarked on a world tour focusing exclusively on that album. “That night I went back home and thought, ‘If I want to see The Wall in its entirety, then there must be a lot of people who want to see that,’ ” Petit said in an interview this week. Petit’s first tribute to The Wall made its debut in April 2011, at La Tulipe. That show sold out, and they decided to do it again in February 2012 at Le National. Thanks to the buzz created by those two performances, a number of Quebec summer festivals came calling to ask for the show, including Woodstock en Beauce and a fest in Quebec City. The tribute played both festivals in 2012, and it pulled into Lévis, near Quebec City, a week after Waters performed The Wall from start to finish in front of 80,000 fans on the Plains of Abraham. “Seven days (after Waters’s concert), we’re playing in Lévis, five kilometres from les Plaines, and there were 25,000 people,” said Petit. “At that point I said, ‘People won’t ever get enough of Floyd.’ So that’s when I started the show called The Wall Extravaganza.” Petit spent the next 2½ years creating the ambitious tribute show, which made its debut with a three-night run at Club Soda in February 2016. It ended up playing Club Soda 10 times that year. The following year, The Wall Extravaganza toured the U.S., with a 22-date road trip. Petit likes to call it “The Wall and beyond. It’s total immersion into The Wall.” Petit and Bruno then decided to move on to a full-scale tribute to Floyd’s entire career. That was the beginning of Space: The Best of Pink Floyd, which hit the road in 2017, eventually making its way to Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier of Place des Arts last December. A year later, it is coming back to Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, revamped as Space #2 Symphonique. As the title suggests, it’s a symphonic take on the British band’s work, with two lead singers (Sebastien Lacombe and Sylvain Auclair), three backup singers and seven musicians augmented by 37 members of the Orchestre symphonique de Trois-Rivières. The symphonic arrangements were created by noted Montreal saxophonist Charles Papasoff, who also performs in the show. “It’s epic,” said Petit. “It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever done. ‘Grandiose’ is the word.” Petit used to play guitar in the band, but has stepped back to focus on the artistic direction, though he will sing in the finale, on the song The Trial. The show is completely faithful to Floyd. “We have to respect every detail of the music, and we don’t add one note to any solo,” said Petit. “That’s the way the masterpieces were written. “The music of Pink Floyd will, over time, be just like the music of Wagner or Mozart,” he said. “They are the classic composers of our era. In 200 years, there will be orchestras playing the music of Pink Floyd.” The Wall Extravaganza will once again tour the U.S. in January and February, and then it hops over the Atlantic to tour England in April and Germany in July. Petit used to be a fairly successful franco singer-songwriter here, but that’s ancient history for him. I suggest it’s not his focus now, but he has another way of describing his singer-songwriter past: “It’s not on the back burner — it’s in the cemetery.” He feels his Pink Floyd work is just as creative, simply in another arena.