ECHOES... PART TWO
Last year David Gilmour returned to Pompeii – previously the scene of Pink Floyd’s 1971 cinematic tour de force. As his performance of that show nears release, the man himself presents a selection of shots, captioning them exclusively for MOJO, while his
COMING BACK AND SEEING THE STAGE and everything, it was quite overwhelming really. It’s a place of ghosts… in a friendly way,” said David Gilmour, on his first visit to Pompeii for a full 45 years. For Gilmour, the ghosts of the ancient Roman city were literal – in the bodies buried under volcanic ash and calcified by Mount Vesuvius in AD79 – as well as spiritual: his return serving as a reminder of Pink Floyd’s visit to the same venue in 1971. That year, British director Adrian Maben had had the idea to combine sculpture, “in some kind of surrealistic décor. I naively thought it was possible to combine good art with Pink Floyd music.”
Visiting Pompeii’s ruined amphitheatre, clocking the acoustics – “echoing insect sounds, flying bats and the disappearing light music” – Maben asked Floyd to be filmed there, sans audience, to focus on the music and setting. The subsequent Pink Floyd: Live At Pompeii, one of the band’s most iconic performances, would play on the repertory cinema circuit for years. In 2016, Gilmour decided to tour the previous year’s Rattle That Lock album, “in the nicest, most beautiful places,” he said before the first of two Pompeii shows. This would include other European amphitheatres and a chateau in Chantilly. “They might be much harder to play,” he opined, “but I’d rather we did something where people think, Wow, that was fantastic… it changes their memory, turns it into something greater.” The return to the Pompeii amphitheatre included an audience, “the first since gladiators wrestled sheep!” chuckles Gilmour’s long-serving bassist Guy Pratt. He discovered this nugget of information from Professor Mary Beard, a specialist in Roman history, and it seems, Pink Floyd. When Gilmour’s wife Polly Samson suggested they ask Beard (one of their favourite authors) to the show, they discovered that her first ever sighting of Pompeii was in the original film, and that she’d already bought tickets for the July 2016 shows. Like Gilmour, it was Pratt’s second time in Pompeii: in 2014, he’d taken his son, Stanley (also the grandson of the late Floyd keyboardist Rick Wright), to show off the site that the bassist had first seen, as a teenager, in the cinema. “This time, the amphitheatre was filled with tourists like myself, and like most things, it was smaller in the flesh, but it was still stunning,” he recalls. “But I didn’t imagine we’d return to play there.” Pratt, who has known Gilmour for the last 20 years, says the man enjoys reminiscing, “especially when Rick was around, they’d really go off! And David’s a fantastic
DAVID RESUSCITATED THE GREAT GIG IN THE SKY AS A TRIBUTE TO RICK WRIGHT. GUY PRATT
raconteur.” But Pratt doesn’t recall Gilmour getting nostalgic on this trip: “David was really busy too, there were lots of people to meet, like the mayor. And though nothing’s taboo, I don’t ask him questions like that. But as he said, the place was full of ghosts, so it was clearly moving for him. And sad too, because Rick wasn’t there. But it was also special, because you can’t revert to auto-pilot on those kinds of shows. Unfamiliarity is good for the music.” Unfamiliarity extended to the stage set-up. “The amphitheatre meant we couldn’t use our usual lighting gantry,” Pratt explains. “The top ring of the arena was the lighting, which meant that when the lights changed, they changed all the way around, which was spectacular. So were the fireworks at the end of Comfortably Numb. And the sound, without high walls to bounce off. Actually, it was like a club date, because the audience was limited to about two thousand, and when everyone rushed up front, you could see the whites of their eyes. The atmosphere was eerie when only a few people were in the amphi-theatre, because of the antiquity, but it was magical during the shows.” The setlist incorporated numerous Floyd faves, including Meddle intro One Of These Days, the one song to be carried over from Floyd’s Pompeii set. “That was fucking incredible,” says Pratt. “You can make those wind sound effects on your phone nowadays, but David hired a proper old wind machine, which was turned by [drummer] Steve [DiStanislao] with a spotlight on him.” But Meddle’s side-long epic behemoth Echoes, the centrepiece of the Floyd film, was avoided, “because it doesn’t make any sense without Rick. But David resuscitated The Great Gig In The Sky, which he rarely plays, as a tribute to Rick. The backing singers came up with a beautiful arrangement for it.” Pratt equally commends The Great Gig… organ part played by new band member Chuck Leavell (Allman Brothers, The Rolling Stones): “You know Rick would have loved it, and that he’d have said, ‘I wish I could play like that!’ It was really fitting.” Gilmour’s new band also included guitarist Chester Kamen (who first played alongside Gilmour in Bryan Ferry’s Live Aid band) and keyboardist Greg Phillinganes. “I’m the last man standing from the 1987 tour,” Pratt chuckles again. “And even that was in doubt for a while, which I get – Bowie didn’t have Mike Garson with him all the time, and David had a bit of a Bowie wobble, like, ‘This might be the last time I do this…’ He’s never had a name-player band, so there might have been a bit of an itch. But it’s good having players
approach things differently, and the music exploded on-stage in a way it hadn’t before, because of how fresh it felt. People commented on how much fun David was having on-stage.” Another subject Pratt is unwilling to address with Gilmour is the matter of whether Gilmour had laid those ghosts to rest, and was at peace with the Floyd legacy: “I think David is, because he’d otherwise have turned his back on something like returning to Pompeii.” So – following the release of the new, commemorative David Gilmour: Live At Pompeii album and DVD – what’s next for his friend and employer? Pratt says there is half an album’s-worth left over from Rattle That Lock. “David might be pottering away,” he laughs. “And if he does play live again, it’ll be a while before he does. But we’re always in touch, and we both live in Brighton. But we tend to talk about rubbish, as friends do, rather than music. He has 10,000 people asking him about that, so I’d rather not be that guy. Maybe that’s why I’ve lasted so long in his band!”