107. Dave Gilmour

Royal Albert Hall

2 October 2015

I adore Pink Floyd, but give me the post-Barrett, concept-album heavyweights over Syd’s whimsical kaleidoscope any day. Yes, early Floyd was a Technicolor carnival of fairground organs and wayward rabbits, but my heart belongs to the era where Roger Waters’ big ideas wrestled with David Gilmour’s liquid-mercury guitar lines. That tension, equal parts inspiration and bare-knuckle feud, was the crucible that produced Dark Side, Wish You Were Here, and The Wall. Eventually, of course, the snake ate its own tail, the concepts got bloated, and the band imploded in a blaze of vitriol and flying pigs.

Gilmour’s solo catalogue has always felt a bit like half a jigsaw box, those unmistakable Stratocaster tones are present and correct, but the bite of Waters’ caustic lyricism is missing. His latest record, Rattle That Lock, is no exception: pleasant, dreamy, occasionally gorgeous, but often drifting off like the outro of “Comfortably Numb” took a wrong turn at Eastbourne and kept wandering until it hit the sea.

Tonight, at the Royal Albert Hall that contrast is writ large. All the Floyd stage furniture is here: giant circular screen, tasteful laser wash, you half-expect the alarm clocks from “Time” to start clanging (they do, later, during the encore). But first we have to sit through a polite handful of new tunes accompanied by animations that look faintly like shorts from a French film festival. Everyone applauds generously but you can feel the room waiting for something.

It lands four songs in with “Wish You Were Here.” That opening acoustic figure blooms across the old hall like a sunrise and suddenly 5,000 people remember how loud communal singing can be. That lyric: “Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?” cuts as sharply now as it ever did. Next comes “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” all elegiac layers of sound and that stately Gilmour solo: proof positive that in 1975 they could follow Dark Side with something even more vast.

Surprises arrive, too: David Crosby and Graham Nash wander on in festival-dad attire to lend harmonies to “Comfortably Numb,” turning an already narcotic classic into a cathedral of stacked vocals while Gilmour wrings fresh sorrow from that solo.

The encore is pure fan service: “Time,” “Breathe” and a widescreen “Comfortably Numb”. It’s a reminder that Gilmour still writes good songs, but greatness, that razor edge that came from clashing with Waters, remains a 1973 relic. Tonight, though, nobody minds. We exit, hearts full, into the West London night, still humming that immortal four-note “Shine On” motif and wondering whether any modern feud will ever sound this monumental.