The Australian Pink Floyd Show
A Two-Fan Symposium on Music Obsession
By Quinton Skinner and Sam L. Landman
The Australian Pink Floyd Show are considered the consummate tribute band of their kind, famously playing a show for the 50th birthday of (Pink Floyd lead guitarist and singer) David Gilmour.
When it was announced that they would be playing Minneapolis’ State Theatre, lifelong Pink Floyd obsessive Quinton Skinner contacted writer and performer Sam Landman, perhaps the only other person who speaks the same stilted language of trivia and arcane information about a notoriously aloof self-absorbed group of musicians who haven’t played a full concert with their classic lineup in more than 35 years.
Unfortunately, Landman had a rehearsal for the upcoming Waiting for Waiting for Godot by the Twin Cities’ Loudmouth Collective, so the two were unable to attend together.
They did, however, collaborate on the following, delving into the nature of Pink Floyd, the show itself, and the elusive concept of fandom.
Quinton: I’m inordinately excited to see the Australian Pink Floyd Show in Minneapolis this week. First because I love Pink Floyd, and I’ve heard this band kills a note-perfect version of the big roaring crowd-pleasers. But it’s also because there’s no great band more appropriate for the tribute treatment than the Floyd.
I mean, you go all the way back to their roots in the 1960s and they’ve been battling with questions of who they are as a band, whether they’re legitimate, whether they’re “real.”
Sam: I’m inordinately bummed that I CAN’T see the Australian Pink Floyd Show in Minneapolis with Quinton, my separated-at-birth Floyd brother. (I’ve had many separated-at-birth Floyd brothers [and one sister]. But considering that Quinton has more than passed my “Which One’s Pink: Obscure Floyd Sniff Test,” he’s my most current one.)
That being said, I’m an admitted Floyd snob, having been in a snooty Floyd tribute band back in the day. Which is why I’m sort of glad I’m not going.
Sure, the Australian Pink Floyd Show will probably rain warm Floyd chestnuts all over the lowest common denominators (“Comfortably Numb,” “Another Brick In The Wall,” Money,” etc.). But will this band whip out “Paintbox” or “Apples & Oranges” like my tribute band Thieving Llama did on numerous occasions? Will they attempt “Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast” in its entirety with the same gusto as the Llama?
Probably not. And maybe that’s for the best.
Hell, even Pink Floyd only performed Nick Mason’s God-awful shitfest, “The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party” a handful of times before they canned it from the setlist. So, why would you heave that upon innocent bystanders who just showed up to hear “Hey, You?”
Still, if they even lobbed out something as marginally off-kilter as “Wot’s…Uh the Deal” or “A Pillow of Winds,” I’d really like to be there to witness it.
Quinton: And that evokes the arcana factor, which is always a big deal to the ardent Floyd fan. For me it goes all the way back to the early 1980s, when scoring a vinyl copy of Piper at the Gates of Dawn was akin to finding some lost book of the Bible that would somehow explain the gaps in the mysteries (which turned out to kind of be the case).
But no, I doubt these guys are going to crank out “Cymbaline” or even take a run at “Jugband Blues.” Their frame of reference is the late 1980s-early 1990s brand of Pink Floyd, the one I saw two nights in a row at the Oakland Coliseum and is synonymous with the band in the minds of millions thanks to their incessant touring at the time (and the release of new material famously referred to by estranged band member Roger Waters as a “credible forgery.”)
Waters was right. Pink Floyd itself for a number of years was the most awesome Pink Floyd cover band in the world. And in the process they put a layer of shellack on what the band had been before.
Pink Floyd itself for a number of years was the most awesome Pink Floyd cover band in the world.
Sam: See, to me, witnessing “a surrogate band” going through the motions of the actual Floyd I saw in 1994 (or thereabouts) seems like something I might not be able to get behind.
It goes against everything I’ve come to believe as a self-professed Floyd snob.
I’d hate to be that Xeroxed copy of a corpulent 40-ish-year-old holding up his lighter, listening them plod through yet another interminable version of “Comfortably Numb,” a song I’ve grown so tired of that I actually skip it when I listen to “The Wall.” I’d just be thinking about how much my legs hurt, while they wheel out yet another “Wish You Were Here.”
If anything, I’d want to be that guy who’s wearing a “Point Me At The Sky” t-shirt that confuses younger fans. The one who gets the occasional high-five or knowing nod from the other elder Floyd snobs in the crowd. The one who turns his back defiantly when the Australian Pink Floyd Show slogs through “Learning To Fly.”
I will say this though. Back before I saw the Floyd in the mid 90’s, I’d read about how they actually played “Astronomy Domine” and even “Echoes” in its entirety early on in the tour. The very idea of this made me absolutely giddy. I knew that if I could just sit through any of their schlock from “A Momentary Lapse of Reason,” I’d be rewarded.
By the time they hit my hometown of Birmingham though, they’d dropped both from the set.
Now. Was this Floyd snob still goosepimply as he stood in that sardine can of a stadium, while the second guitar solo of “Comfortably Numb” wailed in his ears and Marmaduke-sized blobs of light bled all over him from a swirling disco ball the size of an Acura? Hell, yes. Because it didn’t matter that it was a song I was tired of even then. This was the REAL Floyd playing just for me (and a few thousand others).
Was this Floyd snob still goosepimply as he stood in that sardine can of a stadium, while the second guitar solo of “Comfortably Numb” wailed in his ears and Marmaduke-sized blobs of light bled all over him from a swirling disco ball the size of an Acura? Hell, yes.
But when push came to shove, I was still sitting through “On the Turning Away” and getting absolutely no recompense with something as un-obscure as, I don’t know, “Have A Cigar.” So, yeah, I felt sort of let down somehow.
Maybe I’m afraid of being underwhelmed again. I don’t know. Maybe it’d all be different if I was actually there with you, Quinton.
If none of my snobbiness makes any sense to people reading this, let me level set:
The first Floyd album I ever owned was “The Final Cut.” Here are two reasons why:
1) The coolest kid in school owned a Gerald Scarfe, screaming face, Pink Floyd shirt and I was obsessed by the idea of how that image translated to the music.
2) Camelot Records & Tapes wouldn’t give me a cash refund for the Men Without Hats cassette I’d just bought, even though it had no physical tape inside of it.
Just think about that for a second.
If this one-in-a-million packaging defect hadn’t happened in some crummy UK factory back in the early 80’s, I could’ve become an obsessive Men Without Hats fan instead of the devoted Floyd snob I’ve proudly evolved into.
Although maybe I wouldn’t have so much self-loathing about my snobbery. I could just be blissfully unaware and ignorantly happy doing that moronic “Safety Dance.”
[Quinton attends the show and reports back]
Quinton: And now it’s the morning after. The Australian Pink Floyd Show: They’re very good, no doubt about it. The sound was really good inside the confines of the State Theatre, about 90 percent there in terms of the thunk-thunk low end and the mix of organ and mutant blues that makes up much of the Floyd sound.
It made me realize how profound was the paradox involved when Pink Floyd reached stadium-filling status. It alienated Roger Waters to the point that it inspired one of their two masterpieces (The Wall), after which he dictated the band embark on an expensive, ruinous, brilliantly didactic theater show that further drilled down on the group’s interpersonal animosity until they broke up, reformed without him, and . . . became a stadium-touring, borderline-generic colossus that circled the globe repeatedly like a laser-firing jukebox, providing a light version of the abyss-staring existential acid-tinged genius that sprang from the meltdown of their founder and their weird upper-class snobbery and alchemy.
Speaking of which, TAPFS played “On the Turning Away,” which was fucking inexcusable.
Sam: Okay, since you mentioned that last bit of sad news, can you remember their set list?
Quinton: Set List: Shine on You Crazy Diamond, Time/Breathe, On the Turning Away, Wish You Were Here, Us And Them, Any Colour You Like, Brain Damage, Eclipse, The Happiest Days of Our Lives, Another Brick in the Wall / Intermission / Pigs, Learning to Fly, The Great Gig in the Sky, Hey You, What Do You Want From Me, Sorrow, One of These Days, Comfortably Numb, Run Like Hell.
So, mostly crowd pleasers, but with an alarming emphasis on the band’s frankly late-80s, early-90s incarnation, when they made a pair of albums to which I literally NEVER listen. But the whole point is that they were replicating that version of Pink Floyd, and they do it very well.
Ultimately, though, that Floyd was 75% of the real thing, and this sounds like about 90% of 75% . . . plus the woman in front of us was recording THE ENTIRE THING on her phone even after my partner shamed her into stopping for a couple of minutes.
Sam: I’m completely thrown by the addition of “What Do You Want From Me” in there. Was there a single person at the State Theater waiting with bated breath for ANYTHING off The Division Bell?
I’m seeing it this way: if I’m in a band that pays tribute to a band like Pink Floyd (AKA a group with a career and creative output that’s this expansive, complete with seminal concept albums and songs that live within even the most pedestrian Floyd fan’s collective consciousness), my first plan of attack would be to bench any filler or lesser recognized/appreciated material.
But that’s me. Maybe I’m not seeing it because I’m not a professional musician. Or maybe Australians just LOVE The Division Bell. Regardless, I’d be keeping it down to the essentials.*
Now, I know that completely flies in the face of my earlier sentiment about how they should whip out something risky and obscure like “Julia Dream.” But as the man said, “They’re still running a business, people.” Play the hits, boys.
Still, the majority of that set list is tiggety-tight. Sad I had to miss it because of “acting.”
(*I think we’ve had this conversation, but I can’t listen to “Radio KAOS” anymore. It’s just so damn dated. I’m convinced it’s the instrumentation. That being said, you could trap me in a locked room with only bread, water and “Radio KAOS” to listen to for ten years over an afternoon filled with all the Gordita Crunches I could eat and one spin of The Division Bell.)
Quinton: I guess that brings us back to full circle: our shared snobbery over Pink Floyd. Do I look down on people who think The Division Bell is something remotely worth listening to? Of course I do. But my love of Pink Floyd is ridiculous and exhaustive. I wanted them to play “Free Four,” or at least take a run at “Interstellar Overdrive,” but what percentage of the audience shared my view? Of course they wanted to hear “Run Like Hell” and “Time” because they’re GREAT SONGS (and because, unlike me, they haven’t obsessively listened to them so many times they could be hired to supervise the next inevitable remastered box set because they could hear if a semitone in David Gilmour’s solo on “Money” was slightly off.)
But really, how could anyone think that The Division Bell Pink Floyd was anything but the equivalent of what the guys in TAPFS could probably come up with in their own right? That is, a batch of new songs that kinda sound like Pink Floyd but aren’t fooling anyone?
How could anyone think that “The Division Bell” Pink Floyd was anything but the equivalent of what the guys in TAPFS could probably come up with in their own right? That is, a batch of new songs that kinda sound like Pink Floyd but aren’t fooling anyone?
Anyhow, TAPFS know what they’re doing. We saw t-shirt after t-shirt last night commemorating tour stops from years and years past. They have a bald guy with a pot belly who looks like Gilmour and even makes Haughty Guitar Face during the solos just like the real thing. They have just enough of a sense of humor in their iconography (bunnies and Aussie outlines inserted in the familiar Floyd album imagery) to let us know that this is supposed to be fun, after all.
Come to think of it, Pink Floyd were never all that fun. The concerts I saw were like big numbing spectacles, calculated to stun you into submission. But there’s no doubt they’re my favorite band of all time. I’ll sit there and enjoy even a simulation. Because I realized last night: you don’t really choose your favorite band. Your favorite music just sort of settles in and, before you know it, it’s a sound that somehow speaks to your innermost self, telling you things you never even knew you needed to hear. There’s no explaining it, there’s no excusing it, it just is.
When I was a child, I had a fever . . .
Sam L. Landman is a workaday copywriter by day, sometime actor by night and a sketch writer with Blackout Improv whenever he can bend time and space. He’s also the playwright behind the yearlong Tumblr, One-Act-A-Week. You can read all 52 one-acts he wrote at oneactaweek.tumblr.com (if you want to produce one, hit him up). He’s also the co-host of an anti-nostalgia podcast called Aging Poorly (agingpoorly.com). He lives in St. Paul’s quaint Highland Park with his understanding wife and an FIV-infected cat.
Quinton Skinner is the author of non-fiction and fiction books including the upcoming novel Odd One Out (Prospect Park, 2017). He has written for numerous national publications and many in the Twin Cities, where he is currently senior editor of Minnesota Monthly magazine.
Thank you for reading! Be sure to follow North Mag here on Medium for more of the best writing from America’s Top Coast.
