December 5, 1972
Forest National / Vorst Nationaal, Brussels, Belgium
Welcome to the month of Pink Floyd, where I’ll be celebrating
the 30-day countdown until the release of the Early Years box set. Technically,
it’s 31 days, but I’ll be celebrating the 31st day differently…
maybe. I’m bad at commitment.
The plan is to look at 30 random concerts from Pink Floyd
history, even going past the content covered in the Early Years.
The concert in review is from December 5, 1972, from the
Dark Side of the Moon tour. Yes, we’re here. I actually picked this one because
it’s my personal favorite. I cannot do this concert justice.
The Dark Side of the Moon Tour was a big tour, the biggest
until A Momentary Lapse of Reason tour. And of course, this tour was for their
in progress album The Dark Side of the Moon. The tour actually started 14
months before the album would be released, enough time for it to go through
several name changes, between “Eclipse” and “Dark Side of the Moon – A Piece
for Assorted Lunatics”, this concert being the latter.
This concert takes place in Belgium, and is the only concert
in Belgium during the Dark Side Tour. The recording here is so good it’s been
confused as a soundboard. It’s even in stereo.
This concert has the best sounding live Childhood’s End you
can get, and I love Childhood’s End so that alone puts it on the top of my list
for best Pink Floyd bootlegs. And since it’s a pre-1973 concert, it’s just
Floyd up there. Around the second part of the 1973 tour, Dick Parry joined in
on saxophone, with several backing vocalists (including Clare Torry twice on
November 4, 1973)
Being a Dark Side concert, we start off with the entire
album. Specifically, Speak to Me.
Dark Side was released in March of 1973, but Speak to Me is still pretty
different. For one, there is no speaking parts or parts of other songs thrown
in.
Dark Side has its fair share of disasters, including, and
not limited to:
·
The first concert ever to introduce Dark Side
not actually finishing Dark Side due to technical difficulties
·
A
spectator falling and killing the person he landed on late into the tour.
Breathe includes
another disaster that ends up making the song more interesting. About 40
seconds into the song, the PA system freaks out and makes noises like an alarm
from Star Trek. And it’s loud. This messes up the song’s timing, but also
causes Gilmour to hold off on singing and jam for a little bit until it’s
fixed. So we actually get a nice little Breathe jam before the lyrics come in.
Cool!
The Travel Sequence,
which is On the Run but not, has a very nice mix. If The Travel Sequence is new
to you, it’s a guitar and keyboard jam instead of an electronic jam, with a
drum part that’s similar to On the Run. The mix is nice because it puts Mr.
Wright right up front where he’s very audible without taking away any of the
band. It’s also more jam than the studio Travel Sequence we got with Immersion,
with less emphasis on the guitar (Later, I heard that Gilmour wasn’t really
doing much here anyway). The only way they could transition into Time is by
fading themselves out.
And Time. Time is
pretty slow, but the instrumentation is the same, except Gilmour and Wright share
vocals and it’s so beautiful. They either forget “Ticking Away” or their
microphones were off, but Wright comes in before Gilmour so we get solo Wright
for half a verse. That’s right everybody, this is THE concert for Richard
Wright fans. And I love everything. Wright does to the chorus vocals mostly by
himself, though. The guitar solo continues to be dominated by Wright’s keyboard
part, which is the only bad part about having Wright so high up in the mix.
Breathe (Reprise)
is a separate song in every single bootleg, so as far as I care it’s the
cannon. With Gilmour’s vocals more isolated, you can hear how good he is here.
The Mortality
Sequence is a naked version of The Great Gig in the Sky, without backing
vocals. I really like the early mix from Immersion, and this is close to that.
They seemed to have pushed Wright back some more, and now the bass is highest
in the mix. Speaking of bass, Water’s choice of notes makes it sound like
someone’s sneaking around in a video game. I much prefer either live Great Gig
or studio Mortality Sequence over live Mortality Sequence. In the end, it
becomes a jazz number.
Money has a very
nice, clean bass sound, so they got that right. If that guitar was a bit
louder, you could hear how nice and hard that sound is, but you can’t really
hear it. Instead you get Wright’s keyboards in a wah wah form before the whole
things becomes loud and a bit distorted during the solo. I think it’s because
of the bass, too, so it becomes a deep booming sound. Another thing to note is
that Mason’s drums are always heard. This whole recording is like the opposite
of what happens in bootlegs.
Us and Them is
the same without echoes on the vocals, and Gilmour and Wright doing harmonizing
again. Up until the middle section, where the sax solo is supposed to be. It’s
a nice organ solo. It’s still the good old Us and Them you remember, and it
never gets old. They do a really good job with dynamics in this performance.
Straight into Scat.
Or, yeah, Any Colour You Like. It’s Scat because Gilmour does some scat singing
alongside his guitar, and not because they take a bathroom break. They already
drank tea during the Man and the Journey tour, so that’s enough avant garde.
It’s only six minutes long, so it’s a nice mix between regular Dark Side sound
and long jamming that you would see in 1975. It makes it better than the guitar
is mostly heard throughout the song as long as Mason and Wright weren’t going
hard on their instruments like they did around 4:40 into the song. I mean,
Mason is just going on his drums, and Wright plays a long, loud chord behind it
and sounds magical.
The Lunatic Song
is Brain Damage with more keyboards in the start. The bass starts to distort
the recording even more, and that’s fine because it makes a nice surrounding
noise. The outro guitar is a little messy, but we’ll look past that because we
are nice people. It’s also higher pitch than regular Brain Damage, so that’s
interesting.
Nick Mason tries to slow it down for Eclipse but it takes a little bit for the band to accommodate.
Waters doesn’t vary his pitch much for the song, but you can hear Gilmour start
to yell for “And all that you eat”. It’s the little things that make this.
For the second set (one of the greatest second sets), we
jump into One of These Days. When
that bass finally starts, it’s loud. This is going to get good and distorted.
Oh my god, the keyboards are so loud, too. It’s like a dream. This song
captures the live atmosphere perfectly.
Mason isn’t as loud as he should be, and the guitar is pretty much lost in the
mix when everyone else is playing. But do you know what we do get? That post
“cut you” keyboard part that’s different from the studio. It’s the type of
rhythm from the Live at Pompeii performance.
During the performance, Waters screws up, and everyone else
screws up except Mason. No one stops Mason from his drum fills.
Careful With That
Axe, Eugene is another great performance, and exactly how you want the song
to be. It’s hard to say one specific instrument is better in this performance,
because even the guitar is audible and adding atmosphere to the song. Waters
scares the shit out of me with his Scottish guy from Grooving with a Pict
before THE BLOOD CURDLING SRCEAM that gave me goosebumps just now. Good god.
Gilmour informs “Chirs” that Waters’ microphone is not on.
Waters is the only person who can introduce Echoes. It starts off a little weird, with what sounds like Wright
tuning his keyboards during the guitar intro. This performance also needs more
guitar if it wants to keep up with the normal Echoes standard. But come on, it’s
Echoes. No mistakes here, just heavy distortion on the recording from the
extreme amounts of sound coming from the stage. It kind of makes me sad that we
will never have every Echoes in soundboard quality, because even that
jazzy-bass section after the first bunch of lyrics is a masterpiece.
The moment I’ve been waiting for. Childhood’s End. Such an underrated gem. It starts with a keyboard
introduction before the drums slowly fade in to start the rest of the band.
There’s only 14 Childhood End performances live, so to have one in such good
quality makes this bootleg a keeper. Like with Careful with That Axe, every
instrument is special in this song. Take time off your day to listen to the
guitar solos in this performance, because it sure is something to never forget.
Right after the solo is a fun sounding bass part that slides up each note, like
a soundtrack to a giant walking, accompanying a keyboard solo.
The jamming and playing for this performance is some of the
best. The recording quality is also some of the best for an audience recording,
even keeping crowd noise and conversation kept to a minimum. It captures the
feel of the live venue perfectly in my opinion. At the same time, it’s like
having a bootleg from opposite land; the instruments that are usually lost in
the mix are right up front, and the guitar is buried. A couple mistakes thrown
in make this a memorable performance and one to get a hold of.
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