David Gilmour - Live - Meltdown Festival
 The
Meltdown Festival is a regular event held at the Royal Festival Hall on
London's South Bank, next to the River Thames. Each year, a different
artist is invited to concoct an eclectic mix of performers for the
festival.
In 2001 it was Robert Wyatt. Amongst those he invited were
David Gilmour, who, to many people's surprise, happily took up the
offer and performed a breathtaking and unexpected show for the two
thousand lucky enough to get tickets.
From a personal perspective, the
choice of songs was perfect (always some songs you yearn to hear of
course) and some big surprises as the evening unfurled. I must admit
that my jaw had dropped so far when he followed Terrapin with Fat Old
Sun, that it took most of the rest of the show to get it back into
position!
Thankfully he followed with some more expected songs such as
Wish You Were Here...I say thankfully, as although I feel a lot of them
are overperformed, it enabled me to pull myself together! To hear Fat
Old Sun AND Terrapin live was awesome.
What was also nice, was to see
David looking so calm and relaxed, almost from the outset. He calmly
batted away questions and shouted nonsenses from the audience, like a
seasoned comedian deals with hecklers. Bear in mind that this was
probably the first show he had done in many years where things were
pretty quiet during and between songs...
The songs performed were:
Shine On You Crazy Diamond part 1-5
Terrapin
Fat Old Sun
Coming Back to Life
High Hopes
Je Crois Entendre Encore (an opera by Bizet)
Smile (a new song)
Wish You Were Here
Comfortably Numb
Dimming of the Day (by Richard Thompson)
Shine On You Crazy Diamond part 6,7 & 9
Encore:
A Great Day for Freedom
Hushabye Mountain (from the 1970 film, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang)
Performing these tracks were the
following (amongst others - at one point there were nine vocalists on
stage - sorry, didn't manage to work out who they all were) who
accompanied David:
Margot Buchanan
Caroline Dale
Nick France
Michael Kamen
Chucho Merchan
Dick Parry
Sam Brown
Durga McBroom
Claudia Fontaine
Carol Kenyon
Press review
While his guitar gently weeps
Here's a concept even weirder
than Arthur Smith sings Leonard Cohen: David Gilmour sings Bizet. A
high spot of the legendary Pink Floyd guitarist's Friday night RFH
extravaganza - part of the Meltdown 2001 festival, devised by Robert
Wyatt - was his rendering of a rapturous aria from The Pearl Fishers.
In French. And in a high tenor that became a climactic falsetto.
Charles Trenet meets Aled Jones. It was gorgeous, but scarcely what the
fortysomething Floydies in the audience were expecting.
Gilmour took the stage in his
rock-star-millionaire garb of nondescript T-shirt and jeans and the
demeanour of a truculent roadie, picked up an acoustic guitar and
launched into a one-man-band version of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond",
his tribute to the damaged visionary Syd Barrett from the original
Floyd line-up. As the stage filled up with instrumentalists -
saxophone, double bass, cello, piano, second guitar, and (count 'em)
nine backing singers - we realised his wasn't going to be an MTV
"Unplugged" session. It was a showcase, by a musician bored with his
rock-god pigeonhole, of his eclectic musical taste.
Gilmour raided the band's back
pages for favourite moments - "Fat Old Sun" from Atom Heart Mother,
"Wish You Were Here" in a gorgeous duet with Neil McColl, "Comfortably
Numb" from The Wall (with a contribution from the Robert Wyatt, who now
resembles Moondog). He threw in Richard Thompson's folksy "Dimming of
the Day" with the delicacy of a Celtic harpist.
Ignoring the over-familiar
Dark Side of the Moon, he sang three numbers from The Division Bell,
calming the rock'n'roll strut of "Coming Back to Life" into a tender
tribute to his wife, Polly.
When he finally strapped on a
Stratocaster, the audience whistled and yelled for the authentic
Gilmour sound - those liquidly stratospheric electric solos, at least
an octave higher than anybody else's. Visibly, he relaxed with an axe.
But the revelation of the evening was the romanticism of his
arrangements, the mellifluousness of his voice, the churchy swoop of
the streaming, arpeggiated cello and the nine-part choral harmonies. Is
that the sound this burly guitar hero has secretly craved?
The audience cat-called genially
throughout, like adolescents cheeking the headmaster at Gilmour High.
"Where's Roger Waters?" asked a Floyd anorak of the departed bassist.
"You want him, you can have him," said Gilmour. He closed with an
electric reprise of "Crazy Diamond", returned for a full-stage epic
blast of "A Great Day For Freedom", and sent the audience home to bed
with a lullaby called "Hushabye Mountain". The big softie.
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