Capitol Records Press Release - October 2002
On November 5th, David
Gilmour in Concert, the DVD and VHS, will be released on Capitol
Records. Filmed live at his critically acclaimed Meltdown Festival
concert at London's Royal Festival Hall in June 2001, with additional
footage from David Gilmour's three concerts at the same venue in
January 2002. It also includes guest appearances from Rick Wright,
Robert Wyatt and Sir Bob Geldof. The 130 minute DVD/VHS captures the
magical performance given by David Gilmour and illustrates why these
concerts won universal rave reviews.
David Gilmour in Concert
comprises 16 songs performed by Gilmour, his semi-acoustic band rich in
talent and the exquisite gospel choir led by Sam Brown. The set is
tantalising in its sheer diversity - from Pink Floyd classics such as
"Wish You Were Here," "Comfortably Numb" and "High Hopes," to Syd
Barrett's "Terrapin" and "Dominoes," as well as a performance of "Je
Crois Entendre Encore" from Bizet's opera The Pearl Fishers which one
critic described as an "unlikely triumph..." and a new song "Smile."
Where did the idea for such a
musical departure come from? Gilmour explains: "Robert Wyatt was the
Meltdown Festival's curator for 2001. He rang and invited me to play
and my immediate answer was "yes". While Robert was still on the phone,
an idea came to me, God knows where from. I thought: just a
double-bass, a cello and a small gospel choir. Then I put down the
phone and started to panic..."
That initial panic led to Gilmour
being credited in the Daily Telegraph, with inventing a "whole new
genre ... a sound that is warm, richly textured and genuinely
different... ensemble music of the highest order." The Meltdown
performance went so well, David Gilmour decided to come back to the
Royal Festival Hall a few months later to perform the show three more
times. As he explains, "It seemed rather daft putting that amount of
effort into it for only one night. So I thought maybe I'd do it again
for fun. Just for me really."
And now, with the release of David Gilmour in Concert on November 5th, the concert can be shared and enjoyed by many more.
The DVD will also feature more
than thirty minutes of Special Features. These include home video
footage of David Gilmour rehearsing at home with the choir, six guitar
solos in "close-up" so that guitar enthusiasts can watch him play his
solos in detail and there are three bonus songs recorded at other times.
The entire concert performance is
presented in 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround and 24-bit stereo LPCM. Total
running time is approximately 130 minutes.
DAVID GILMOUR IN CONCERT
Last June, David Gilmour chose
the prestigious if low-key Meltdown Festival in London to show a new
side to his music. It turned out to be a very special night at the
Royal Festival Hall - now captured on 'David Gilmour in Concert' on DVD
and VHS tape. The utterly distinctive and distinguished voice and
guitar of Pink Floyd gave a rare, lovingly staged performance at the
Royal Festival Hall. It was so uplifting to both artist and audience
that by early 2002, Gilmour was back at the venue for three more
sold-out shows, joined on some songs by Rick Wright, his colleague from
the Floyd. Three bonus tracks from that series have also been included
on the DVD.
Meltdown changes its curator
annually. This year's was David Bowie. Last year's was Robert Wyatt
(once a Sixties 'progressive' himself, in the Soft Machine). When Wyatt
rang Gilmour with an invitation to play at the 3000-seat theatre, the
answer was an immediate "yes". The high-decibel son et lumiere that
typifies a Floyd show was no longer of interest to Gilmour. But how to
embrace an intimate venue? "While Robert was still on the phone, an
idea came to me, God knows from where. I thought: just a double-bass, a
cello and a small gospel choir." Not a line-up he was used to. "Then I
put down the phone and started to panic..." That initial panic led to
Gilmour being credited in the Daily Telegraph, with inventing a "whole
new genre." David Cheal described it in that paper as a "a sound that
is warm, richly textured and genuinely different...ensemble music of
the highest order."
"More challenging and intriguing
than anything Pink Floyd has done in decades," wrote Alexis Petridis in
the Guardian. Obviously something with which Gilmour does not concur.
"Not better, just different," he says.
We should pause for a brief
reminder here about how deep and wide Gilmour's musical reach has
extended beyond Pink Floyd. He was, for instance, the man who nurtured
the talent of an unknown teenager called Kate Bush, executive producing
her enormously successful 1978 debut album 'The Kick Inside'. The same
year, he released his first, eponymous titled album for Harvest
following it in 1984 with 'About Face'. Gilmour was the only member of
Pink Floyd to play at Live Aid in 1985 and has played on albums by
Bryan Ferry, Pete Townshend, Grace Jones and Paul McCartney, amongst
others. More recently, when McCartney dug back into his rock 'n' roll
roots for 1999's 'Run Devil Run' album, Gilmour was on hand with his
Fender Esquire to play and sing on the album and at the historic
accompanying gig at the Cavern Club in Liverpool.
Born in Cambridge, Gilmour joined
Pink Floyd in 1968 after serving with the local band Jokers Wild. He
went on to forge one of the most individual, expressive guitar styles
in the lexicon of rock.
But back to the Meltdown. With
just three months to rehearse - eventually contracted into three weeks'
intensive work with the musicians and singers - Gilmour had to figure
out a set that fitted with the Festival's laid-back vibe while at the
same time satisfying both himself and the hardcore Floyd fans.
Stripping down some of his mega-bands anthems and presenting them in a
mostly acoustic setting was one way to get back to the essence of the
songs and render them more poignant. Rather more surprising for the
audience was the inclusion of some pretty quirky favourites: folk,
opera and even a lullaby from 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang'.
It was a lovely evening. In
scruffy T-shirt and jeans, Gilmour strode on stage alone, picked up his
acoustic guitar, and teased the audience with a long run-in to a
classic interpretation of the Floyd's 'Shine On, You Crazy Diamond' -
substituting, with intriguing results, an echo-delay for the usual
massed synthesisers. From there on, it just got better. Over the set,
he was gradually joined by his backing musicians - Dick Parry on sax
(who played on the original 'Shine On'); Neill MacColl on guitar;
Chucho Merchan on double bass; Michael Kamen on piano and cor anglais,
Sam Brown leading a nine-voice gospel choir; and - an inspired decision
- Caroline Dale on cello. Listen to her picking up Gilmour's solo on
the electric reprise of 'Shine On' - performed towards the end of the
show - and you'll abandon any notions of a "class divide" between rock
and classical music. Gilmour certainly did. "Here's a bit of culture,"
he announced, tongue in cheek, before singing an aria from Bizet's 'The
Pearl Fishers.'
"That's why the Meltdown is so
brilliant," he says. "It's a proper, British, slightly esoteric,
popular music festival." The type of festival where the
wheelchair-bound Wyatt can suddenly appear in the stalls, to sing the
"doctor" part on 'Comfortably Numb' (known best to Floyd-freaks for
Gilmour's stunning guitar parts). A festival where, Gilmour now
confesses, he was quaking with nerves before that lonely walk to the
stage.
This Meltdown concert can now be
seen and heard by all those who couldn't get tickets. Bonuses on the
DVD include all the guitar solos in close up ('Spare Digits"). "For all
the guitar anoraks out there who want to follow my fat little fingers
at work," says Gilmour.
There's a 'Home Movie' of Gilmour
and the choir during their first rehearsal at his home studio. "Polly
was filming the kids mucking about in the garden when she heard the
massed voices and came up and shot a bit so it's more intimate than
most."
There are also three extra,
miscellaneous songs: Screaming Jay Hawkins's 'I Put A Spell On You'
which Gilmour did with Mica Paris and Jools Holland some years ago,
'Don't' which was filmed at the Hammersmith Apollo last year at a
concert in honour of Lieber and Stoller, and Shakespeare's Sonnet 18
('Shall I compare thee to a summer's day ...), set to music by Michael
Kamen, which Gilmour sang at the Old Vic earlier this year in aid of
RADA.
Gilmour isn't expecting sales to
match 'Dark Side of the Moon'. Pink Floyd's fans will buy anything by
the band, and Gilmour admits that they are "pretty adoring". But he
also knows that, since the band has generally shunned personal
publicity, "fans have to be quite well versed in the Floyd to know my
name. Quite discerning." Then a smile creeps over his face. "Adoring
but discerning," he says. "That'll do."
DAVID GILMOUR IN CONCERT TRACK BY TRACK
SHINE ON YOU CRAZY DIAMOND:
"'Shine On' is my
favourite song from the 'Wish You Were Here' album. I thought I would
try it solo with acoustic guitar. The record has the sound of fingers
on wine glasses with keyboards on a long, drawn out opening, so I had
to devise a new way of doing it. It struck me that there is a device
I've used with a long repeating delay on my guitar with which I can
give myself what sounds like a synthesised orchestral background. I
found that it lent itself to it very well."
FAT OLD SUN:
"This is a song of
mine from 'Atom Heart Mother' which we played live with Pink Floyd a
few times in the early seventies. Several friends asked me to play this
one. I was happy to oblige.'"
COMING BACK TO LIFE:
"This seemed an ideal
one to do in this sort of set-up. The choir replaced the keyboards. I
wrote it for Polly. Not much more I can say."
DOMINOES:
"I've done one of Syd
Barrett tracks on each of the concerts. They're not easy to do because
most of them are so personal. There are not too many that I feel I can
do justice to, but this is one. Our version brought a slightly jazzy
feel to it"
TERRAPIN:
"Another of my favourite Syd songs."
HIGH HOPES:
"Probably my
favourite song from the recent Pink Floyd era. I wrote it on a piano,
it has a classical guitar and an orchestra on it, so the line-up we had
was perfect."
JE CROIS ENTENDRE ENCORE:
"I sang this song in
French, from Bizet's opera, 'The Pearl Fishers'. I saw a film called
'The Man Who Cried.' I bought the soundtrack album and really liked
this song. I suggested to Polly that I might give it a try and she,
unhelpfully, went red at the prospect. I scared myself silly with this
one."
SMILE:
"This is a new song that Polly and I have written. She wrote words to a piece of my music that she loved."
BREAKTHROUGH:
"Rick took little
persuading to come and play. But I said 'You can't just wander into my
concert and play two or three songs plonking away on your keyboard,
we've got to put a spotlight on you.' I chose this song from his last
album [1996's 'Broken China'] because when I first heard it I wished
he'd written it in time for The Division Bell."
WISH YOU WERE HERE:
"'Wish You Were Here' was made for this sort of line up and I still love it."
COMFORTABLY NUMB:
"I did a demo of this
that never had more than two instruments playing at any one time.
Double bass and piano then double bass and hi-strung acoustic, that was
it, two instruments for one of our great anthemic Pink Floyd tracks."
DIMMING OF THE DAY:
"Neill MacColl
suggested this song by Richard Thompson to me when we played together
at a benefit concert for his sister-in-law, Ruth Picardie. I love this
song; the idea of his life being an old house that's falling down.
Beautiful."
SHINE ON YOU CRAZY DIAMOND:
"I thought I'd
bookend the concert with this, as we did originally on the album. You
can't completely let go of the classic designs of show structure! We
closed with the electric version."
A GREAT DAY FOR FREEDOM:
"From the last Pink
Floyd record, a song about how all that great promise of freedom and
democracy when the Iron Curtain came down has been a bit of a
disappointment for many."
HUSHABYE MOUNTAIN:
"A song from 'Chitty
Chitty Bang Bang,' which my kids play at home all the time. Not much of
that album that appeals to me, but it certainly appeals to them and
after the first 20-30 times, this one song started shining through.
Some people thought I was joking when I said I was going to do it. I
wasn't sure myself if I could go through with it and thought that I
might just chicken out after 'A Great Day For Freedom.' I could have
just walked off then, but I forced myself back to the mike and I'm glad
I did because in the end you should just do what you like and please
yourself".
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