Pink Floyd live performances
On 30 September 1966, Pink Floyd were invited to play All Saint's Church Hall to raise money for the nascent International Times newspaper and became the "house band".
Mainstream interest about the counterculture was increasing, and part of the band's 20 January 1967 show at the UFO Club was broadcast in Granada TV's documentary entitled It's So Far Out, It's Straight Down.
In April 1967, Pink Floyd were among 30 bands that played The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream benefit gig, which was organized for the "International Times" legal defense fund and held at Alexandra Palace in London.
Throughout the summer and into the autumn of 1967, copious drug use, especially of LSD, and constant pressure by the record company to write new hit songs, continued to affect Barrett's mental state.
A typical 1968 set list included some of the following: On 29 June 1968, Pink Floyd headlined the first free Hyde Park concert organized by heir management company, Black hill Enterprises, which later parted ways with the band over their decision to remove Barrett.
[3] A typical 1969 set list would include some of the following: See: The Man And The Journey Tour The shows at Mothers, Birmingham on 27 April 1969 and the College of Commerce, Manchester on 2 May 1969 were recorded for the live part of the Ummagumma album.
At the finale of "The Journey" suite the band was joined on stage by the brass section of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the ladies of the Ealing Central Amateur Choir.
A typical 1970 set list included some of the following: At gigs in early 1970, Pink Floyd performed an instrumental piece which had originally been intended for their soundtrack of Michelangelo Antonioni's film Zabriskie Point, referred to as "The Violent Sequence".
[8] On 18 July 1970, they headlined a free concert in Hyde Park, London, organized by Blackhall Enterprises, and closed the show with "Atom Heart Mother".
In 1972, during a German tour, Waters sardonically introduced Echoes as "Looking Through the Knotholes in Granny's Wooden Leg" (a Goon Show reference) on one occasion and "The March of the Dam Busters" on another.
On another occasion, during a live radio broadcast, Waters had instructed compere John Peel to announce "One of These Days" to the home audience as "A poignant appraisal of the contemporary social situation."
The last gig of the tour was as headliner of the 1975 Knebworth Festival in England, which also featured The Steve Miller Band, Captain Beefheart and Roy Harper, who joined Pink Floyd on the stage to sing "Have a Cigar".
Designed by Mark Fisher and Andrew Sanders, they featured a pyrotechnic "waterfall", umbrella-like canopies that could be deployed to protect the band from the elements, and a variety of characters associated with the "Animals" album; including "Algie", a 40-foot long inflatable pig that drifted out over the audience, the "Average American family" (which, at the time, included Mom, Dad and 2.5 children), and paper sheep that parachuted down on the crowds after being shot from cannons mounted to the sides of the stage.
[19] The musicians that accompanied the band on the tour included veteran saxophone player Dick Parry (occasionally playing keyboards as well) and guitarist Snowy White, who also filled in on bass guitar for some songs.
The two remaining members of the band, David Gilmour and Nick Mason, along with Richard Wright, had just won a legal battle against Roger Waters and the future of the group was uncertain.
The initial "promotional tour" was extended, and finally lasted almost two years, ending in 1989 after playing around 200 concerts to about 5.5 million people in total, including 3 dates at Madison Square Garden (5–7 October 1987) and 2 nights on Wembley Stadium (5–6 August 1988).
The tour took Pink Floyd to various exotic locations they had never played before such as shows in the forecourt of the Palace of Versailles, Moscow's Olympic Stadium, and Venice, despite fears and protests that the sound would damage the latter city's foundations.
In an interview with BBC Radio 2 in October, 2001, Gilmour implied that the Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd compilation (released in November 2001) "probably" signaled the end of the band.
Gilmour, Mason and Wright performed "Fat Old Sun" and "The Great Gig in the Sky" at his funeral at Chichester Cathedral, contrary to reports in the media claiming they played "Wish You Were Here".
On 2 July 2005 Pink Floyd performed at the London Live 8 concert with Roger Waters rejoining David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Richard Wright.
Gilmour announced the Live 8 reunion on 12 June 2005: Like most people I want to do everything I can to persuade the G8 leaders to make huge commitments to the relief of poverty and increased aid to the third world.
On 10 May 2007 Pink Floyd (Wright, Gilmour and Mason), joined by Andy Bell of Oasis on bass and Jon Carin on keys, performed at London's Barbican Centre as part of "The Madcap's Last Laugh", a tribute concert for Syd Barrett who had died the previous year.
He returned for The Wall shows along with a complete "surrogate band" consisting of Peter Wood (keyboards), Willie Wilson (drums) and Andy Bown (bass).
Several backing vocalists, (the most notable of whom are Rachel Fury, Clare Torry, Sam Brown, Margaret Taylor, Durga McBroom and Carol Kenyon) have accompanied the band on and off from Dark Side of the Moon onwards.
When psychedelia fell out of fashion around 1970, elevated platforms of the type used for maintenance work on high buildings were brought on tour, filled with lighting equipment, and raised and lowered during performances.
By the 1994 Division Bell tour, the show was using powerful, isotope-splitting, copper-vapour lasers, costing over $120,000 each, which had previously only been used in nuclear research and high speed photography work.
The high quality, wide angle projection needed for this required high-speed, 35mm, 10,000 watt xenon film projectors with custom lenses, all of which were designed, built and toured by Associates & Bran Ferren.
During the final guitar solo in "Comfortably Numb", it was tilted horizontally with its peripheral lights focused into a single spotlight on the stage, Several generations of giant glitter balls began with the Dark Side of the Moon tour.
On the 1973 tour to promote The Dark Side of the Moon, a large scale model plane flew over the audience and crashed on to the stage with a spectacular explosion, an effect repeated at the start of The Wall and the Division Bell shows.
The use of inflatables reached its peak in 1980–1981 during The Wall shows, in which several of the characters from the album were brought to life in the form of giant, fully mobile string puppets with menacing spotlights for eyes.
