No Ordinary Fool

The show began with an instrumental version of Outside The Wall on the clarinet that segued almost imperceptibly into Waltzing Matilda and back again. Perhaps this is how The Australian Pink Floyd Show begins each show of its current The Wall tour. However, seeing as Saturday also happened to be Anzac Day, it was a particularly poignant choice. Indeed, the derivative song And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda is a bitter and angry song about the outcome of war, as, of course, is so much of The Wall.

The Australian Pink Floyd Show may be a tribute band. However, they travel with a set-up worthy of Bruce Springsteen. With gleaming instruments, a two-tiered stage, three backing singers, and a huge high-quality digital backdrop, the pending performance has quality written all over it. Indeed, the instinctive roar that the audience lets rip with as In The Flesh? ends reveals the secret of their enduring success – the playing of high quality music to a high standard. In the abhorrent vacuum caused by the absence of the regrettable real thing, this band, above all other pretenders, has been providing Nature’s response for two decades now.

Truth be told, I avoid tribute bands as a general rule. However, the opportunity to see The Wall played in its entirety had the relentless gravitational pull of a black hole. Indeed, this slick performance of the album boasted a choreography of near machine-like efficiency. The only notable flicker of fallibility came during Waiting for the Worms, when a roadie let a megaphone drop and had to flee back to retrieve it. At the same time, this lack of spontaneity, coupled to it being a seated performance, meant that the show did end up feeling more Broadway musical than balls-out rock gig.

At the same time, the original show was always meant to be a rock opera. Certainly, the visuals employed here are stunningly good. A personal favourite was the use of a cartoon-strip to portray the events in One of My Turns. Equally, the show’s climax in The Trial is an intensely absorbing audio-visual experience. Finally, the idea to shape the heads of the iconic marching hammers into kangaroos is also quite a clever quirk!

The band still had the appetite afterwards for a further half hour of encores, including Shine On You Crazy Diamond and Brain Damage. The latter, though, could do with an updating, given that the visuals still seemed mired in last year’s US Presidential election campaign. Always a pleasure to see Maggie again, though…

Okay, as good as The Australian Pink Floyd Show are, it is not enough to change my general attitude towards tribute bands. Although, any group of musicians that can turn Vera Lynn into a song worth hearing is clearly doing something right. On the whole, they are bloody good, albeit a little too straight-jacketed for my tastes. Indeed, it reminded me of the time that I saw a Japanese tribute band perform a nuance-perfect set of Thin Lizzy covers, only for it to transpire that they had barely a word of English between the three of them…

P.S. This was also my first visit to what has become the utterly unrecognisable Point Depot. Now a modern amphitheatre, I have nothing but praise for the superb sound quality and clockwork general organisation. Drop the beer prices and you have a winner, guys!

Photos – Cristina Gehlen