LIVE TECHNOLOGY

this is LIVE TECHNOLOGY ..STRANGER THAN FICTION



LASER TECHNOLOGY , PYROTECH , LIQUID SLIDES , EXPLODING PLANES, FLOATING STAGES , SPACE MUSIC AND QUODRAPHONIC ... SIT BACK AND LET THE PICTURES LOAD AND EXPLODE




Pink Floyd are a British progressive rock band noted for philosophical lyrics, classical rock compositions, sonic experimentation, innovative cover art, and elaborate live shows. One of rock music's most successful and influential acts, the group have sold an estimated 73.5 million albums in the U.S., and over 200 million albums worldwide.
From left standing - 1) Nick Mason - drummer 2) Syd Barrett ( died july 7 , 2006) - founder member, lyricist , vocalist and guitarist. 3) Roger waters - lyrics , vocals and bass 4) Richard Wright - Keyboards
seated - David Gilmour -vocals ,guitars
In this post , I will take you through some of the amazing aspects of their live shows. I'll use very less text and many images.

Pink Floyd is renowned for its lavish stage shows, combining over-the-top visual experiences with music to create a show in which the performers themselves are almost secondary. With or without the benefit of mind-altering substances, even the most jaded modern concertgoer can expect Pink Floyd to put on a show that aims to rattle the senses.
In their early days, Pink Floyd was among the first bands to use a dedicated travelling light show in conjunction with their performances, with slides, film clips, and psychedelic patterns dubbed Daleks (created by heating drops of oil or dyed fluids onto glass slides), all projected onto a large semi-circular screen (dubbed "Mr. Screen", later replaced with a circular projection screen that could be retracted and tilted).



Pyrotechnics, such as exploding flashpots, an exploding gong, and fireworks were a major feature. In the early shows there were numerous technical difficulties, such as a flashpot that blew out the cones of all the speakers. The Floyd's early combination of music and visuals set the standard for subsequent stadium tours on both sides of the Atlantic. On May I5 1970 they did a two-and-a-half-hour star-billing set at a Crystal Palace Garden Party complete with fireworks and a 5O-foot inflatable octopus which rose from the lake while they played Return To The Sun of Nothing (later called Echoes). In teeming rain, they encored with Astronome Domine. Unfortunately the volume of the speakers killed the fish in the lake.







Later shows featured over-sized balloons such as a giant pig which floated over the audience, a plane crashing into the stage, a giant flowering disco ball, more than 100 multi-colored robotic 'dancing' spot lights, and multi-coloured lasers. Their laser shows were particularly famous, such as their use of extremely powerful, isotope-splitting copper-vapor lasers in the 1994 Division Bell tour. These gold-colored lasers were worth over $120,000 apiece and previously used only in nuclear research and high speed photography..













Live at Pompeii (1971).
Film Director Adrian Maben's film featured footage of the band's 1971 performance at an amphitheater in Pompeii with no audience present (only the film crew and stage staff). A kind of sonic experiment at the historical amphitheatre. Take a look at the Equipment !!!

The Wall Live (1981)
Pink Floyd mounted its most elaborate stage show in conjunction with the tour of the album ,The Wall'. A band of session musicians played the first song, wearing rubber face masks (demonstrating that the individual members of the band were practically anonymous to the public), then backed up the band for the remainder of the show. Giant inflatable characters designed by Gerald Scarfe, including fully mobile giant puppets of a teacher and Pink's wife, with menacing spotlights for eyes, took the traditional inflatables to a new level.
During the first half of the show, a huge wall was built between the audience and the band. There were 340 white bricks forming a 160-foot long, 35-foot high wall. For the second half of the show, the band was largely invisible, except for a hole in the wall that simulated a hotel room where Roger Waters "acted out" the story of Pink, and an appearance by David Gilmour on top of the wall to perform the climactic guitar solo in "Comfortably Numb".

The Division Bell Tour - 1994

The Division Bell 's tour in 1994 was promoted by legendary Canadian concert impresario Michael Cohl and became the highest-grossing tour in rock music history to that date, with the band playing the entirety of Dark Side of the Moon in some shows, the first time it had done so since 1975. The concerts featured a very large stage, a large round screen, special effects, quadrophonic sound and powerful lasers. They used extremely powerful, isotope-splitting copper-vapor lasers in the 1994 Division Bell tour. These gold-colored lasers were worth over $120,000 apiece and previously used only in nuclear research and high speed photography.. Three stages leapfrogged around North America and Europe, each 180 feet long and featuring a 130 foot arch modelled on the Hollywood Bowl. All in all, the tour required 700 tons of steel carried by 53 articulated trucks, a crew of 161 people and an initial investment of US$ 4 million plus US$ 25 million of running costs just to stage. This tour played to 5.5 million people in 68 cities; each concert gathered an average 45,000 audience. At the end of the year, the Division Bell tour was announced as the biggest tour ever, with worldwide gross of over £150 million (about US$ 250 million). In the U.S. alone, it grossed US$ 103.5 million from 59 concerts.

REUNION

On July 2, 2005 Pink Floyd performed at the London Live 8 concert before a crowd of 200000 with Roger Waters rejoining David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Richard Wright. It was the quartet's first performance together in over 24 years — the band's last show with Waters was at Earls Court in London on June 17, 1981.

Anecdotes

***The 1970 Crystal Palace Garden Party gig has a somewhat tragic anecdote. There in the standing pool of murky water were inumerable and quite happy schools of generally healthy fish, swimming their tranquil little lives away in perfect solitude. Now if you are the least bit upset by the mention of dead fish, turn away now. With that warning, the wrath of death has so far overlooked Pink Floyd concerts, save for a few hundred or so not so lucky cold-blooded aquatic vertebrates at Crystal Palace. For the concert, special amplification and speaker systems were constructed by Charlie Watkins of WEM PA, the venerable British electronics firm, who also designed the enormous sound system so prominently seen in Live At Pompeii. The concert was indeed splendid, everyone enjoyed themselves, and the sound was overwhelmingly perfect. Only one very smelly problem surfaced as Charlie described: "Due to the reflective surface of the pond in front of the stage, there was a great gain in sound velocity." As a result, the Floyd's fearsome arsenal of sound equipment pummeled the pond's inhabitants delicate nervous systems with such insurmountable and persistent blows, that the fish succumbed to the sonic assault by going into a permanent state of psychedelic trauma. For the next morning, several hundred not-so-fresh fish were found floating motionless on the pond's otherwise inviting surface. Moreover, the Floyd were presented a bill for the dead fish.
***July 22nd, 1989 Pink Floyd gave a concert on a floating stage in venice. This was part of the Momentary Lapse Of Reason-Tour.
This created a lot of problems for the city. There was anger because of the loud music and resulting damages of the buildings. Another problem was the amount of people and not enough toilets to compensate this.
Unfortunately the recording of this concert is not available on video officially. It was shown on TV.

***On the opening night of one of their UK shows disaster struck when a stand collapsed and 60 fans were injured. It was on Wednesday, October 12th at around 7:55pm when the accident happened. The band had yet to arrive onstage and the introductory music was being played when Block 9A, holding some 1200 people began to crumple. The seats were supported on scaffolding and some fans thought the moving seats were part of a special Pink Floyd effect. Then people began to panic and scream and, according to one eye witness, the whole stand "went down like a concertina." Many were trapped in the wreckage and 28 were taken to hospital suffering from shock and minor injuries. The 15000 people in the hall were evacuated and the show postopened until the following monday. Dave Gilmour later said: "We were very distressed at what happened, and concerned about those who were injured." Once the show was back on track, the fans were stunned by the power of the performance. It was claimed that the 112 concerts sheduled for the entire tour cost the band $200 million to stage.


So that was a brief history of one of the greatest Live acts on the face of the earth... The Pink Floyd... pass this piece of marvellous history to your friends...


Any information regarding the band's history , musical works etc can be viewed from the link below.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_floyd