PINK FLOYD: The Suns Eclipsed By The Moon

For the true Pink Floyd fanatic, 1987 was an extraordinary year. First the band split into two armed camps. Roger Waters fired the opening salvos with a blitz of media denunciations of his former bandmates, action in the British courts to stop them from operating under the name Pink Floyd and releasing Radio K.A.O.S., an album conceptually bigger than The Wall. With Waters making the first (and apparently the right) public relations moves, most critics came to Pink Floyd’s opening dates to bury and not to praise them, convinced that Waters had taken the essence of the band with him.

Somebody forgot to tell the fans—and three guys named Gilmour, Mason and Wright. While the Waters tour drew respectably for a “new” artist, filling places like Madison Square Garden with old Floyd fanatics, Pink Floyd sold out the same venues for five and six nights in a row, playing to an audience that is, for the most part, too young to have seen them before (this is the band’s first proper tour in 10 years). The new fans know of the band’s legendary multimedia events from their older brothers and sisters, but they have also memorized nearly every note and lyric of Dark Side Of The Moon and The Wall and are quite capable of relishing peak Floyd. What this new audience is seeing is a revitalized band, driven by the voice and guitar of David Gilmour. It’s a harder and more fluid band than the Floyd that Waters abandoned. Awestruck fans are also seeing Pink Floyd’s greatest bits, as the pig from Animals and the crashing airplane, animation and dazzling ball/claw from the Dark Side Of The Moon tour all make their second appearances alongside the new songs and visualizations.