E-Mail This Article to a Friend Floydian slips The dark side of The Dark Side of the Moon BY JAMES PARKER
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In a Floyd frame of mind, having just finished John Harris’s new hardcover The Dark Side of the Moon (Da Capo), a "behind-the-scenes, in-depth look at the making of one of the greatest studio masterpieces and most commercially successful albums ever recorded," I wandered down to the Orpheum on December 2 to check out the Australian Pink Floyd Show. What a bizarre evening. TAPFS are a Rolls-Royce of a tribute band, and their current set includes a front-to-back performance of The Dark Side of the Moon, which they thoughtfully played before intermission so I could stagger out of the theater when it was over and nurse my sensibilities on the T going home.

I was doubly injured: the tentacular misery of the original music had reached out from 1973 to claim me, and the weirdness of the show had done my head in. Sharp-eyed brethren in from the Cape, weathered by alcohol or fishing, stood up and roared "PINK FUCKING FLOYD! YEAH!" during the diva hootings of "The Great Gig in the Sky." Earnest young stoners nodded along to the mourning, processional trudge of "Us and Them." Men gripped the shoulders of their teenage sons as "Brain Damage" dispersed its huge weariness through the hall: "And if the dam breaks, many years too soon . . . I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon." Ancient trips and long-buried buzzes began to sizzle again beneath fresh swampings of melancholy. "We’re gonna take a little break," said lead guitarist Steve Mac at the conclusion of "Eclipse," in his first comment of the night, "and then we’ll be back with a lot more Floyd." Run for your lives!

The Australian Pink Floyd Show mount a superb non-spectacle: lasers, backing singers, pristine sound, a screen running image sequences, immaculate performance. Your average tribute outfit is to some extent a critique of the original article; in the interests of presentation, certain aspects are emphasized, others forgotten. Not this one. TAPFS are immobile homage, ego-free, a ghostly channeling of Floyd power. They do not do their thing "in character" — like, for example, Beefy DC — because Pink Floyd have no character. What would an imitation of Dave Gilmour even look like?

Jowly and friendly-looking, dressed in black T-shirts, the Aussie Pink Floyd have the presence of bouncers or stagehands. The touches of wit in the animation running behind the band — a kangaroo in sunglasses, on a hospital bed, whizzing down hallucinated corridors to the frantic synth-burble of "On the Run" — only underline the absolute sobriety of their musical reproductions. Guitarist Damian Darlington stepped forward and did "the laugh" — the loose-lunged cackle of (as I learned from Harris’s book) Floyd roadie Peter Watts, used on the album like a refrain — and it was a thing of bloodless accuracy, quite eerie. TAPFS’s Paul Bonney is a better drummer than Nick Mason, and the guitar work, as far as I could tell, was spot-on: Gilmour’s perfect little dissertations mimicked to the note.

No, this is no lumpen "tribute": TAPFS are a portal, a hole in reality through which the strange, groinless throb of Floyd music issues without interference or obstruction. No stomp, no swing, just lush cosmical maunderings on the theme of mental collapse. Harris goes into all this quite thoroughly, how the ’70s Floyd, hatched from the shattered nursery of Syd Barrett’s mind but drifting aimless in his wake, gradually gathered themselves into a new and deeper gloom: the vision of grumpy old Roger Waters. He writes somewhat in the mincing Brit journo-style — using "ill-advised" where "crap" or "no good" would be better, that kind of thing — but the transatlantic phoner he does with Waters, who is "supervising" the 5.1 surround-sound remix of Dark Side at a studio in the Bahamas, is pure colloquial gold. Recounting an attempt in 1967 to get a disintegrating Barrett looked over by the radical psychiatrist RD Laing, author of The Politics of Experience, Waters reflects: "He [Barrett] wouldn’t get out of the car . . . and I’m not sure that was necessarily a bad thing. Laing was a mad old cunt by then. [Pause] Actually ‘cunt’ is a bit strong. But he was drinking a lot."

With Syd gone and his giggling gnomeology with him, it was Waters whose somewhat sterner biography began to shape the direction of the band: father killed at Anzio in the Second World War, mother a member of the British Communist Party. Waters, with his Easter Island statue of a face, was never going to write a lyric like "Here are men, there are men/Lots of gingerbread men!" Harris percipiently cites the track "If" from 1970’s Atom Heart Mother, with its nod to Kipling in the title, as Waters’s first move into the plodding post-imperial glumness he would perfect on Dark Side: "If I were alone I’d cry/If I were with you I’d be home and dry/If I go insane, please don’t put your wires in my brain." Englishness, for Barrett, had been a demented pastoralism; for Waters it was repression, wet socks, illness.

So how come the reddened dudes from Hyannis were getting to their feet for this? The specter of Syd treading the grassy courts of King’s College ("Brain Damage"), the First World War echoes in "Us and Them" ("Forward he cried from the rear/And the front rank died") — why were they responding to something so deeply inlaid with the deposits of English sadness? Because Dark Side is "The Waste Land" for potheads, that’s why. "Down (down, down . . . /And out (out, out . . . )/It can’t be helped, but there’s a lot of it about." That’s great lyric writing, resigned everyday mumblings raised to the level of poetry. Not much fun (Harris archly notes the joylessness of the Floyd studio process — the lack of excitability, the cold and lordly treatment of backing singers), but then we can’t all be the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.

Time, jobs, going insane — Waters, working from his own particulars, was aiming squarely at the universal, and he hit the mark. The risks were obvious: "If you write, ‘Breathe, breathe in the air/Don’t be afraid to care,’ " he tells Harris, "you leave yourself open to howling derision. People just go ‘You fucking wanker!’ " But so was the prize. People sitting on cushions in the ’70s, under dodgy wall hangings, really listened to Dark Side. The whole Australian Pink Floyd Show experience, in a way, dramatizes this frowning attentiveness. No wonder I got upset — all that seriousness, bouncing off the Orpheum’s yellowing plasterwork, was frigging overpowering. (Waters, unencumbered now by truculent band mates and in the full bloom of his grandiosity, has just written an opera about the French Revolution.)

Well, there it is: a whole page about The Dark Side of the Moon. Are you getting that end-of-the-line feeling? Tribute bands, books about "The Making of . . . " — all part of the rich and wriggling symptomology presented by rock and roll as it takes its final slide into dementia. The memory systems, plainly, have gone haywire, and the patient is acting out, doing voices, disappearing into nostalgic fugues. It’s like a Pink Floyd album.