![]() Such a beloved piece of music played with passion and panache meant the standing ovation from devoted fans was utterly deserved. Never the greatest of singers, his voice has dropped so many octaves that it sounds as if Johnny Cash is channelling Leonard Cohen, but the glorious melodies, limber grooves, and some lush work from a six piece string section, otherworldly theremin and beautifully conceived female backing vocals kept it all on point. There is little of the space that once facilitated listener’s own imaginative responses on the original, as Waters drives his message home again and again. Waters does like the sound of his own increasingly gravelly voice, though, talking through all the former instrumental passages. During a focused performance backed by 14 superb musicians, he dug into the much loved songs with sombre gravitas, delivering an abundance of new lyric passages emphasising core themes of life as a battle between forces of good and evil, sanity and insanity, “US and Them”. Nevertheless, Water managed to squeeze in a huge lighting rig and giant Triangular prism that dangled ominously over the front rows of the stalls. The 2,286 capacity Palladium is a very different kind of space, focussing the audience very intently on the stage, without much in the way of distracting visual extravaganza. The last time Waters played London, in June this year, it was for two nights at the 20,000 capacity O2 Arena, in a production that featured giant screens beaming brain scrambling imagery and all his usual over the top production paraphernalia including dirigible flying pigs, lasers and fireworks. This was the first of just two intimate live performances of his new album, Dark Side of the Moon Redux. But it turned out to be very much a game of two halves, that shifted from the slightly ridiculous to the utterly sublime. And had he just stuck to the business at hand, this opening night would have been an absolute triumph. Clearly if anyone has a right to revisit this music, Waters does. ![]() Released in 1973, Dark Side of the Moon is 50 years old, the fourth best selling album of all time, made by a legendary group of which Waters was bassist, lyricist, co-vocalist and principal songwriter, who has a composition credit on 8 out of 10 tracks, and is the sole writer of three. But if he genuinely wants to be Mr Pink, he’s going to have to raise his theatrical game. The old joke about Pink Floyd was “which one’s Pink?” Performing their greatest album live, Roger Waters wore a bright pink jacket, as if finally asserting that title for himself.
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