I took along a friend of mine Steve who in turn brought another mate Simon. Steve's a bit of a Pink Floyd fan who can almost recite the Wall, Animals and the later stuff note for note. Simon is a proficient enough keyboard player to play it as well.
It took a while for the Thorngate Halls to fill. Looked a bit sparse early on. I thought the low ceiling might cause a few problems to the sound but although it wasn't perfect it was pretty good.
I was expecting the audience to be filled with tons of long hairs that looked like they came off the cover of Ummagumma but most of the audience had, like the Floyd of the 80s, shorn their hair, the men at least. The Hall wasn't packed but it was a good turn out.
The Thorngate Halls are like one of those big social clubs you get up North with a pile of side tables and a massive dance floor. Wisely the band waited till the audience built up before coming on stage. We'd had a few beers by then but drifted from the bar onto the dancefloor as the intro music began.
It was all sonic stuff to start with into which walked the five members of Pulse. Wait a minute I thought, there's Gilmour, that one's Roger Waters, Nick Mason's sat at the traps and Rick Wright is back behind the keyboards. So who's this bloke in the middle on the vocal mike? Simon had already confused matters by suggesting that Roger Waters would leave three quarters of the way through. In a way, I was glad this is the Pink Floyd five instead of the four. I just hoped that Syd didn't collapse during the first numbers.
The singer looked too in control to be the wayward genius that was Syd Barrett and any hope of a set that kicked off with See Emily Play and went through the entire Piper at the Gates of Dawn and my Relics album was soon scotched.
What we did get was a Pink Floyd set that was full of grit, fire and damned hard work. Dave Khan as ever was blinding on lead guitar, the light show beamed from all over and concentrated on a massive gong screen centre stage, the lead singer sang his heart into all the material and the drums, bass and keyboards bit into the songs. I particularly enjoyed something called Learning To Fly and later on a sterling version of Comfortably Numb.
It was in a sense very much a performance of band, sound men and road crew to create a Pink Floyd 'experience'. One that the audience absolutely loved. One that I can take my hat off to and say "You worked your bollocks off and deserve all the plaudits for."
But did it reach me. Only in parts, I still have a problem with tribute bands. Me, I'm just a critical old sod. I gave up listening to the Pink Floyd in 1975. I once bought Atom Heart Mother then sold it for some San Francisco acid rock. I had Relics cus it was cheap. Heard Granchester Meadows and all that rambling stuff on early John Peel but could never afford to buy it.
My other Pink Floyd experience was to join the Syd Barrett Appreciation Society and receive one issue of the Terrapin magazine. Never ever bought the two Barrett solo albums, Barrett just appealed to my maverick sense of the hip. And in the words of Mike Pye, all that quasi classical prog rock of the later years "Missed me by miles . . ."
While girls swayed their hips as Dave Khan screwed another killer solo, guys nodded their heads and beat their feet, a few kids on the floor whang chunged out of their heads on Special Brew or something, guys nodded their heads, girls listened intently and I took a trip back in time.
It's 1972, somewhere on the A3 south of London, three blokes in an old green Hillman Minx picking up a couple of girls hitching to Bickershaw to sit around in the mud for three days and watch the one and only Captain Beefheart, Stackridge, Hawkwind, Dr. John, Country Joe, Maynard Ferguson, Brinsley Schwarz and de Grateful Dead amongst others. And Terry with the dansette sat on his lap puts on Apples and Stairs by the Pink Floyd.
Then I teleport to 1975. I'm stood against this corrugated iron fence at some place called Knebworth Park. As I launch a stream of piss in the dark, the queues for the toilet were a good half an hour long, as I do so, Dave Gilmour is playing that gorgeous long solo through Echoes and I'm following the pattern up and down on the fence.
Whilst tucking my bits away and pulling up my flies I hear a hiss through the fence. "Hey man, hey man, help the real Floyd fans man, just loosen a few of the bolts to this fence from your side man and let us in man, this is people's band man and we can't afford to get in man." Not having a spanner handy I went back to the hill to join the Isle of Wight meets Hertfordshire party that had gathered there.
I still see to this day quite vividly the point when the Spitfires, the real Spitfires did a fly past and Wendy Buckley's friend Richard leapt up and down like a firecracker exclaiming "The Spitfires, it's the Spitfires" And tonight in Gosport I am grinning as I recall a very drunk Roger Sanders (now a truly fine citizen and still an all round good bloke) when he rolled in a lighted fire.
There are no Spitfires tonight, no flying pigs, no cream crackered hippies but while each and everyone makes our own Pink Floyd experience my brightest memory returns during Pulse's portrayal of the album that the singer holds as the best of the bunch, Dark Side of the Moon.
My criteria has always been, don't buy albums you can find in other people's collections so I never bought it. I don't think it could ever match up to the only time I ever heard it. Those were the days when Jeff Lewis was Social Secretary of Southampton University. Jeff's head was right where ours was. He had the Jefferson Airplane's Lawman lyrics scrawled on his office wall right alongside Arthur Lee's "The snot is caked to my pants, there's a bluebird on a fence . . ." aside. No Led Zepp lyrics for Jeff's wall.
Led Zepplin were the band I was thinking about tonight in Gosport. It was the first and only time I saw Zepplin. Don't know how Jeff managed to book them for they had been refused entry to a Welsh University for some gig and promptly refused to do any Uni gigs.
But get Led Zepp he did and the support band, well the support band was the newly released Pink Floyd album, Dark Side of the Moon. Dark Side of the Moon played through Zepplins stonking PA over an audience of whang chunged hippies. The sound came from everywhere with the speakers bouncing the sound from back, front and sides.
That exploding set of alarm clocks just about did us in. And tonight recalled all this for me. The audience loved it. Steve was ready to buy a CD, Simon had a wide grin on his face and me, well me I just wanted to go back to 1973 and hear those bloody alarm clocks go off again.
Pulse as good a tribute band as you can get. They do a two and half hour trawl through their Pink Floyd experience and they play with guts and fire and deliver the goods. Ninety nine point nine per cent of the audience are as wrapped up in it as they are. Me I'm just not totally convinced by tribute bands.
Bums on seats is the final arbiter in this rock'n'roll business. The other option, of course is to play your own stuff and have half a dozen people and a lurcher dog turn up. Steve's mate used do that, he was in a band called the Screaming Abdabs. That was before they became the Pink Floyd of course . . .
Mike Plumbley