“We’ve had a wonderful but slightly sweaty time,” offered Brit Floyd bandleader Damian Darlington toward the end of his group’s set this past Friday night at Mizner Park Amphitheater. The feeling was mutual. With the humidity, as much as the onstage fog, enveloping the atmosphere, Brit Floyd’s final concert of a two-and-a-half-month tour leg carried the unintentional ambience of a ritualistic sweat lodge. But given the combination of paranoia, cynicism, grandeur and euphoria that coalesce in Pink Floyd’s music, a shared experience of ritual and perspiration seemed appropriate.
The U.K. band is a fairly recent addition to the growing list of Pink Floyd tributes, having formed just 12 years ago, but you wouldn’t know it from the exactitude of its playing, with its picayune attention to detail. Clad in all black, addressing the audience only minimally, and jettisoning any arena-rock aggrandizement, the 10-piece band—including three backup vocalists—seemed to disappear anonymously into its voluminous sound, placing the emphasis strictly on Pink Floyd’s exploratory but tight arrangements. Treating the original compositions as sacrosanct but exhibiting fresh creativity through its lighting and video choices, Brit Floyd effectively imagined what a Pink Floyd concert would sound like today, with a set list spanning every era, with even a brief sojourn into the Syd Barrett years that most Floyd tributes ignore.
The theme of the set was the 50th anniversary of The Dark Side of the Moon, a landmark in both Pink Floyd’s discography and music in general. Brit Floyd performed almost the entire album but not, interestingly enough, in succession. By interspersing a three-hour set with Dark Side tracks among deeper cuts for Floyd die-hards, the band kept its show unpredictable and exciting.
On a video screen behind the band, visuals ranged from animations to bespoke graphics to repurposed snippets from “The Wall” and other motion pictures. “Just Another Movie” featured clips from cult movies to cartoons, and included a nifty repeated excerpt from the finale of “Casablanca” that simulated the effect of a stuck VHS tape or a groove-locked vinyl record. On “Young Lust,” lurid images of flowers engaging in copulation drove home the song’s message as strongly as Roger Waters’ lyrics, while the entrancing “The Gunner’s Dream” captured the song’s essence through landscapes of apocalyptic destruction. The psych-pop nugget “See Emily Play” presented the title character, adorned in fairy attire, frolicking in a forest.
The show was almost free of politics—whose inclusion is a frequent complaint of the prickly Waters’ recent tours—until the late addition of “Brain Damage.” Its lyrics about lunatics were matched with visuals of every American president from Reagan onward, along with world leaders from Putin to Kim to Merkel. (The intention seemed to be to goad audience members of every ideological persuasion; even Bernie Sanders made the cut, to which I doubt Waters would have approved.)
Laser lights aided this multisensory tapestry, projecting a Princely purple during “Young Lust,” wriggling and shuddering in tandem with Darlington’s virtuosic guitar on “Sorrow,” crisscrossing with the chaotic geometry of an Abstract Expressionist painting on “Wish You Were Here,” and combining to form Pink Floyd’s iconic pyramid at the end of “Brain Damage.”
Musically, of course, the players are beyond professional; to say there wasn’t a false note onstage is to still understate how much the group was on point and in the pocket, even when tackling material as sprawling and complex as “Pigs (Three Different Ones)” and “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” But I will single out vocalist Eva Avila for her transcendent contribution to “The Great Gig in the Sky.” Emerging from her role as a backup singer to perform the tune’s famous vocal acrobatics, Avila was as expressive, ecstatic and electric as Darlington’s guitar.
As great a performance as the band’s encore of “Run Like Hell” was, the moment felt a little anticlimactic following the gripping emotion of the proper set closer, “Comfortably Numb.” Brit Floyd doesn’t engage in much onstage showmanship, but in this case a little theatre went a long way. Engaging in a silent mini playlet, a band member emerged in a doctor’s outfit and seemed to “inject” another slouched and zonked-out player with a prop syringe. The message seemed to link the song’s expression of drug addiction with the insidiousness of the mainstream pharmaceutical-industrial complex. Aching with tragic gravitas, it was just the sort of needling provocation that Waters & Company would have engaged in themselves.
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