David Gilmour Returns to Pompeii With Refigured Pink Floyd Classics
It’s hard to imagine what the ancient Pompeiians who built an amphitheater in their region of Italy around 80 B.C. would have thought of David Gilmour‘s concert there on Thursday. The perimeter atop the structure was lined with light, fire pots and pyrotechnics that shot flames into the air, much like the volcano that wiped out the city in 79 A.D. The majority of the spectators were gathered on the field where gladiators once squared off against their adversaries. And one end of the structure housed a stage that, in addition to giving the former Pink Floyd singer a platform, also held a mammoth circular projector screen with enough lights and lasers to approximate the alien touchdown scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
It was a concert that was virtually centuries in the making – the first-ever rock show to take place in front of an audience in the structure there – and it was a milestone, too, for Gilmour, age 70, as it was the first time he’d played there since he and his Pink Floyd bandmates shot the 1972 cult-hit concert film Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, what director Adrian Maben once described as an “anti-Woodstock” picture.
He acknowledged that fact by incorporating a couple of favorite songs from that era into the set list: the galloping bass face-off “One of These Days” – a highlight from the film that Gilmour’s been playing on this tour for the first time since the Nineties – and Dark Side of the Moon‘s soaring “The Great Gig in the Sky,” which isn’t in the film but still evokes the era. It was the first time he’d performed the latter since 2006. (The night’s one disappointment, however, was a total absence of “Echoes,” the cornerstone of Live at Pompeii. Gilmour tells Rolling Stone it’s too difficult to perform that song without the late Rick Wright.)
“Grazie mille,” Gilmour told the crowd after “The Great Gig in the Sky.” “It’s lovely to be back here in this beautiful place after all these years, amongst all you people and all these ghosts, ancient and recent.” It was a nod to Wright, who co-wrote the song.
The evening – the first concert of a two-night stand – was conceived as a special event and, “Echoes” notwithstanding, it was extraordinary. The air smelled of ancient dust. The night sky slowly faded from azure to dark green to pitch black by the end of the concert. And the amphitheater itself – which once could hold around 18,000 revelers but tonight hosted only a couple thousand who were willing to pay at least €300 each for the intimate gig – was grown over with grass and looked exactly as it did in the film. There was even an in-depth exhibit of Floyd photos and memorabilia on site from their four-day stint in 1971 filming the picture. All Gilmour had to do was to divine stinging, soaring notes from his guitar and sing in his typically husky voice.