Pigs will fly, as the old saying goes, before feuding musicians Roger Waters and David Gilmour reunite to make a new Pink Floyd album. Then again, it’s worth pointing out that pigs have flown — and will continue to do so as long as Brit Floyd keep up their nearly 25-year career playing note-by-note renditions of the band’s music to sell-out shows around the world.
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“We do have quite a large inflatable pig that makes an appearance when there’s room for him,” Brit Floyd founder and bandleader Damian Darlington said in a recent interview. “Not every stage has the room available to inflate it. But when we can get it in there, it certainly makes an appearance.”
Brit Floyd is stopping at the Wilson Center on Monday, Aug. 25, at 7:30 p.m. — also a sold-out show. The tribute act plays sounds from the psychedelic greats who got their start in the 1960s, often bringing featured guest musicians from Pink Floyd’s studio and touring band line-ups.
Either way, Brit Floyd audiences can count on high production values and a career-spanning catalogue of their predecessors’ songs, including a complete performance of a single album that changes from tour to tour.
This year the band is commemorating the 50th anniversary of “Wish You Were Here,” an album that included the epic 26-minute-track “Shine on You Crazy Diamond.” Divided into nine movements, the song was reportedly inspired by the 1968 health-related departure of original singer-songwriter Syd Barrett.
“The song “Wish You Were Here” touches on that, as well,” Darlington said. “In fact, the whole of the album is, to a certain degree, about the absence of Syd Barrett, either directly or indirectly.”
Over the course of its career, Brit Floyd has performed nearly all of the songs from the band’s post-Barrett era. And with shows that typically clock in at two-and-a-half hours, there’s time to play a full album as well as a dozen additional songs.
“There are still one or two songs that I would love to play,” the bandleader said. “But not many because we’ve already played the vast majority of them over the years.”
Darlington’s first exposure to Pink Floyd was “The Wall,” the epic 1979 thematic double album, which a friend lent to him in his early adolescence.
“I was just instantly captivated by the fact that there was a narrative running through the whole thing,” he said. “And there were all these cool sound effects, which are especially appealing at that age. I was also just learning how to play the guitar, and there was all this wonderful guitar work. And from that point onwards, I just wanted to check out every other Pink Floyd recording I could get my hands on.”
Darlington’s first experience playing Pink Floyd’s music for a living was in a tribute band that billed itself as the Australian Pink Floyd. Formed, as its name suggests, in the land down under, the group had relocated to London and was looking for a guitarist. Darlington was hired for the gig and stayed with them for five years, before leaving to form a band whose mission was to recreate Pink Floyd’s music as perfectly as possible.
Thousands of shows later, the bandleader has never grown tired of it. He hailed Pink Floyd has having “so much variety in their music,” which lends itself to becoming a playground of fun for any musician.
“But at the core of it, there is something recognizable, all the way through, that is Pink Floyd,” he added. “You still know it’s Pink Floyd pretty much from beginning to end.”
Even with a band that, over the course of its career, produced 15 albums and well more than 200 songs, Brit Floyd’s decades of constant touring has meant repeating virtually all of them. And as much as fans might hope and pray for a Pink Floyd reunion, Darlington sees no likelihood of that happening.
“It’s a nice fantasy, but I think that ship has sailed quite some time ago,” he said of the possibility of Gilmour and Waters reuniting. “But fortunately, they’re still releasing music of their own. David Gilmour put out a solo album last year, and it’s wonderful that we’re still getting the opportunity to hear new music and see them live. But I think the prospect of the two of them performing onstage together ever again is about as remote as it gets.”
It’s also unlikely that Brit Floyd would ever incorporate the two musicians’ solo work into their sets, although they have thought about it — even debated it occasionally.
“I think it would be interesting to, say, do one Gilmour track and, for balance, one of Waters,'” Darlington said. “But if we do that, that just means there’s two Pink Floyd tracks we can’t do. And at the end of the day, it’s a Pink Floyd tribute band that people are coming to see.”
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