PARENTAL ADVISORY: If you’re a young person, don’t let your parents catch you reading these reviews, because there are occasional references to the illicit use of cannabis, LSD, PCP, quaaludes, meth, cocaine and/or vast quantities of alcohol. The other warning is this: If you consume these things, you will forget a great deal of the fun you had, and that’s no fun.

There is no grass inside Maple Leaf Gardens, so us lunatics instead lolled giddily on chairs and the concrete that was normally (if indeed anything was “normal”) iced over for make-believe hockey games. There were, however, bats in the arena when Pink Floyd played there. Very large ones, of a sort that Ralph Steadman might have used to illustrate a typical day in the life of Hunter Thompson.

Friends tried to convince me later, in a debate that festered on and off for years, that they were only acid bats, but if the pterodactyl-sized mammals were indeed just a hallucination, they were a fine hallucination, decades ahead of CGI, both visually in the daring swoops and aurally in the shrieks they emitted loudly enough to be heard over the roar of “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” being bounced quadraphonically off the great barn’s back wall.

Who can be sure? We were on the Dark Side of the Moon, after all. Only a few astronauts had been there before, and it seems to me that at least one of them did mention bats.

My dubious friends and I had been priming for Pink Floyd for some time, “Dark Side” being the vortex that finally sucked us completely in and sent us scurrying backwards in time to 1969’s “Ummagumma” (also excellent), 1970’s “Atom Heart Mother” (impenetrable), 1971’s “Relics” (who is this Syd Barrett person and can’t someone do something about him?) and of course “Meddle”, 23 minutes of which was a single track called “Echoes” that has not stopped echoing in my consciousness to this day.

In ‘69 I missed a Pink Floyd date at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall by a week but happily settled for a poster and tickets to the following week’s Led Zeppelin show there.

The more cinematic stuff, “Obscured by Clouds” and “Live at Pompeii”, came along later for me, more retrograde catching up, but in the interim there was “Dark Side”, a colossally subversive album that was very nearly titled something else altogether. Floyd watchers far more studious that I have determined that the band dropped the title after discovering that a British blues band amusingly called Medicine Head had just released an album called “Dark Side of the Moon”. What are the chances? It must have been a case of history waiting to happen.

In the event, the Medicine Head LP went nowhere, so the Floyd reclaimed the title and stuck it on what became mankind’s second-highest-selling rock record (after the wastefully talented Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”). One wonders if it’s still possible that someone might order “Dark Side” online, only to be puzzled when a copy of Medicine Head’s album is delivered.

When Pink Floyd hit the North American freeway in March 1973 to flog their beast, they brought along more than just a formidable arsenal of frightening space music. For one thing, there was the Azimuth Coordinator, a sound system that probably had more to do with quadraphenia than quadraphonics. Rick Wright was in charge of running the machine, using a joystick, as if stirring a witch’s brew, to direct the sound from this section of the audience over here to those guys over there. Us acidheads found it very clever, though it still couldn’t explain the bat shrieks.

The other lethal piece of equipment the Floyd dragged around with them was “Mr Screen”, the giant circular backdrop against which all their freaky films were projected, like Ian Eames’ stunning clip of animated clocks that ran in sequence with “Time”.

With this gear, plus exploding flashpots, Nicky Mason’s huge exploding gong, lethal lasers, sundry fireworks and so much dry ice that it took a couple of days to find all the fans again in the front rows, plus Dick Parry and his astonishing untamed saxophone, plus the exceedingly exotic back-up singers Nawasa Crowder, Mary Ann Lindsey and Phyllis Lindsey, who were called Black Grass (so there was grass in the Gardens, quite apart from the burning variety), you had to keep reminding yourself that Pink Floyd were onstage as well.

Wright, Mason, David Gilmour and Roger Waters played “Obscured by Clouds”, “When You’re In”, “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun”, “Careful With That Axe, Eugene”, “Echoes” and the “Dark Side” album in its entirety, ending with a threat to cut us all into little pieces “One of These Days”, with Hell being loosed around them, bombs going off, Mr Screen coming up with every piece of unnerving cinematic footage it could think of, and all six Black Grass hips shimmying relentlessly as if sex was all anyone cared about even at this apolcalyptic juncture in the rapidly closing space-time continuum.

It was, as they say, a feast for the eyes as well as the ears. I went home bloated with bombast, stuffed on stunts, barely able to keep waving an arm to fend off the bats.

Not enough, Pink Floyd decided, incredibly. We need more impact in the show.

And so it was, between the Gardens show in March ‘73 and the Buffalo show in June, that the Floyd introduced yet another grand gadget while playing a pair of gigs at London’s Earl’s Court: a plane that flew over the audience’s heads and crashed into the stage with yet another massive explosion at the end of “On the Run”.

Somehow the aircraft got past US Customs and was launched past my unprepared head at the Memorial Auditorium in Bubbalo. It was two weeks before my eyebrows grew back and a full two years before I forgave the Floyd enough to go strap on another one of their concerts. Inevitably, of course, the tolling of the iron bell called the faithful to their knees.

With hindsight, I came to understand why the band started using a former 747 hangar at Toronto International Airport every time they were rehearsing for another North American jaunt.

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Touring in ‘73, selling out every stop, Roger Waters was feeling guilty. It was his band now, but it used to be Syd’s. But Syd Barrett had gone too far into the spirit of the times, not to mention into the band’s stash of electric Kool-Aid, and he’d stopped being a stage presence. In fact he’d just stopped. So they’d chucked him out.

Waters liquified his regrets by writing “Wish You Were Here”, a lament to his old buddy’s mental inaccessibility and an exorcism of the ghost he’d become. As a seance, the recording session worked a treat. Syd showed up in the studio, uninvited, at first unrecognisable, a little plump as ghosts go, but full of congenial congratulations on the success of “Dark Side”. It was one of rock history’s more chilling moments.

The band’s response was “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”, so consumed with heartfelt emotion that it stretched from one side of the album to the other. I first heard it live, boxed around “Have a Cigar”, with “Raving and Drooling”, “You Gotta Be Crazy”, all of “Dark Side” again and “Echoes” to boot, at the football stadium in Hamilton, where thankfully the exploding jet was all that was flying around and I could concentrate on the music more, and enjoy the movies, like Gerald Scarfe’s “Wall”-anticipating animation of an insect-like creature mixed in with rats and beheadings. Lovely.

I was well up in the bleachers, also seeing the stage for the first time as the constantly morphing living thing that it was, rocketing out fire one moment and glowering angrily the next. And safely far away from the tumult, what I remember best is an image of the crazy diamond that kept appearing on the big screen, Syd in better days, eyeliner stare, heroic, the madcap laughter not yet merely mad.

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Pink Floyd took a year and a half off between albums. I took 13 years off between Pink Floyd concerts, missing “The Wall” tour altogether, much to my dismay. By the time I saw them again in 1988 there had been plenty of current passed under the bridge, blood as well as Waters, who almost took the bridge with him.

They’d gone from Ivor Wynne straight to the Knebworth Festival, where they played with some of the other names on my concerts list — the Steve Miller Band, Captain Beefheart and Roy Harper — and then after their cooling-down period released the Orwellian “Animals”. The “In the Flesh” tour for that album gave Roger more cause for regret after he spit on an overeager fans in Montreal. He went into full reassessment mode and came out on the dark side of the Floyd.

They built a wall and tore it down and built another one. Waters packed it in at the end of ‘85 and the unholy bickering commenced over who owned the band’s name. How did that tune go? “All that you love, all that you hate, all you distrust, all you save. All that you give, all that you deal, all that you buy, beg, borrow or steal.”

Roger having trickled uphill or down, depending on your point of view (mine is up), Gilmour, Mason and a reluctant Wright went into the studio in late ‘86 to record what was possibly, titularly, a comment on bandmates going AWOL, “A Momentary Lapse Of Reason”. They fleshed out with Tony Levin from King Crimson, Phil Manzenara from Roxy Music, Carmine Appice of Vanilla Fudge and racks of other players.

For the tour that began in September 1987, in Ottawa — sometimes called the “Delicate Sound of Thunder” tour — the Floyd had Gary Wallis assisting Nicky on drums and percussion, Guy Pratt on bass, Jon Carin on keyboards and Tim Renwick on second guitar. Scott Page replaced Dick Parry on sax. And they kept on going, around the world, for three years, straight into another Knebworth Festival. 199 shows, 5.5 million paying customers, history’s biggest outdoor stage, sales records shredded and scattered in the lightning.

The May 13, 1988, show at Toronto’s CNE Stadium, at which a pig somehow took flight, perhaps inevitably after all, was part of the middle phase of the tour’s three legs. They’d played Toronto the previous September as well, and the setlist changed little:

“Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts 1-5)”, “Signs of life”, “Learning to Fly”, “Yet Another Movie” / “Round And Around”, “A New Machine (Part 1)”, “Terminal Frost”, “A New Machine (Part 2)”, “Sorrow”, “The Dogs of War”, “On the Turning Away”, then an intermission, and then “One of These Days”, “Time”, “On the Run”, “Wish You Were Here”, “Welcome to the Machine”, “Us & Them”, “Money”, “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)”, “Comfortably Numb” and the encores “One Slip” and “Run Like Hell”.

Ah, yes, “Comfortably Numb”. These days neither Floyd nor Gilmour nor Waters concerts are complete without it. In Roger’s case two guitarists — Snowy White and Doyle Bramhall II — work full-time replicating Gilmour’s solos note for note and do a good job of it, but no one can beat Dave. The song is breathtaking to begin with and his fretwork and feel escalate it into another dimension entirely.

As well as that same dreadful Gerald Scarfe film with rats and bugs during “Welcome to the Machine”, Mr Screen treated us to shots of Doberman-type attack dogs racing down a beach, into a building and up a staircase to find Gilmour, who then turns and sings the opening line of “Dogs of War”. Buh-boom, buh-boom, buh-boom, buh-boom …

I believe “The Great Gig in the Sky” fit into the CNE gig at some point, fitting indeed for the last time I saw Pink Floyd.

“And I am not frightened of dying. Anytime will do, I don’t mind. Why should I be frightened of dying? There’s no reason for it, you’ve gotta go sometime.”

“If you can hear this whispering, you are dying.”

“I never said I was frightened of dying.”

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Another three years’ downtime, then “The Division Bell”, more touring, occasional glimmers of hope for a reunion with Waters, and then there it was, for half an hour, at Live Aid. Frightfully old codgers. Grandad, put down that guitar! No wait, you’re still pretty good!

In 1997 a Pink Floyd fan who just happened to be an astronomer discovered an asteroid and named it “19367 Pink Floyd”. It’s up there now, tumbling about on the dark side of some blinking satellite, creating an oscillation in the ether that, if you listen closely enough, goes like this: All you create, all you destroy, all that you do, all that you say, all that you eat, and everyone you meet, all that you slight, and everyone you fight, all that is now, all that is gone, all that’s to come, and everything under the sun is in tune, but the sun is eclipsed by the moon.

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Some of the photos on this page were actually taken by fans in Bercy, France, and Verona, Italy, in 1989, but the pig is from the 1988 Toronto gig.

There are loads of videos on YouTube of Pink Floyd live in concert. I particularly like “One of These Days” from 1994, “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” from 1972, and “Echoes” from Pompeii — 8.5 minutes complete with daft footage of them walking among the steaming lava vents of brave Vesuvius (that’s five V’s — v-v-very good!).

* See #10: Bob Marley
* See #11: Bob Dylan
* See #12: Heatwave
* See #13: Watkins Glen
* See #14: The Who
* See #15: Crosby, Stills Nash & Young
* COMING SOON: The Compleat Dorseyland Concert Directory