Unnerving...

There’s some artists which you would give their due acclaim, should the opportunity arise, but you just don’t pay close attention to what they’re up to in general because they’re so fuckin’ omnipresent. David Gilmour fits squarely in this category. I mean, he puts out a pretty steady stream of material, and has for several decades now (!!!), but it’s just one of those things. I mean, I like Pink Floyd as much as the next guy, and like every other musician on the planet, I know ever single note of Dark Side and WYWH, but I don’t set my watch by ’em or anything, you know?

Anyways, yes, there is a point in here eventually. I was flipping through the channels tonight, and I happened upon Rave playing the concert film of the 2006 David Gilmour (and friends, natch) Live At The Royal Albert Hall thingie, and I’m like “oh, this is cool,” or whatever. So I’m watching along, and the set is this bizarre fusion of DG shit and Pink Floyd (both the w/ Rog and w/o iterations) songs, with various folks coming up and it’s okay and all. I mean, all other things aside, David Gilmour is a fucking excellent guitarist, no mistake.

So it’s chugging along, and then in the middle of a bunch of whatever, David Bowie walks out on stage and they bust in to Arnold Layne. While I grant that Rick Wright is the only person on stage that actually performed that song in its original state, so it was more of a cover than anything else, it was (a) shocking, and (b) really fucking cool.

I know that most of the British readers of this site will probably have known about this, because there was a single made of this performance which apparently reached #19 on the UK charts last fall. (I assume #18 was some British indie rock band, and #20 was probably the worst electro-pap imaginable, because the British are like that.)

Okay, so I guess there wasn’t actually a point, after all. But I’m a big Bowie fan, and he pwnd the fuck out of that tune, I’m just saying. And whaddya know, here it is on the tube. Who woulda thought it?