Brit Floyd: Uniting people with the music of Pink Floyd

By: Grant Silver

On the night of April 8th, 2022, I attended Brit Floyd’s 2022 World Tour at DPAC. Brit Floyd is a tribute band to the legendary rock band Pink Floyd. Being a massive Floyd fan, This show was a must see and I am so thankful that DPAC put me on this concert! Before the show, However I volunteered and helped direct guests to their seats using the lobby map. An interesting thing both my volunteer partner Mark and I noticed was how many fathers you saw bringing their kids of all ages. This was so cool to me because you could see that these parents are helping carry on the amazing music by showing it to their kids which is so important to keeping tributes to legacy bands like this alive and relevant. After helping at the map station it was time for the show to start. I got to my seat and right away, I saw a massive circular screen which resembled what the original Floyd used throughout their live shows in the 70s and 80s. This screen would play accompanying visuals that added to the laser lights and music during the concert. After a short instrumental intro, The band launched into ‘Learning to Fly” from the 1987 album “A Momentary Lapse of Reason”, which was the first Pink Floyd album without Roger Waters. It was a very interesting choice to me for them to open with a lesser known song but then I remembered early last year, Pink Floyd released the later years box set which remixed and mastered a lot of the tracks from the later years without Rogers. This made me assume that they were going to perform a couple songs from the later not as popular albums due to this release. My assumptions were confirmed when after this tune they played three more songs from that album and the album after it, The massively underrated “The Division Bell”. Even though I'm not a huge fan of this era of the band, These songs sounded radically better live due to less synths and computer ambiance which made those 80s and 90s albums sound very dated today. The band was absolutely astonishing; there were 2 guitar players, a bassist, keyboardist, drummer and a percussionist who also doubled on saxophone. They perfectly replicated the music note for note while adding their own spin by improving on songs like “Money” which they extended by adding two guitar solos and three female backing vocalists who added more depth to the classic track. The band also performed a very diverse selection of tracks ranging from hits like “Wish You Were Here” and “Another Brick in the Wall Pt 2” to deep albums tracks like the heavy psychedelic instrumental “One of these Days” and the hypnotic, trippy “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” (where they added an amazing saxophone solo). The audience was also having an absolute blast and seemed to be definitely getting their money’s worth. If you ever see that Brit Floyd is in your city and you are even a tiny bit of a fan, I would highly recommend going to see these top of the line musicians perform these classic songs.