Pink Floyd - On tour in 1974 and 1977

  The program on the left is from Pink Floyd's UK winter tour in 1974.
                                                  On the right, the program from the 'Animals' tour in 1977

Somewhere along the line in the 1970s, concert programs became expensive and rather boring.

Certainly between these two Pink Floyd programs, from 1974 and 1977, the Floyd became a corporate monster and their programs became all style and no content.

The 1974 tour program was a treat though, being made to resemble a comic, with each member of the band given their own comic strip: Rog Of The Rovers, Captain Mason, R.N. - you get the idea.

Little quiz pages were interspersed and, most notably the program included the lyrics to the new songs the band played in the first half of the show.

Lyrics to the new songs

Pink Floyd's way of working up new material was to take it out on tour and gauge audience reaction, before committing it to record. Hence, the prototype for Dark Side Of The Moon was premiered as Eclipse - A Piece for Assorted Lunatics at live shows in 1972.

During the winter tour of 1974, the songs being tried out were Shine On You Crazy Diamond, You Gotta Be Crazy and Raving and Drooling. Of the three, Shine On... was the most impressive and the one clearly more complete than the other two. It was ready to appear on their next album, Wish You Were Here. Despite its unfamiliarity, Shine On You Crazy Diamond got a great reception from the audience at Wembley's Empire Pool.

You Gotta be Crazy and Raving and Drooling, with alterations to their lyrics and arrangements, would become Dogs and Sheep on the album Animals. So fully three years before they would appear on an album, these songs were being road-tested.

First half: New Songs
Shine On You Crazy Diamond
Raving and Drooling (Sheep)
You Gotta be Crazy (Dogs)

The circular screen and rapid-fire projections

Second half: The Dark Side of the Moon
Speak to Me
Breathe
On the Run
Time
The Great Gig in the Sky
Money
Us and Them
Any Colour You Like
Brain Damage
Eclipse

Encore:
Echoes

The show was spellbinding and the audience loved it - the recordings show that clearly. But not everyone was impressed. That sniffy hipster at the NME, Nick Kent, a man who almost certainly never played a three-hour show in his life, thought the Floyd were too detached from the audience.

My bootleg CDs of the '74 Wembley shows,
bought about 20 years ago from record shops in Tokyo

Kent missed the point, then. With Pink Floyd, it was never about the band members as rock stars. They were not throwing shapes and projecting themselves in the manner of other groups. Above all, it was about the music and the visuals. Right back to their earliest shows at London's UFO club in 1967, the light show was the focal point.

And by the time of the Dark Side Of The Moon tours, the show was all about the images projected on the circular screen, stage centre.

My ticket

Melody Maker's Chris Charlesworth, reviewing an earlier show in Edinburgh, said of Dark Side of the Moon: "On this tour it takes on magnificent proportions with that truly brilliant movie screen designed, I think, to take the observer on a space flight to the other side of the galaxy."

In the Classic Albums show about Dark Side, they show many of the visuals projected on the circular screen. This was innovative staging at the time.

Nowadays, stage lighting and visuals are way more advanced at arena shows, but the Floyd were at the forefront of concepts to transform live shows into a much more visual and engaging spectacle - a process that developed into flying pigs with the Animals tour and, ultimately, The Wall.

'74 tour

"Visions flash past all too quickly," said Charlesworth. "But stand-out bits include various tumbling buildings, a pilot’s view of a take-off, coins and clocks in profusion, plenty of sea and surf, and the closing sequence depicting prominent politicians apparently well satisfied with the Floyd’s performance."

The Wembley '74 show climaxed with the giant screen showing the sun being eclipsed by the moon. On the bootleg recording of the Empire Pool show, you can hear the audience response as the Eclipse reaches its crescendo. It was very well done, the whole thing, topped off, let's not forget, by this timeless classic of an album.

Here's an audio recording from Wembley 1974

UPDATE: I have just found some great quality film of Pink Floyd live from June 28 1975, at the Ivor Wynne Stadium, Hamilton, Ontario. Filmed by Jim Kelly 'Speedy' in super8 reels. With thanks to the Genesis Museum for 4k reel conversion, and audio sync by Ikhnaton and NUFF.

Here's the link

By 1977 and the Animals tour, the Floyd had taken the live experience to another level. "Roger had an idea for the next Pink Floyd album," according to the withdrawn liner notes for the new 5.1 mix of Animals: "He borrowed from George Orwell’s allegorical story, Animal Farm, in which pigs and other farmyard animals were reimagined anthropomorphically. Waters portrays the human race as three sub-species trapped in a violent, vicious cycle, with sheep serving despotic pigs and authoritarian dogs. You Gotta be Crazy and Raving And Drooling perfectly fitted his new concept."

The show was again split into two halves.

First half: Animals
Sheep
Pigs on the Wing (Part I)
Dogs
Pigs on the Wing (Part II)
Pigs (Three Different Ones)"

Second half: Wish You Were Here

Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts I–V)
Welcome to the Machine
Have a Cigar
Wish You Were Here
Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts VI–IX)"

Encore:
Money
Us and Them

Part of the show at the V&A

If you saw the Pink Floyd exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum a few years ago, you will have seen the flying pig, the war plane and the various other stage props that made up the Animals show. 

The album cover photo shoot of the pig flying over Battersea Power Station has passed into legend. Apparently they hired a marksman to shoot down the flying pig if it broke free of its moorings. 

Unfortunately, on the first day of the photo shoot, the weather was not conducive and so the session was postponed. 

But the marksman had only been hired for the one day, so when the pig broke free and entered London airspace untethered, there was no one to shoot it down.

Contact sheet from the Battersea photo shoot

The 1977 live shows were suitably over the top, to match the music. The pyrotechnic stage lighting was choreographed from two articulated towers. At the climax of Sheep, fireworks burst out from the towers.

At various points during the first set, an inflatable family, larger than life household items like a fridge or a car and various animals would appear. 

I believe these concerts utilised quadrophonic sound and the band made good use of the available technology. The sound of dogs barking and pigs squealing was particularly freaky.

The four-piece band was augmented by second guitarist/bass player Snowy White. The overall sound was much more punchy and aggressive than the 1974 show had been. 

My ticket

I suppose that's a lot to do with the songs. The lyrics by Roger Waters became darker and more political on Animals. The unused liner notes to the 5.1 mixes of Animals said: "Despite being recorded in London during the long summer heatwave of 1976, Pink Floyd’s Animals remains a dark album. Its critique of capitalism and greed caught the prevailing mood in Britain: a time of industrial strife, economic turmoil, The Troubles in Northern Ireland and the race riots of Notting Hill."

The alienation and distance from the audience, that Nick Kent sensed in 1974, also became quite real, particularly on the last date of the North American tour in Montreal. By all accounts, including his own, Waters became increasingly angry with the rowdy American audiences. It culminated with him spitting in the face of a fan at the front of the stage. The experience fed into the writing of the next Pink Floyd album, The Wall.

1977 Animals tour program

Despite the improved audio facilities, there were no official recordings made of the Animals tour and no decent unofficial audio exists from the Wembley shows. Here's a recording from the US tour

The Animals tour program was black and glossy. It contained no words, apart from Pink Floyd - Animals on the cover; just a bunch of so-so photos. A waste of money frankly, but a memento nonetheless all these years later.

I gave up buying concert programs after that.

Also on this blog:

Reviewing Pink Floyd at the V&A: Their Mortal Remains
https://bangnzdrum.blogspot.com/2017/09/reviewing-pink-floyd-at-v-their-mortal.html

March 1973 - 'Dark Side of the Moon' enters the charts
https://bangnzdrum.blogspot.com/search/label/pink%20floyd

Vegetable Man - Syd Barrett's last Floyd recordings
https://bangnzdrum.blogspot.com/2014/09/vegetable-man-musical-anarchy-of-syd.html