Pink Floyd live performances

Pink Floyd were pioneers in the live music experience, renowned for their lavish stage shows that combine intense visual experiences with music to create a show in which the performers themselves are almost secondary. Pink Floyd's combination of music and visuals set the standard for rock musicians. As well as visuals, Pink Floyd set standards in sound quality with innovative use of sound effects and panning quadrophonic speaker systems.

Besides the music, arguably the most important and certainly the most elaborate part to any Pink Floyd live show is the special effects.

'Yes, we did all sorts of strange things, you know, for live concerts as well, we used to make up tapes for the audience to come in by. We had one half-hour-long tape, which we'd play for the half an hour the audience was coming in just before we started our show, and things like that. Just tapes of bird noises in quad--quadraphonic sound, you know, with birds singing, and pheasants taking off in the distance, and swans taking off from water, a tractor driving down one side of the room, and an airplane going over the top, and all these things carrying on, all just from just different sound effects records, you just stick them in and you--you create a type of mood.'

Pink Floyd were among the first bands to use a dedicated travelling light show in conjunction with their performances. During the Barrett era, dynamic liquid light shows were projected onto enormous screens behind the band while they played, and the band also incorporated large numbers of strobe lights, which were controlled manually by an engineer. This had the effect of totally obscuring the band itself, except for their shadows, which Barrett took advantage of: he would hold his arms up during parts where he was not required to play, making his shadow grow, shrink and undulate, adding to the visual spectacle. They developed many of these lighting techniques through their fortuitous early association with light artist Mike Leonard.

When psychedelia fell out of fashion from about 1970 onwards, elevated platforms of the type conventionally used for roof maintenance in high buildings were brought on tour and filled with lighting equipment to be raised and lowered during performances. Following Roger Waters' departure in 1984, the Pink Floyd light show reached a dazzling pinnacle. Marc Brickman, the group's lighting designer, utilized hundreds of automated intelligent lighting fixtures and lasers, which were state-of-the-art at the time. By the 1994 Division Bell tour, the band was using extremely powerful, isotope-splitting copper-vapour lasers. These gold-coloured lasers were worth over $120,000 a piece and previously had only been used in nuclear research and high speed photography.

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Wikipedia