Are there teenagers who escape Pink Floyd? It seems like a must at the beginning of a music lover’s life, because with 7000 copies of The Dark Side of the Moon sold every week even today, this mythical group has never stopped recruiting followers.
Posted at 9:15 a.m.
I didn’t escape it either. At 15, I used to destruction the cassettes of Wish You Were Here, The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall in my Walkman. This group has opened the musical horizons of so many young people going through puberty that it is a cliché. I listened to Pink Floyd until I was sickened in my early twenties, and just when I was starting to drift away from it, my little brother, who is six years younger than me, dove deep into the same initiation rite. His intense, repeated listening almost turned me away from Pink Floyd forever, but he switched to rapping right after, which gave the whole family a break.
For this reason, I invited my brother to the press conference of the exhibition Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains, which has just started at Arsenal Contemporary Art. We have so many common memories around this group that the occasion was too good. We had seen their last show at the Olympic Stadium in Montreal in 1994. He with his friends, me with our father.
You have to have experienced this at least once in your life, because Pink Floyd has redefined large-scale shows, enough to inspire an ironic song in Mononc’ Serge, The bad trip of the centurywhere he makes fun of fans who rushed to the Stadium like lemmings. Man, there were lasers… In 1994, they did three nights and sold 175,000 tickets!
My father and I had never experienced a show in the company of 65,000 people, so in the first few minutes, located very high in the stands, we were a little hyperventilated – I almost left. But the magic caught up with us.
Thousands of lighters were lit (it was before iPhones), and we took off for a beautiful trip, despite the legendary bad acoustics of the place. I still remember my father’s face, dumbfounded. He got up several times muttering admiring “tabarnaks”, and I probably watched my father as much as the show, because his wonder was a show in itself. For my part, I have never been able to forget this moment when I fell into a trance with the crowd on the guitar solo of Hey You — I felt like I was in a cult.
After the show, my dad had bought my brother a t-shirt and we had to stumble upon him in the midst of 65,000 people, levitating on magic mushrooms and the musical experience of his 15 years old. I suggested that he get out of there as soon as possible, before our father came back from the bathroom and realized it. But Dad wasn’t stupid, he guessed it and didn’t say anything. Youth must happen and Pink Floyd must live…
“Given what you took, do you remember the show, at least ? I asked my brother as we walked around the exhibit. Yes, one of the most beautiful moments of his adolescence, he tells me. Thousands of young people had stormed the STCUM buses to go to Mount Royal, in order to pursue the dream of the show, thus recreating the happenings of the previous generation which, in 1994, said that Pink Floyd was no longer what he had been.
Still today, my brother likes to fall asleep to the music of the play Echoes…
The exhibition Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remainswhich was presented in London, Italy, Germany, Spain and the United States before landing in Montreal, is truly a gift for groupies. With over 350 artifacts — from letters from Syd Barrett, electric guitars and keyboards, to puppets and inflatable characters from The Wall –, we measure the artistic evolution of a group, sometimes in sawtooth because of the known conflicts between its members, which revolutionized the history of music by mixing theater, opera, animation, jazz, psychedelic, electronic and progressive rock, among other things.
The impact of Pink Floyd would not be the same without the contribution of artistic director Aubrey “Po” Powell, who defined the visual universe of the group, and to whom the exhibition makes a very good place. We ran into host and ex-RBO Richard Z. Sirois, who looked like a kid in a candy store, grinning from ear to ear. He had traveled 10 hours for this press conference attended by Nick Mason, the drummer of Pink Floyd, who signed one of his albums.
PHOTO MARCO CAMPANOZZI, THE PRESS
Nick Mason, founding member and drummer of Pink Floyd
Moreover, the moving image that I will remember from this exhibition is that of Nick Mason who wandered alone in a room, like a simple 78-year-old visitor, looking at the evidence of his flamboyant past.
My father would be his age today if he were alive. We didn’t expect to run into Nick Mason during our visit and he kindly agreed to pose for a photo with my brother.
It will be one more memory in our family album on Pink Floyd.
Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remainsuntil December 31, 2022 at Arsenal contemporary art