David Gilmour’s DVD offers versions of favourites

Meltdown Festival at the London’s South Bank is a fairly low-key affair that, despite different and inspiring curators every summer – this year David Bowie, or Scott Walker few years back – all tend to carefully go for more obvious/popular rather than the adventurous and experimental. But, when Robert Wyatt (once a drummer with proggers Soft Machine) was in charge in 2001 he thought it would be interesting to invite Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd.

Gilmour jumped at the chance and this DVD, ‘David Gilmour in Concert’, is the document of the event. But, this is not simply rehashing of Floyd and Dave’s solo work, these re-arrangements take pieces onto new planes: it re-appraises time-honoured tracks by substituting keyboards intro to ‘Shine You Crazy Diamond’ with guitar effect to turn it into an acoustic song and choir is replaced by keyboards on ‘Coming Back To Life’…

The collection is varied and no fan should be able to complain: there are Floyd’s songs, ‘Wish You Were Here’, ‘Comfortably Numb’, ‘Fat Old Sun, even some of the Syd Barrett’s (who, with Roger Waters, founded Pink Floyd and the subject of ‘…Crazy Diamond’) work - ‘Dominoes’, ‘Terrapin’ - plus some intriguing choices such as Bizet’s ‘Je Crois Entendre Encore’, Richard Thomson’s ‘Dimming Of The Day’, Rick Wright’s ‘Breakthrough’ (for the fellow Floyd-ian guest spot) and even ‘Hushabye Mountain’, a song from ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’, because his kids play it at home, apparently.

All played so well and with such ease, just like a group of friends jamming on some familiar material, something you really don’t see anymore. Gilmour enjoyed Meltdown so much that he returned last January for additional shows and three songs are from those dates, one of which is the Rick Wright’s cut. Package full of flying sounds, bows, choristers, rock elements and passages as soft as nubile’s… ears.

On top of all these brilliant music, DVD also contains ‘Home Movie: The first rehearsal with the choir’, extra tracks performed in different times, places and circumstances: ‘I Put A Spell On You’ with Mica Paris and Jools Holland on the latter’s ‘Roadrunner’ TV show a few years ago; ‘Don’t’ (Elvis Presley song), taken from a Leiber and Stoller tribute concert in 1991, and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (‘Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day’) set to music by Michael Kamen.

A wealth of goodies you’d ask Father Christmas for.

8.6/10