Tuesday, May 5, 2009

PF - 1970-11-12 - Blindness


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Dr. Forrester said...

Pink Floyd
Blindness (Sigma 5)
Falkoner Centret, Copenhagen, Denmark
November 12th, 1970

Sigma 5 Silver > Secure EAC Wav > Flac


Disc 1: Astronomy Domine, Fat Old Sun, Cymbaline, Atom Heart Mother



Disc 2: Green Is The Colour, Careful With That Axe Eugene,
Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun, A Saucerful Of Secrets, The Embryo


From Bootleg Encyclopia on the Web:

Two tape sources exist for Pink Floyd’s November 12th, 1970 show at the Falkoner Centret
in Copenhagen in common circulation. The first tape is very clear and powerful. It starts
with Roger Waters’ opening greeting and runs through to the first part of “A Saucerful Of
Secrets.” A second audience recording is expertly edited in for the rest of that track and
for the final song of the evening “The Embryo.” The second tape source is good to very good
but very distant from the stage. It clearly isn’t as good as the first, but is more than
adequate to give a complete aural picture of the entire concert. Highland released the
excellent but incomplete tape in 1999 on Copenhagen Sequence (HL 291/292). There is some
discussion about what tape Highland use to complete the release; some claim it is the
November 20th 1971 Cincinnati tape, but in reality it is the tape from the concert previous
to Copenhagen on November 11th, 1970 in Gothenburg, Sweden. Several years ago Copenhagen
1970 Complete (Ayanami-226) was released editing together both sources to present the whole
show. Blindness follows the paradigm of the Ayanami by using the excellent sounding tape
and introducing the lesser quality tape in a seamless edit two minutes into “A Saucerful Of
Secrets.” The excellent quality recording sounds beautiful. It isn’t too shrill and
captures amazing detail of the events on stage including the subtle sounds of chirping
birds during “Green Is The Colour.” There are some minor volume dropouts throughout the
set, and there are some speed problems during the first couple minutes “Atom Heart Mother”
due to the tape running close to the end of the side. After a tape flip 6:35 into the song
that problem clears up.



The band’s performance is a pristine example of latter day psychedelia. Not in the
drugged-out, mind expanding ethic, but in the art of never musically stating the obvious
and producing music filled with suggestive ideas without nailing anything down. The
lyric “when I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse / out of the corner of my eye /
I turned to look but it was gone” is a perfect verbal summation of Floyd’s musical modus
operandi during this time. The tape begins with two seconds of crowd noise and
unidentified music at the very beginning, probably from what the taper used the tape
for before recording Pink Floyd. There is silence as the band tune and Waters greets
the audience with a low key “good evening” before launching into “Astronomy Domine.”
This Syd Barrett space song sometimes sounds very dorky in performance, but by this
time, and the delivery in Copenhagen, has an overtone of the sinister and dread.
The audience is dead quiet throughout the performance and one can only imagine what
they were thinking. “Fat Old Sun,” due to Gilmour’s golden tenor, sounds gorgeous
but he has terrible trouble hitting the high notes in the following song “Cymbaline.”
His voice cracks while singing “it’s hiiiiigggggggghhhhhhh time / Cymbaline.” The
taped interlude is also difficult to hear in this recording. Before “Atom Heart Mother”
Waters says, “We've got a new album out, one side of which is called ‘Atom Heart Mother’
and which has a choir on it and some brass people. Brass instruments. And there's a
version of it that we do without the brass and choir. We're gonna end first half of this
concert with that.”



What follows is a dramatic, eighteen-minute version of their epic. The second half of
the set begins with the “Green Is The Colour” segue with “Careful With That Axe, Eugene.”

The former serves as a relaxing, pastoral introduction to the blood curdling chaos of the
latter and this small set piece is the last vestige of the “Man And A Journey” suite
attempted the previous year but abandoned. Gilmour especially goes crazy after the scream
in “Eugene” spitting out nasty heavy metal riffs over the meandering keyboards. Before
the final number Waters says, ”The powers that be tell me that our first set too long so
we've got, this is going to have to be our last number, I'm afraid, and it's called 'A
Saucerful Of Secrets'.” This is a great performance even after the tape switch with the
more poor quality audio only enhancing the effectiveness of the dolorous church choir in
the "Celestial Voices" section towards the end of the piece. At the song's conclusion
the audience can only respond with polite applause. The band have time for one encore and
play an eight minute version of “The Embryo,” one of their greatest live pieces. There
isn’t much in the way of improvisation, but Wright plays a lyrical keyboard motif beneath
the “seabird” screeching in the songs middle. Since this only their fifth release in as
many months, Sigma takes their time with their releases, carefully mastering and sculpting
each release to as close as perfection as possible. Blindness is packaged in a double
slimline jewel case with glossy inserts with relevant photos from the era with the cover
design being particularly attractive. It is limited to three hundred copies and even
though it is only the second silver release of this tape, stands as definitive. (GS)


Artwork, Secure EAC Log, and Flac Fingerprints included.

May 5, 2009 at 5:38 PM

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