Via the Times Online:
Pink Floyd fans are an optimistic lot. A year ago the band’s blogging followers were talking up a putative tour in 2009 that would reunite the so-called “classic” 1970s line-up — the one responsible for their 40m-selling magnum opus The Dark Side of the Moon — for their first proper concert since 1980.
To a large extent, this represented the triumph of hope over experience. Of the many attempts to get the four members of Pink Floyd back on stage together, only Bob Geldof’s had come off. After the fractious foursome re-convened for an historic 18-minute slot at Live 8 in 2005, the world’s largest concert promoters, Live Nation, offered them a record $250m — pure profit, net of all production expenses, which the promoters would cover separately — to tour North America. This figure valued Pink Floyd as a bigger live draw than the Rolling Stones, and was more than twice what Live Nation shelled out to sign Madonna to an inclusive concert-and-albums deal in 2007.
True to form, the Floyd declined, mainly at the behest of David Gilmour. The band’s guitarist, who compared their Live 8 performance to “sleeping with your ex-wife”, was planning his most ambitious solo tour yet, to run from 2006 until the end of 2008. Prominent in Gilmour’s band was the Floyd’s keyboard player, Rick Wright, whose ejection from the group in 1979 led to years of discord in which the three remaining squabbled over who owned the band’s name.
It was Wright’s rehabilitation as Gilmour’s new buddy —coupled with the conciliatory noises emanating from drummer, Nick Mason, and the previously hostile bassist, Roger Waters — that helped to raise hopes of a 2009 Floyd tour. Once Gilmour’s solo tour had wrapped at Gdansk in November 2008, the feeling among the Floyd faithful was that the long-awaited reunion might be back on the cards.
Sadly, it wasn’t. Rick Wright died of cancer last September, a tragic loss which, like the death of Pink Floyd’s prime mover, Syd Barrett, in 2006, inspired an avalanche of obituaries unusual for the passing of a pop musician. It also brought to light aspects of the shifting alliances that have characterised the career of Pink Floyd, one of rock’s most complicated soaps.
Good band, that was.
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