Inside one of Pink Floyd’s most spectacular concerts

In the wee hours of Saturday, June 28, 1975, thousands gathered at the entrance to the since demolished Ivor Wynne Stadium in Hamilton’s east end. Some among the crowd were locals, though many had made their way to Steeltown from much further afield — quite a few having camped out for days on nearby lawns in a state of frenzied anticipation. As the summer sun beat down throughout the morning and afternoon, the throng swelled by tens of thousands before the gates were finally opened. Over the next several hours, the 50,000 who assembled would be treated to a kaleidoscopic bombardment of light and sound that none of them would ever forget.

The summer of 1975 marked a distinct moment in the life of the now legendary English rock band Pink Floyd. Formed a decade earlier amid the white heat of Britain’s postwar musical revolution, the group had quickly traded its roots in American rhythm and blues for a sound more in sync with the transgressive spirit of the late 1960s.

Through performances at London’s short-lived UFO Club, it had made itself the toast of the city’s burgeoning countercultural underground with extended and freewheeling instrumental odysseys that saw the band members themselves showered in a frenetic symphony of colour and light. Spacey and cacophonous, protracted jams like their early signature “Interstellar Overdrive” often sounded less like traditional songs than transmissions from the celestial beyond: thunderous psychedelic experiments blasted (as one CBC Radio host aptly put it in 1966) through “an array of equipment sadistically designed to shatter the nerves.”

Under the formative, though also short-lived, leadership of Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd would find initial success in the pop charts with idiosyncratic tunes like “See Emily Play” and “Arnold Layne.”

Its first two studio albums — 1967’s “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” and 1968’s “A Saucerful of Secrets” — saw the group refine the impressionistic innovation of its live performances to remarkable results. But Barrett’s increasingly erratic behaviour and deteriorating mental state, caused (or at any rate significantly exacerbated) by excessive consumption of LSD, risked leaving the other members of Pink Floyd — drummer Nick Mason, bassist Roger Waters and keyboardist Richard Wright — rudderless.

Following the addition of guitarist David Gilmour, an old school friend of Barrett and Waters, the band spent the early 1970s honing a new esthetic and creative identity. Though still firmly rooted in the experimental and avant-garde, Pink Floyd’s emerging progressive rock sound would gradually shed the trappings of ’60s psychedelia before finally leaving them behind altogether.

No longer bound by the formal constraints of any particular genre, their sensibility broadened to incorporate a wide pastiche of influences that found joint expression in new studio innovations and increasingly resplendent live shows. With 1973’s “The Dark Side of the Moon” — which celebrated its 50th anniversary in March — Pink Floyd reached not only a new creative milestone but solidified its rather improbable status as an art house ensemble with globe-spanning appeal and commercial success.

Channelling the political and moral ambiguities of the 1970s, the record’s lush mixture of uplift and melancholy was enriched by its embrace of humanistic themes that were universally resonant: among them mortality, depression, war, poverty and madness.

“The mighty egos of men who strode the world’s stadiums like colossi usually identified with superheroes, swashbucklers and gods,” composer Howard Goodall observes. “Pink Floyd instead chose to identify with the lost, the confused, the yelled at, the disenfranchised.”

Despite both its monumental success and often autobiographical songwriting, the group somehow remained an enigma compared to other rock outfits. Even at this stage, Pink Floyd’s creative director, Aubrey Powell, tells me, “any member of the band could have walked through the audience and no one would have recognized them.”

The Great Gig in the Hammer

If Pink Floyd’s 1975 North American tour found the band at the absolute zenith of its creativity and showmanship, the decision to close things out in working-class Hamilton seems to have been the product of pure happenstance. Toronto almost always got the big shows, but with facilities at the CNE undergoing renovations, it ultimately fell to the smaller city’s 34,000-seat football stadium to host what attendee Rob Gronfors describes as “a mini-Woodstock” that brought the tour to its dramatic finale.

Until quite recently, the evening has existed mostly as a piece of local folklore, fondly remembered by those who attended and occasionally discoverable on obscure bootleg recordings. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, however, the more than two hour-long performance has now been enjoyed by hundreds of thousands around the world.

In another happy twist of fate, a stunning visual record of it has emerged as well, thanks to a 4K scan of 28 minutes’ worth of footage uploaded to YouTube in April. This very special time capsule came to Gronfors by way of his late friend Jim “Speedy” Kelly, an Orillia native who took to shooting rock shows with his 8-mm camera in the early 1970s. (Gronfors, a rock enthusiast and former tour manager himself, befriended Kelly at a 1977 Led Zeppelin concert and now runs a YouTube channel dedicated to sharing audio-synchronized restorations of his old reels.)

Even among this vast trove of rare footage, Kelly’s portrait of Pink Floyd’s banner performance in Hamilton is a particular treasure.

As Powell — who is also a former roommate of Syd Barrett’s and curator of the remarkable Pink Floyd exhibition “Their Mortal Remains” — informs me, the band was rarely photographed after 1973 and, astonishingly, very little footage of them performing was captured between the release of “Dark Side of the Moon” and the late 1980s.

“As individuals,” he says, “Pink Floyd were invisible.” Pink Floyd’s drummer Mason agrees, speculating that the enigmatic status of the group’s members was owed in part to their preference for creative visual accompaniment to live performances.

“By the 1970s, we’d sort of found our niche, which was very much putting on a show.” While many bands played in front of giant monitors featuring blown-up versions of themselves, Mason says, Pink Floyd were “much more interested in augmenting the music with lighting displays (and) particularly the use of film.” This televisual component, invariably cast from the band’s trademark circular screen and sometimes supported by props and pyrotechnics, became almost as integral to its performances as the music.

Music and visual effects alike would come together in spectacular fashion on the evening of June 28, 1975. Sandwiched between recording sessions for the yet-to-be-released “Wish You Were Here,” the show offered ticket holders a whole host of special delights, some of whose full significance can only be appreciated in retrospect.

Divided into two sets, the first hour featured songs soon to be iconic but entirely unknown to most or all of the crowd. The band’s openers “Raving and Drooling” and “You’ve Got to Be Crazy” would not be officially released until 1977’s “Animals” (respectively under the names “Sheep” and “Dogs.”) Introducing its since-legendary 26-minute suite “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” Waters offered an onstage tribute to Barrett, to whom the piece is dedicated. (Having mostly vanished for several years, the band had actually seen Barrett just weeks earlier when he had suddenly appeared, barely recognizable, at Abbey Road Studios during their work on “Wish You Were Here.”)

More observant concertgoers would have also noticed a more subtle tribute to Barrett from Wright, as his keyboard brought the song to conclusion with eight wistful notes taken from the melody of his 1967 composition “See Emily Play.”

As night fell, the unmistakable sound of a heartbeat signalled the beginning of the second set, occupied almost entirely by a complete performance of “The Dark Side of the Moon.” Aside from an infamously troubled gig at England’s Knebworth Park a few days later, it would be the last time the lineup behind one of rock’s most celebrated albums would play it live as a quartet.

The night is perhaps best remembered for what transpired next, as a giant model airplane travelling by wire high above the crowd appeared to crash into Ivor Wynne’s scoreboard and explode. In actuality, members of Pink Floyd’s road crew had decided to rig all of the remaining surplus pyrotechnics from the tour to the scoreboard and set them to go off in conjunction with a simulated plane crash.

No one was injured, but the explosion was sufficient to destroy the scoreboard and blow out the stadium’s back wall. If Canadian Pink Floyd appreciators have never forgotten the incident, neither has Nick Mason. “I do know that we did a horrible amount of damage to the scoreboard, to our deep shame,” he says. “To the people of Hamilton, I’m very sorry about the scoreboard!”

Notwithstanding dysfunctional pyrotechnics, the show proceeded without interruption, offering energetic renditions of “Dark Side” signatures like “Money” and “The Great Gig in the Sky” before an encore performance of “Echoes” — the sprawling and beautiful soundscape that had occupied a full half of Pink Floyd’s 1971 album “Meddle” — brought the evening to a close.

It had been a memorable affair that showcased one of the world’s most interesting and pioneering bands at its musical and artistic peak.

Pink Floyd, needless to say, would ultimately produce six more albums and play hundreds of other shows in the 48 years since it so memorably descended on Hamilton. By the early 1980s, however, the noxious pressures of success and creative differences within the band’s ranks would lead to Waters’ rancorous exit — the four not playing together again until their final ensemble performance at 2005’s Live 8. But whatever proverbial walls have periodically separated the quartet, its members have never faded from view or failed to create compelling work. Since Wright’s tragic passing in 2008, the others have reunited in various configurations while continuing to pursue their own respective tours and projects.

Today, Pink Floyd and its music are in fact experiencing something of a renaissance.

“Have You Got It Yet?” — a new film about Syd Barrett — premiered in May. “Squaring the Circle,” an entertaining and thoughtful documentary about the art studio Hipgnosis (which designed many of Pink Floyd’s most iconic album covers) had its Canadian debut at the Scotiabank Theatre this month.

Powell, who co-founded Hipgnosis with the late Storm Thorgerson, worked with the surviving band members over several years to assemble the astonishing collection of artifacts currently housed at the CNE for the “Their Mortal Remains” exhibit. Co-curated with his collaborator Paula Webb Stainton (another close collaborator of Pink Floyd’s) the exhibit offers a stunning audiovisual portrait of a band whose history now spans more than half a century.

I put the question of Pink Floyd’s enduring popularity and present revival to Mason, who in 2018 began performing songs from its early years with his own outfit Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets.

“I don’t really know,” he jokes. “It could just be four desperate, elderly men trying one last gasp at being pop stars.” But, he adds, the dual experience of consulting on the exhibit and playing the songs again has been a potent reminder of where it all started. “One thing that comes out towards the end of one’s working life is what fun it is to play music,” he says. “(And) I think it reminded me that the real core of this whole thing is to be onstage, playing with friends.”

Some 48 years after one unforgettable performance in Hamilton, Ont., Pink Floyd and its music continue to resonate in our era of political paralysis, technological disruption and commercialized existence: still finding new converts among the young, and no less able to render the hopes and fears of modern life in all of their dizzying and contrasting hues — pain and ecstasy; joy and sorrow; light and darkness.

Highlight reel: What to see at “Their Mortal Remains” Pink Floyd exhibition

“Their Mortal Remains” offers a chronological tour of the more than six decade history of one of the world’s most iconic bands. Through an extensive archive of photos, films and artwork, the exhibition traces Pink Floyd’s inception and earliest days as a psychedelic act in London’s underground scene through its high water mark in the 1970s to its members’ last performance together at Live 8 in 2005. These are the five things you can’t miss.

1. Individual showcases for all 15 of Pink Floyd’s studio albums, from The Piper At the Gates of Dawn (1967) to The Endless River (2014).

2. Personal effects from every member of Pink Floyd, extending as far back as Syd Barrett and Roger Waters’ school days at Cambridgeshire High School in the 1950s.

3. Handwritten scores, sketches and lyrics associated with landmark records like “Atom Heart Mother,” “Dark Side of the Moon” and “The Wall.”

4. Instruments and inflatables (including the famous pig) from Pink Floyd’s legendary tours and live performances.

5. Audiovisual exhibits featuring band interviews and rare concert footage.

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