Pink Floyd double feature: The Wall & Dark Side of the Rainbow – Thu 18 December 2008 – Globe Theatre

The Bear says:

So, after only a week, it was back to the Globe Theatre for another musical double feature, this time by Pink Floyd. I'm not a huge Pink Floyd fan – really, the only one of their albums that I really love is their psychedelic first one, Piper at the Gates of Dawn. However, the powerful visual images in The Wall have always really appealed to me and I'd never seen it on the big screen before, so I was keen to catch this showing.

The other attraction was Dark Side of the Rainbow, which I'd heard references to for many years but never actually investigated. If you haven't investigated it either, the title refers to the practice of watching The Wizard of Oz with the sound turned off while listening to Dark Side of the Moon instead. Yes, really. Proponents of this allege amazing bits of synchronicity between the images on the screen and the sounds on the album, to the point where some people claim this to have been intentional on the part of the band.

I'm not going to repeat last week's comments on the Globe experience, except to say once again that I'm so glad that the venue exists to put on the programming that it does. I am, however, going to say that whoever first thought that The Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon somehow synch up was clearly out of his or her head. There's a lot of information (words, beats) in a 45-minute album, and it doesn't terribly surprise me that when played against a movie (any movie), Dark Side of the Moon (or any album) will contain words that match an image on the screen from time to time or beats that match a movement. To me, the most striking co-incidences were close to the end of the "experience" where there were about three "matches" in close succession during the confrontation between the Wicked Witch and Glinda. A few minutes later, there's another funny match as the scarecrow dances around like a lunatic as Pink Floyd sings "the lunatic is on the grass". But that was about it. I'm very glad to have finally seen this for myself, so I can now say from personal experience, "nothing to see here".