Relics Floyd tribute at The Penny

Friday 6th July 2018
Penny Theatre, Canterbury
 

After cycling to Margate and back with Emilia (finally saw the mysterious shell grotto...wow!), I felt compelled to cycle just a bit further and drop in to The Penny to catch some of this Pink Floyd tribute band from Ashford.

I arrived just in time for the second set, the singer/guitarist coming on stage to announce "We're going to try playing the whole of Dark Side." And they did. Plus "Comfortably Numb" and "Another Brick In The Wall" to finish (including some Scottish-accented vocal humour, "...Grooving With a Pict"-style). The keyboard player covered the sax parts about as well as you could hope, and together with the guitarist managed to jam their way through a vocal-free "Great Gig In The Sky" surprisingly effectively. They didn't try to do it note-for-note, to their credit, adding their own touch and soloing freely. The mini laser show was rather sweet, when contrasted with the scale of Floyd's! What really struck me was that, despite the Floyd's very public school, middle-class origins, the band and audience were (as far as I could tell) much more working class — this music has become so embedded in the national psyche that it has become "the People's", and playing it like this has effectively become a form of folk art.