March 10, 2020 was for me, my son Dilbert and two friends a rare highlight in what was for most people
on planet Earth annus horribilus.
It was the night that the concert film Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets was screened for one night only around the world. But it had certainly not always been on my “must see” list.
For some time beforehand I had been put off the thought of ever paying much attention to Nick, Guy, Gary, Lee and Dom’s interpretations of early Floyd favourites after watching a few clips of them on YouTube.
It pains me to say it, but Nick Mason’s drumming on a couple of the clips was downright awful. For example, in the bit in the middle of the original recording of One of These Days Nick thumps the drum eleven times. On the clip I saw he timidly tapped it five times. It was empty, it was lame… It was just plain wrong!
And in the original Arnold Layne, initially Nick raps the snare drum after Syd sings “Arnold Layne……..”
with a straight rat tat tat tat tat tat. But the last time he plays ratatat tatatat tatatat tatatat….
But on the YouTube clip, Nick just played it safe and did the rat tat tat tat tat tat every time. WRONG!
You may think I’m being overly picky here, but it was an ominous signal to me that maybe these shows
weren’t going to feature the attention to detail that I felt the songs demanded.
But the clincher – and the reason I never watched another SoS video – was Gary Kemp singing Fearless.
I’ll never forget his, “You say the hill’s too steep to CLI–EE-YIMB”. It had me curled up in the fetal position on the floor with blood trickling from my ears as I tried to reach for the mute button. Even now I can still hear it in my head like a jackhammer splitting my brain. Somebody please make it stop!
Ok, clearly the band were enjoying themselves and having fun on stage, but to hear Gary Kemp murder what I consider one of David Gilmour’s best vocal performances in such a (seemingly) disrespectful manner made me conclude there and then this whole Saucerful of Secrets venture was a bit of a crock.
But my friend Michelangelo (not his real name) contacted me about the March 10 screening in Melbourne. My son Dilbert and his father-in-law Darrell (not the correct spelling) were mad keen to go, so I decided to tag along, thinking the four of us could make a fun night of it even if the music was rubbish.
The night arrived and the four of us met up at Michelangelo’s place. We had an hour and a half to get to the venue, which was an hour’s drive away. Unfortunately we first had to drop Michelangelo’s daughter Veronica (not her real name) to her part time job at Harrold’s Horrendous Hamburgers (not its real name. It was actually Harrold’s Horrendous Hot Dogs). It was fifteen minutes’ drive in the opposite direction.
Then once we’d dropped Veronica and driven off we all got really hungry. The waft of those horrendous hot dogs… sorry, “hamburgers” was making our mouths water. So we pulled off the highway to a roadside McDoggles Fried Curry Hacienda (not its real… you get it!). There were dozens of cars at the drive thru, so we thought it would be way quicker ordering inside.
It wasn’t. Juniors manned the counter with no supervision, and as we all waited for our orders to be processed the clock wound around and all the cars we had seen in the drive thru disappeared, along with twenty seven others which had arrived after us.
I stepped forward and asked if I could change my order to a selection from the breakfast menu.
Knowing by now we were going to be horribly late, we chomped down our McDFCH’s in the car, hoping that we’d be saved by the usual two and a half hour’s worth of Pearl and Dean commercials before the feature film.
Oh, and there was another saving grace. I had been clever enough to book ahead for our car parking. Earlier in the day I went online and selected a multi level car park just near the venue, so at least parking wouldn’t be an issue.
Or so I thought.
We parked the car and walked out onto the street. One look at Michelangelo’s Google Maps on his phone and it was clear I’d gotten us parked near the wrong cinema!
Not only were we in the wrong block, we were pretty much in the wrong suburb! So we started running towards the cinema where we were supposed to be as fast as we could.
For the young Dilbert that was a reasonable clip. For Darrell and me, quite brisk but with regular stops and the ever-present risk of a coronary. But for Michelangelo, not as svelte as he once was, and with a walking stick, three false hips and gout in his knees and ankles, the pace was little more than an agitated shuffle. With the ever-present risk of a coronary.
We’d have been better off getting the car straight back out of the car park (for sixty bucks, probably! A friend of mine once said there’s a special place prepared in hell for multi level car park owners.) and driving to another car park closer to the cinema.
Because we are all such nice guys we slowed and waited for poor Michelangelo. We arrived at the cinema, surprised to find the movie was still playing, and entered the theatre just as the crowd was singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone”. No, not the crowd in the theatre, in the film. The crowd at the end of Fearless.
We’d missed the first four songs, but ONLY four songs. And importantly I’d missed Gary Kemp singing “cli-ee-yimb”. So it wasn’t a total disaster.
To be continued…