You could set the controls for the heart of the sun if you'd like, but if you're into Pink Floyd deep enough to get that reference, you would do better to set those control for the heart of Mesa on Tuesday. That's when the Australian Pink Floyd Show returns to Mesa Arts Center with another tribute act, Led Zeppelin 2.
Here's what bassist Colin Wilson had to say about the concert when he checked in from the road.
Details: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 2. Mesa Arts Center, 1 E. Main St. $35-$95. 480-644-6500, mesaartscenter.com.
Question: What can fans expect from the tour you'll be bringing to Mesa?
Answer: We’ve played Mesa many time but this year is slightly different. We’ve got another band on the tour with us, Led Zeppelin 2, which are a fantastic Led Zeppelin tribute band, so we’re giving the fans a real complete night of the best classic rock. Led Zeppelin 2 come on and do their set. We come on and do a 90-minute set of the best of Pink Floyd. We try to cover most eras of Pink Floyd in that 90 minutes and give everybody something they can relate to. And we’ve obviously got a show that we’ve become kind of reasonably renowned for, which is a huge light show, a laser show, projections of a circular screen, inflatables that come up during the show and the best 90 minutes of Pink Floyd.
Q: How did you wind up playing in a Pink Floyd tribute band?
A: Well, the guys that started the band originally, two of the original members are still in the band today. They were huge Pink Floyd fans and I think they’d been in other kind of pub cover bands and played a couple of Pink Floyd songs and always got good responses to those. And it was the very early days of the kind of tribute-band scene, if you want to call it that, in Australia. And they decided with the encouragement of some of their friends to kind of concentrate on doing Pink Floyd and seeing if that was possible to do a complete evening of Pink Floyd music and nothing else. In the early days, it was like no one even knew if there would ever be an audience for that kind of thing, if people would embrace or think it was a bit strange or whatever. By the time I came along, and I’ve been doing it 22 years now, for me personally, it was kind of a challenge. And I had been to see them so I knew how good they were and what the potential was, so it was something to really get my teeth sunk into. And then we started to build up a following in Australia very gradually. People started to warm to the idea and enjoy what we were doing. And we just took it from there really, one day at a time. You never get any kind of guarantees in this business. So we thought let’s see if it’s possible to do this and how it’s going to go over with the Pink Floyd fans.
Q: As a Pink Floyd fan, do you have a favorite era of the band?
A: My favorite era, and I think this is the same for a lot of Pink Floyd fans, is probably that kind of ‘70s era when Roger Waters kind of picked up the baton as a songwriter with “Meddle” and “Dark Side of the Moon,” “Wish You Were Here,” “Animals” and “The Wall.” For me, that is probably the core time. Saying that, there’s obviously things from before that I love and things from after that that I love as well, even from the “Division Bell” album in ’94. I mean, there were some real classic Pink Floyd songs on that album. But if I had to narrow it down to one album, I would probably fluctuate between “Dark Side of the Moon” and “Animals.” For me, “Animals” is usually the one that sort of stands out because it’s a little bit rockier and a little bit harder edge, maybe. I think the subject matter of the songs is really interesting and there are some epic compositions on there.
Q: Do you tend to focus on the radio staples? Are there deeper album cuts?
A: On this tour, because we’re doing a 90-minute set and we’ve got another band with us, it does tend to be a more radio-friendly set, the things that a majority of people know, because we’ve got to assume that half of the audience for these shows are gonna be Led Zeppelin fans primarily, so we need to be doing the Pink Floyd stuff that they’re more likely to know. But it’s still nice to get a couple album cuts in there that people may not expect us to do. Certainly, when we do our full show, a two-and-a-half-hour, we get to play some of those deeper album cuts like “Careful With That Ax, Eugene” or “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” those kinds of things, which are great fun to play and they’re great for the real die-hard Pink Floyd fans that know every note they ever recorded. But even on this tour, we’re still trying to get a couple things in there that maybe people wouldn’t expect us to do.
Q: Do you do any Syd Barrett songs?
A: Yeah, over the years, we’ve done a couple of Syd things. We do “Astronomy Domine” quite often. That’s a song we enjoy. And we’ve done “Arnold Layne,” “Lucifer Sam.” But again, within the context of the show, we have to be mindful that a lot of the audience probably are going to be waiting for things from “The Wall” and “Dark Side of the Moon,” the more commercially successful albums.