Experiencing Pink Floyd

The nine-piece UK Pink Floyd Experience band has come a long way in just two years since starting out in the tribute game.

They’ve rapidly ascended to the ranks of the medium-sized theatres and are delighted to be heading for the Assembly Hall in Worthing on Friday, June 24.

David Power, bass and vocals, and Neil Smallman, on Hammond organ/keyboards, had always intended to get together for a Pink Floyd tribute, David says.

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“We had played in various bands before, and then for some reason the planets were in the right alignment. We always said, though, that if we ever did it, then we would always look in particular at what we call the Gilmour years of the late 80s and 90s, when the tours would all go out with a nine or ten-piece band, when they were big productions with extraordinary lighting and film shows. That’s what our aim is.

“Part of the challenge was finding the right people. Fortunately our three lady backing singers are people I have worked with in the past.”

And so the pieces fell into place. The biggest difficulty was in finding their Gilmour, a figure a lot of the tribute put across with two separate people, one the guitarist, the other the vocalist - not an option David considered.

The band isn’t specifically a look-alike band, but they wanted the look to look right. Separate singer and guitarist would have looked wrong. However, in Paul Andrews they found the right person to combine the two roles, just as Gilmour himself did.

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The band started rehearsing and after just three months, they were starting to play the pubs, since when things have gone well, projecting them to the middle level on the Pink Floyd tribute spectrum.

At the bottom you’ve got the pub bands doing their thing: “At the top you’ve got the Australian Floyd show that have been going 20 or 25 years, playing the same stadia that Floyd themselves would have played.

“That’s eventually the level we would like to be at, but I think we are maybe five or six years away from that at the moment,” David said.

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