Our thanks to Theatrice Westbrook for very kindly sharing recollections of an evening in Irvine, California, in June 1984, when David Gilmour played at the Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre as part of his About Face tour that year: Chef André Wiederkehr, a friend of my co-worker and friend Karen, got tickets and they had a couple extra. They invited me and other coworker/friend Brian and gave us a ride. Pink Floyd wasn’t really Brian’s cup of tea. He was more New Wave, outrageous⦠he turned me on to John Waters and “Pink Flamingos”! But ironically after a group of us saw Berlin in concert in Hollywood earlier, he told me LA was too much, he couldn’t wait to get back behind that Orange Curtain (the more conservative Orange County, California)! Go figure. Brian had his leg in a cast, but refused a wheelchair and walked from the parking lot to our seat on crutches. (He took up the wheelchair offer after the concert.) We had great seats in the lower section, closest to the stage. David Gilmour’s first solo tour. Roger Waters had also begun his first solo tour during the middle of this tour (and more Floyd acrimony would lay ahead). Before the show, André and I went to the restroom; I came out first. Through the fence I saw a guy in jeans and a red Pendleton talking with crew or someone. He looked like a trucker. I looked at his face from profile, it was David Gilmour, 20-25 feet away, with very short hair. I about shit myself. André came out of the bathroom, talking. André was a super hardcore European Floyd fan from Austria. (Translation: Hardcore fan.) When I pointed out David Gilmour, he stopped in his tracks, staring, speechless. We both stared for a couple minutes before returning to our seats. No opening act. A beautiful Summer eve, a little warm. I had both solo albums and hoped he would play my favourite track “There’s No Way Out of Here” (he didn’t). But I was not disappointed. The new album, “About Face”, was more “radio friendly”, with more guest players (Jeff Porcaro was the drummer). The stage was much more scaled down than on Floyd tours. (Part of the show is visible in the US-only 1984 home video release “David Gilmour Live.”) The band played cuts from Gilmour’s two solo albums along with a couple of Floyd tracks. The stage darkened and a deep synth pulsated in syncopation with lighting on the lip of the stage and around the edge of the stage risers. This signalled the opening song “Until We Sleep”, the first of 5 new album cuts. The band was on it. Loud and clear. I thought I recognized the second guitarist who looked like Mick Ralphs, noted this imposing bald drummer, and a lady on percussion who looked like she was pregnant. The next song was the Pete Townshend/David Gilmour song “All Lovers Are Deranged”, which slammed in the same fashion as the first, and with an ending that presaged the intro/outro of Pink Floyd song “Sorrow” (from the 1987 album “A Momentary Lapse of Reason”), as it shook the whole amphitheater.
