The Delicate Sound of Thunder (1988)


 
Disc One 1. Shine on You Crazy Diamond 2. Learning to Fly 3. Yet Another Movie 4. Round and Round 5. Sorrow 6. The Dogs of War 7. On the Turning Away Disc Two 1. One of These Days 2. Time 3. Wish You Were Here 4. Us and Them 5. Money 6. Another Brick in the Wall 7. Comfortably Numb 8. Run Like Hell

 

When Pink Floyd reunited in 1987 (minus Roger Waters), they did something that they hadn't done in an entire decade: they toured. This was pretty substantial since there was a whole new generation of Pink Floyd fans that had never been given the chance to witness such a spectacle. For the concerts, basically everything was brought back. "Everything" meaning all of the elements that made a Pink Floyd show such an incredible experience. The only thing they didn't have was Roger Waters. Although this bothered me when I witnessed this tour, it didn't seem to bother most of the concert goers. After all, they were filling up stadiums (sadly, Waters was touring around the same time and only able to fill much smaller venues - some at 50% capacity).

During the tour, the bad blood was running deep, so the surviving members tried to stay away from the Waters-dominated material. That was a hard thing to do. So hard that their entire new, Waters-less album was featured. They basically played two sets, the first being most of the new album, and the second set was the audience "favorites". So the live album is a snapshot of the tour in the running order basically.

The good news was this was the first "real" Pink Floyd live album since Ummagumma and that was really an entirely different Pink Floyd. Although no one knew it at the time, Pink Floyd would put out another studio album and another double live CD (Pulse several years later.) As history would show, that second one was a much more superior recording. When looking at the song listings side by side, the only thing on this one (excluding the newer cuts that most don't care about) not on the later release is One of These Days which probably doesn't justify buying this whole album so many years after the fact.

So it was good at the time, but in a weird way, it's been made obsolete with the souvenir Pulse from their very next tour.

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