Happy Birthday David Gilmour | Pink Floyd In Venice

Today marks Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour’s 68th birthday. Gilmour, who’s currently working on a solo album, joined Pink Floyd in 1967 and was vital to the group’s sound as they became one of the biggest bands in the world. After Roger Waters left Pink Floyd in the ’80s, it was Gilmour who became the group’s de-facto leader.

We want to celebrate David’s birthday by looking back at professionally-shot video from the A Momentary Lapse Of Reason Tour -the group’s first jaunt without Waters. On July 15, 1989 -nearly two years after the tour began -Pink Floyd performed at Grand Canal in Venice, Italy for a show that aired live on Italian TV and was broadcast worldwide. The evening’s 14-song setlist mixed Pink Floyd classics with tunes off A Momentary Lapse Of Reason. It was not without its issues, but presents some of the best available footage from the tour.

Here’s what Gilmour had to say about the show in a 1990 interview with Q Magazine, “The Venice show was great fun, but it was very tense and nerve-wracking. We had a specific length of show to do; the satellite broadcasting meant we had to get it absolutely precise. We had the list of songs, and we’d shortened them, which we’d never done before. I had a big clock with a red digital read-out on the floor in front of me, and had the start time of each number on a piece of paper. If we were coming near the start time of the next number, I just had to wrap up the one we were on. We had a really good time, but the city authorities who had agreed to provide the services of security, toilets, food, completely reneged on everything they were supposed to do, and then tried to blame all the subsequent problems on us.”

Watch the two-hour-plus Pink Floyd -Live In Venice video:

0:00 Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Part 1)
2:56 Learning To Fly
8:28 Yet Another Movie
14:45 Round And Around
15:20 Sorrow
24:56 The Dogs Of War
32:45 On The Turning Away
40:27 Time
46:11 The Great Gig In The Sky
51:06 Wish You Were Here
55:41 Money
1:05:32 Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)
1:11:05 Comfortably Numb
1:20:50 Run Like Hell?