Pulse [DVD]

I was at one of the Earls Court concerts all those years ago and had forgotten just how magnificent The Floyd were live. Inevitably this cannot be fully captured on DVD but this is certainly the next best thing.

After 12 years of watching Floyd tribute bands it was a sharp reminder of just how good the real thing were. As I didn't get a ticket for the Live 8 appearance I suspect that this was my last ever chance to see them live and if that is so this DVD is a fitting tribute as it captures the full majesty of the band live both visually and aurally.

If the guitar solo at the end of Comfortably Numb does not blow you away then you either have no soul or are already dead.

Shine on & on & on & On & on.................

After years of looking for this on DVD and only finding dodgy bootlegged copies of the VHS and LD releases, I'd given up on the hope of ever expanding the collection beyond Live at Pompeii. Then yesterday I was buying stuff for a stir-fry at Sainsburies, happened to peep at the "impulse buy" display next to the till and saw the 2-disc DVD set of Pink Floyf Live at Earl's Court, 1994. There went my Monday night.

FINALLY one of (if not THE) best concerts ever performed is available to buy on a format that it truly deserves (be quiet LD people, I was only about 12 at the time that was around and nowhere near rich enough to own one. And besides, YOU didn't have it in 5.1). And it's about time. Has it been worth the wait? Have Gilmour et al gone to town and given it the treatment they should have?

Yes. Almost. Well, yes. They have. Ish.

Amongst the numerous reasons cited for the delay of release, chief seemed to be the difficulty in transferring the image from the source material in such a fashion as to do it justice on your common all-garden Big Fat LCD TV. And I for one am not fussed for having to wait now that I've seen the results - the picture quality is ABSOLUTELY. UNBELIEVABLY. ASTOUNDING. The light show that could have powered a small third-world country for a year that Floyd put on in 1994 is blisteringly vibrant when watched on a DVD format, and in comparison the original VHS release (and TV broadcast) looks like a Duracell torch who's battery is running embarrassingly low on juice.

Even better than the eye-bleedingly good picture is the sound. Dear God.

Lovingly mastered in thunderous Dolby 5.1, the soundtrack is quite simply awesome. Not mid-90's American teen drama high five 'awesome', more like the witnessing the power of God and being reduced to a mass of gibbering jelly by it's force 'awesome'. Your fillings may shatter, your ear-drums might burst, your walls might crumble, and your neighbours WILL move out (or come round to enjoy as mine did). Finally, there is a justification for everyone to own a surround sound system. Sell the car. Remortgage the house. Put the kids to work in a labour camp. Anything. It's THAT good. If I had been lucky enough to be there on the night I might even go so far as to say it was even better than being there. I can't imagine how anything could improve upon the experience the sound engineers have managed to produce when this is heard through a half-decent sound system.

So why the "ish" comment above when I asked "is it worth the wait"?

Well, there are a couple of niggles. Bear in mind that I have given this DVD 5 stars and that it is already snuggling in the pride of place, easy access, will never be damaged from having too many "3-for-2" Warner Bros DVDs shoved into the shelf next to it area on my DVD rack; they are minor niggles. But after all the hoo-ha that was kicked up around the release of this musical behemoth, the massive delays, I do feel that they detract from the experience of ownership ever so slightly.

First of all, awe-inspiring though the quality of the concert presentation may be, it is pretty much a straight port from the original VHS release. It would have been nice of the producers, having made some of the fans wait so long for the release that there's a high probability they actually DIED before it came out, to have bumped out the track listing on the first half. The fact that they haven't raises some eyebrows - I hope to God there is not a Pulse: Ultimate Extreme Edition in the pipeline just in time for Chrimbo - and does whiff, EVER-SO-SLIGHTLY, of laziness. OK, so it has been "re-edited" according to the back of the box - but this amounts to a few snips here and there to better cover up the fact that the steel guitar solo in "High Hopes" is actually from the CD release and NOT the night of performance that was filmed (anyone who's got a copy of the BBC broadcast will know that Dave spooned it spectacularly halfway in, and on the official VHS it had already been replaced by the CD track but not re-edited - so what he was playing and what you were seeing didn't quite match up). That's about the sum of it.

The extras are pretty stand-up - the inclusion of the screen projections and the videos made viewable in full screen, in their entirety, are a nice touch and the featurettes are decent. "Bootlegging the Bootleggers" is also an interesting idea, and also lends some explanation as to why the track listing for the first half wasn't expanded (the material may simply have not been available). But again, there's the whiff of laziness - where's the featurette on the night the stage collapsed? Where are the lengthy retrospective interviews with the band? For such a landmark release - one of the most anticipated concert DVDs ever, the last concert that one of the world's most influential bands OF ALL TIME ever did - after watching all the extras, you do put it back in it's lofty shrine within the collection with a few unfulfilled wonderings.

Gripes about the completeness of the extras and moans about expanded content however are, as I said, minor detractors. The reason they exist is simply that what we ARE given is so good, you can't help but wish for more.

In conclusion, the wait is over, and if you don't own this as soon as you can afford to spare the cash - then quite frankly, you're an idiot.

145 minutes of a superb concert in brilliant digital format - high quality visuals and sound capture an astounding musical and visual concert. For the money the rendition of DSOTM in it's entirity is reason alone for buying this DVD. There is also a great mix of live performances from other Floyd albums and I personally loved One of These Days. Great musicians - great everything. The two CD's last for about 4 hours and there is a plethora of extras - but who really cares about those, all I wanted was the concert! On a technical note, the Dolby 5.1 can be streamed at the standard 448 kbps or at the higher resolution of 640 kbps which gives a higher audio quality - fortunately my DVD set up allows use of the 640kbps - well worth it! So stop reading the reviews go out and buy the product.