At Red Rocks, the top-tier tribute band hits every note in songs from Pink Floyd’s masterpiece.

In February of 1980, my friends and I coughed up what was at the time an extraordinary amount of money for a concert ticket: $20. But this was a big one, since Pink Floyd was bringing the limited tour of The Wall to Nassau Coliseum on Long Island near our home. Since its release in December of ’79, we’d been wearing out the grooves of the double album and could only imagine how they’d perform it live.

With only 12 dates in the U.S. (five at the Coliseum, another seven in L.A.), we knew we had some seriously golden tickets, and Floyd didn’t disappoint. Famously at war with one another and on the verge of breakup amidst a boondoggle of a production, the band nevertheless pulled off what was for me the single most memorable concert I’ve ever seen. A plane flew out of the rafters and crashed into the stage, enormous puppets depicting The Schoolmaster, Mother and others hovered over the band as an enormous wall of white bricks was systematically constructed throughout the first act. When it ended and the whole set was obscured and the lights came up at intermission, it took several seconds before the applause — we were all stunned.

Since then, The Wall is something I still listen to start-to-finish at least once a year. There’s really nothing like it, even in Floyd’s own oeuvre. From its high-flying David Gilmour solos to the songs ranging from straightforward rock (“Young Lust”) to the unlikely radio hit “Another Brick in the Wall Pt. II” to the constant barrage of radio and TV broadcasts that punctuate the album, it’s as weird as it is great.

Lighting up the rocks | Photo: Jen Miller

A wealth of musicianship

Since the breakup of the band right after The Wall tour, plenty of tribute bands have formed to fill the desire to hear Pink Floyd live. One of the most venerable is Brit Floyd, which formed in Liverpool in 2011 and has performed over 1,500 shows around the world. They often play at Red Rocks, and this year they did a two-night stand at the amphitheater with the June 4 show leaning into The Wall and The Dark Side of the Moon featured June 5.

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I don’t have any issues with tribute bands, but I’d just never seen one before. In my mind, they’re no different from any orchestra playing the great symphonies — just keeping music people love to hear alive long after the creators are either dead or simply done performing. And while I’d watched some of Brit Floyd on PBS, seeing them live I was floored by how well this astoundingly accomplished group of musicians recreated Pink Floyd’s complex material.

Gilmour’s solo in the latter part of “Comfortably Numb” is perhaps the greatest of all time. Coming as it does after we’ve learned how unwell mentally the main character in the story (Pink) is, it’s a wail of sadness and longing that transcends any lyrics. Famously nailed on the first take in the studio, it features technical challenges like descending pentatonic runs and eighth-note triplets. Guitarist Damian Darlington nails the whole thing. I was near enough to the stage to see his finger work in closeup on the monitors, revealing the extraordinary skill it takes to pull it off.

Singer-guitarist and founding Brit Floyd member Damian Darlington. | Photo: Matt Farr

Note for note

The whole show is like this: note-for-note takes on these classic songs with only the occasional added-on riffs on the endings of a few of them. We didn’t come to hear them Marty McFly their way through “Money” — tribute bands are wedded to the material and beholden to exact reproduction. On that score, Brit Floyd is remarkably spot-on.

Darlington shares guitar duty with a similarly gifted musician, Bobby Harrison, and bassist Ian Cattell trades off lead vocals with Darlington. Drummer Randy Cooke gets Nick Mason’s iconic drum sounds just as they sounded originally, with keyboardist Rob Stringer faithfully following in the style of the late Richard Wright.

The band is augmented with wildly talented multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Dewey — an audience favorite handling saxophone, percussion and occasional bass. Three female backup singers round out the ensemble, most notably Ángela Cervantes, who distinguished herself belting out the wordless vocal solo in “The Great Gig in the Sky.”

Cattell nominally carries the Roger Waters vocals with Darlington more aligned with Gilmour. A highly accomplished bassist, Cattell also handles the most theatrical elements telling the story of The Wall in particular. He plays a white-coated doctor in “Comfortably Numb,” the raging Pink destroying a hotel room in “One of My Turns” and the leather-clad, jackbooted Nazi-esque lunatic authoritarian in the final act.

Bassist and singer Ian Cattell is helped out in “Another Brick in the Wall, Part II’ by members of Young Voices of Colorado. | Photo: Alex Miller

Finale

Unlike the original concert, Brit Floyd didn’t play the entire album, mixing in other Floyd hits like “Time,” “Wish You Were Here,” “One of These Days,” and others while returning time and again to The Wall material. It doesn’t get any wilder than side four of the album, where Pink is caught up in a police state, imprisoned for “showing feelings” and subjected to a mad trial where he’s pilloried by characters from his life. Gerald Scarfe’s terrifying original drawings of all of this are on hand, particularly the bewigged judge who’s portrayed as an ass and balls.

This closes out the three-hour show in commanding fashion, with the quiet little coda “Outside the Wall” performed as the band filed off the stage.

Forty-six years after seeing that original concert, I felt enormously grateful that Brit Floyd is still out there presenting this material in 2026. Sure, much of the audience was as gray as I am, but I also saw plenty of younger Floyd fans, there to experience a bit of musical history from a band that had no peers in its unique style of experimental rock.

They’ll be back — see them if you can.