Echoes, without Echoes, at The Berry

Sad events kept me away from Echoes for a while. They lost their guitarist, Lee, in a car accident last year and then when they got back on the road and played at a local pub, the Fox and Duck in Petersham, I was at a memorial for a friend of mine who died recently.

The ill winds finally dissipated on Saturday 13 April when I was able to catch Echoes at The Berry in Surbiton. I last saw them play there two years ago.

Obviously new guitarist, Doug Lean (far left),has had an impact on the band. His style is a little more forceful and aggressive than Lee's and he does not use a slide guitar (yet). Doug has not yet learnt the full set so this was the band Echoes without the track Echoes. Of course Echoes was missed but the Pink Floyd catalogue is not exactly small and the set survived without it.

There is still a heavy reliance on The Wall, and there is nothing wrong with that. This is obvious from the very beginning and the shows opens with the traditional song In the Flesh?,the words, "So ya, Thought ya, Might like to go to the show" and a solid blast of sound that announces to the pub that the band are on and they mean business.

The set continues with more from The Wall and a smattering of songs from the likes of A Momentary Lapse of Reason, e.g. Sorrow and The Dogs of War) and there was Arnold Layne too.

There was nothing from The Dark Side in the first half as they saved that up for the second. This is the album's fortieth birthday and to celebrate Echoes are playing it in its entirety.

To be honest they used to play all of it before but not in the right order and with other songs interleaved,

Dark Side is still a brilliant album (I bought it in '73 and several times since then) and was warmly received by the enthusiastic audience.

Money was an obvious highlight because it is such a great song and another was Great Gig in The Sky because the saxophone did the part of the screaming vocals so well. Despite that, Us and Them was my favourite song on the night as Echoes skilfully pulled all of the meaning out of the song. It was impossible not to sing along.

Now that Echoes are back on the road I expect to be singing along to them again once or twice again this year. And yet again after that.