Another strength of the post-Waters Floyd is in the live shows, something that unfortunately will not follow
The Endless River album release (I fully understand why, it would be awkward to do so without Rick). Old pieces continued to evolve on both of those 1987-89 and 1994 tours, and the same is true for some old and new pieces on David's subsequent live tours (I already mentioned the extended version of High Hopes from David's concert DVD, which is superb).
They recorded two live albums during the two post-Waters tours, and there was a lot of free potential there to revisit things and do them differently. I like the fact that they filmed the entire
Dark Side being played live (something Nick believes should've been done in the first place when the album originally came out), and that extended (9+ minutes long) version of Money on
Pulse is fantastic (along the same lines, the updated One of These Days on both tours is far superior to the 1971 album version, imo; I just wish there was no audience noise on those two live albums, Pompeii style
).
There are some other things that I wish they did on those live albums. There are 3 old pieces of chopped-up music that I would love to hear as single, complete (and extended) independent numbers: Breathe, Shine On and Another Brick in the Wall.
Breathe is chopped up into Breathe, Any Color You Like [aka Breathe (second reprise)], and Breathe (reprise) on the
Dark Side, but it would be great to hear the number being played as a single piece, and in that running order (with a lot of extra improvisation for the Any Color You Like segment, like in 1972).
The same goes for Shine On. I think that Shine On is the best piece of music they ever created, and it has the best PF sound ever. What
always bothered me is the fact that it was split into two halves on the actual record. WYWH would have been a far better album if the A-side was simply Shine On 1-9, and B-side the other three songs. For this reason only, I think that the
Dark Side is the better album overall. I know that I am not the only one thinking this because there are a few amateur attempts out there (on YouTube and alike) to put together Shine On studio recording back into a single piece, with varying degrees of success. It was originally played live as a single piece (as heard on one of the Immersion disks, and a few bootlegs), so one can get a good sense of how the two halves were joined, but post-Waters Floyd could've played the whole thing live as one piece and release it as such. Unfortunately all live versions of Shine On are, in terms of the actual sound, worse than the studio version (that cathedral sound would be very difficult to reproduce live), a rare example for Floyd. In contrast, Echoes on David's Live in Gdańsk (played with Rick) is far better than the studio album version, again if one could get rid of the audience.
Finally, I would love to hear Another Brick in the Wall (1-3) as a single piece of music, with a lot of solo improvisation in there. Post-Waters Floyd could've done that too, perhaps even without being sued again.
They could've pursued things like that on
The Delicate Sound of Thunder and
Pulse, to make them more interesting, and far more relevant.
, but a local record store has promised me a copy