ARC Are Going On Tour To Celebrate The 50th Anniversary Of Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’

This is going to be an awesome tour! Join AUSTRALIAN ROCK COLLECTIVE (ARC) as they embark on a national tour to celebrate the 50th anniversary of arguably the most successful concept album of all time, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon.

Touring capital and regional cities around the country this June trough July, ARC – the supergroup comprised of Darren Middleton (Powderfinger), Mark Wilson (Jet), Davey Lane (You Am I) and Kram (Spiderbait) – will perform The Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety, beginning to end, before returning to the stage to take on a selection of Pink Floyd favourites and classics. The Dark Side of the Moon tour follows ARC’s unanimously praised renditions of Neil Young’s Harvest and The Beatles’ Let It Be live last year and the extended dates of The Beatles’ Abbey Road tours in 2019-2020. Davey Lane talks with Hi Fi Way about the album and upcoming tour which starts this week.

Are you looking forward to getting back on the road and touring with ARC playing Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon?
Absolutely, I think we’ve got our work cut out for us this time around, I think having done Harvest last year and ‘Let It Be’ as well, both records have this kind of ramshackle looseness to it where you could just go along with the music and let it play itself in a way. With this record, there’s a real precision to it. It’ll be a little daunting to start off with, we’ve got enough time in the rehearsal room to pull it all together. 

I know you’re a massive Pink Floyd fan but did it take much convincing to get Kram, Darren and Mark on board?
No, I mean it was like what records turn fifty in 2023. I think all four of us were that’s the one we have to do. I’m think Kram and I are probably a bit more obsessive about Pink Floyd than Mark or Darren. They’re both still huge Floyd fans. Darren was saying there’s a bunch of these songs and guitar solos that he’s wanted to play ever since he started playing guitar. Likewise with Mark, he grew up on Pulse, like the live record from the 1995. I think it’s just going to be a huge thrill for us. It’s not only Dark Side of the Moon, but as with our previous shows we’ll do a second set of our favourites from other records too. It’s going to be a big job, but it’ll be a lot of fun. 

Do particular songs gravitate to yourself, Kram, Darren or Mark?
I can’t really speak so much for them, but for me from Dark Side of the Moon, Us and Them is a particularly powerful song for me, musically and lyrically there’s just something so overwhelming about it. I’m especially looking forward to that one and in the second set as well, songs like, even though it’s one from the post Roger Ward’s eighties era, Learning to Fly, I know Mark is particularly looking forward to that one. For me as a huge Syd Barrett fan it would be nice to play one or two of his songs from his era of the band as well. It will be good. Aside from Dark Side of the Moon, we’ll cover the breadth of their career.

Have some of those songs proven to be more ambitious to try and learn to play than you first thought?
I think like in general, I can’t pinpoint songs, but I think with David Gilmore’s guitar parts and his guitar solos, they’re such beautifully and cleverly constructed guitar parts that you can’t really go, okay, I’m just going to play some pentatonic scales in B minor and that’ll be fine. His guitar solos are so indelibly a part of the songs that you have to play them precisely or there’s no point really. I don’t think daunted is the word, but we are very well aware of how important the guitar parts are for those songs and how precisely we’ll have to play them.

Do you learn a lot about yourself as a musician, being able to stretch yourself in a way that you wouldn’t ordinarily?
Yeah, absolutely. I think anytime you immerse yourself in a project like this, or what we’ve done over the last few years, even with The Beatles, I’m a huge Pink Floyd fan, I know all their records, but probably a bigger Beatles fan, but even a band like that where you think you’ve studied them enough to know all there is to know about their music, then you peel away the layers of the onion and you find out that there’s actually quite a bit more to it than you than you realised. It’s great to dig deep and go forensic on those kinds of records and realise that there’s actually more to the sum of the parts than you think there is. You always learn from those experiences and I think for me, first and foremost, I’m a music fan, so anything I absorb from music that I love is going to, whether it be songwriting devices or guitar sounds or production techniques or whatever, you always end up absorbing those and applying those things to your, own creative pursuits. 

Has it taken a lot of practice so far?
We’ve start rehearsing. I think it’s mainly the preparation leading up to rehearsal has been between Darren and I, because there are so many guitar parts and different things going on that we’ve had to go, okay, well I’ll play this and you play that part. Darren and I have been conversing a bit about the guitar side of things, but we are in the studio next week, we have a few days and then Kram’s off as Spiderbait are playing a festival in New York that You Am I played last year. He’s away for ten days or whatever it is. Once he’s back we’re back into it and then we’re off on tour. It will be good to have an initial few days of rehearsal and then have a little bit of time in between to let all the information percolate because there’s a lot of information to go with this. Not only the record itself, but the second set that we’re going to do.

Do you do a lot of research yourself? Whether it’s sort of going back listening to the album, obviously the other songs that you’re playing on playing and do you watch whatever live footage that you can get a hold of?
For me mostly the lead up to it has been trying to get to learn as much as I can about how David Gilmore constructed his guitar parts and his sounds because the sounds are so distinctive and unique that you can’t really just try and approximate them. You have to dig deep and fortunately there are a lot of, now in the days of the internet, there are plenty of resources out there that are dedicated to what kind of gear he was using from record to record. There’s a pedal company up in Brisbane called Past FX. They make a few pedals that replicate the same kind of circuits that Gilmore was using. I’ve managed to get a few of those pedals. At the end of the day, I’m just a nerd really. I live for that kind of stuff.

Has there been any other Pink Floyd trivia or facts that you’ve found out that you didn’t know before that’s blown you away?
I’ve been a Pink Floyd enthusiast for so long now that all the trivia and mythology of the band I’ve already immersed myself in. I think there’s been little revelations here and there about how they recorded certain songs and how they achieved certain sounds in studio. Any of these records that we do, you end up coming away from it with more intimate knowledge of the record and the artist themselves. 

Have any other albums been discussed to play on future tours?
We’ve been talking about what to do next year. We all have our own creative endeavours and ARC is like being on a school camp or something like that. We just get to play, pick a record that we love and jump into it. I don’t know, the temptation is there. We’ve been talking a little bit about it and the temptation is to go back to another Beatles record, which we’ll definitely do at some point. I’d love to attempt something like A Night At the Opera by Queen, but the thing is with that, vocally, trying to pull off anything approximating Freddie Mercury, we may have to recruit an extra singer for it if we were to try something like that. I’d definitely like to try A Night At the Opera maybe, or if we go back to The Beatles maybe Rubber Soul and Revolver together. Even George Harrison said himself that he saw those two records as bookends to each other. We don’t know for certain yet, but I’m sure by the end of this tour we will have figured out what we want to do next year.

It must be a buzz going from Pink Floyd to The Who playing Tommy with You Am I?
That’ll be great. That record is such a huge record for Tim and myself. I made no bones about the fact that I probably might not have, I’m sure I would’ve picked up a guitar at some point, but if it wasn’t for The Who and seeing Pete Townsend that made me want to play music in the first place. That’s the thing that was like, when I was thirteen/ fourteen, and I first saw You Am I on TV I was like, they’re not copying The Who, but there’s a band that is imbued with the same spirit, with that same kind of fire and energy. There are a lot of layers to it for me when it comes to not only The Who but the band that I’ve been in for a long time now. 

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch ARC playing Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon on the following dates, tickets from Live Nation…