That curious link between Vasco Rossi and Pink Floyd
No, Vasco Rossi has never sang a Pink Floyd song. In 1984 he inserted in the album live “okay, that’s okay” a version of “liver, crackled liver” in which he quoted “God save the queen” of sex pistols, the punk icons that a decade before had made history in the United Kingdom. In 1993 at the beginning of “Lo Show”, the song that opened the album “The shots above”, they cited “Child in Time” of the Deep Purple, while the title track was a rewriting in Italian of “celebrated” of the Irish An Emotional Fish. An operation, the latter, that Zocca’s rocker repeated in 2009, when he rewritten in Italian “Creep” of Radiohead making it become “at any cost”. In 2018, however, he paid homage to the metal live by hinting their “Enter Sandman”. But with the band of “Wish You Were here” the Komandante has never had to do. Yet there is a curiosity that binds Vasco Rossi to Roger Waters and members.
If you have been to one of the concerts of the “Vasco Live 2025”, the tour with which this summer the rocker is performing in the Italian stadiums, and if you have remained until the end of the show, you perhaps know what we are talking about. Vasco Rossi has chosen to close his shows this year with a double quote from Pink Floyd: when the public flows towards the exits, after the last three pieces in the lineup, “We are only us”, “Song” and “Albachiara”, the amplifiers start the notes of two classics of Pink Floyd. One is “brain damage” and the other is “eclipse”. The meaning, if there is, is all to be deciphered.
“Brain Damage” was composed of Roger Waters in 1971, but the song was completed and permanently engraved by Pink Floyd between 1972 and 1973, for “The Dark Side of the Moon”. Waters said that the text, on the theme of madness, was inspired bythe mental instability of the former Floyd frontman, Syd Barrett: iThe verse “I’m see you on the dark side of the moon”, “see you on the dark side of the moon”, in addition to inspiring the title of the album, has become a well -known metaphor for human irrationality and expresses the idea that madness is always present but invisible, waiting to be unmasked. To the theme of madness, which is central to “The Dark Side of the Moon”, it also links “Eclipse”, always composed of Waters.
Moreover, a poet that life “is all a balance above madness” and perhaps the choice to put the two songs of the Pink Floyd at the end of the show is not really completely accidental, given the concept that this year characterizes the shows of Vasco Rossi (for the record: in 2023 he brought a decidedly busy show, political, and to close the concerts in that case was ” skirt like “by Sam Cooke):” Every song of this concert is a life of lived, stubborn, complicated life.
After the debut of May 31 in Turin (where he also performed the next day, June 1), Vasco Rossi carried on his tour by making a stop on 5 and 6 June in Florence and on 11 and 12 June in Bologna. Tomorrow and Tuesday he will be in Naples (Diego Armando Maradona stadium), 21 and 22 in Messina (San Filippo stadium), to conclude the tour with the double appointment of 27 and 28 June in Rome (Olympic Stadium). Meanwhile, he has already announced the concerts of the Tour 2026.
