Pink Floyd is one of my favourite bands. If I only have 10 uses of time travel, one of them would be to transport myself to their 1974 Dark Side of the Moon concert at Wembley.

Seriously, who else is pretentious enough to do a concert for the lost souls of Pompei??
Seriously, who else is pretentious enough to do a concert for the lost souls of Pompei??

Born 20 years too late for the PC revolution or to catch the tail end of the band before they broke up, I went to a show by a tribute band at Cambridge instead last night.

They were great. They went through the albums over the years, from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn all the way to The Endless River, and played a song from each. They also played all the bangers with singalongs, such as Another Brick in the Wall and Comfortably Numb.

However, to be honest, when the show first started, I was a bit ehhh. They started off with Shine On You Crazy Diamond, which I've probably listened to over 100 times at this point. While the guitar was great, the singing was.. a bit lacking. It didn't have the same sense of loss and longing that Roger Waters had for his long lost friend Syd Barrett, and the high notes just weren't it. The spirit of the song was there, but it just wasn't the same. You could hear the notes and words being sung, but not the weight behind them.

That got me thinking - in my pursuit of brain upload, any replica of our self is akin to having a tribute band playing the song that is one's life. It is there but it is also not there. The lyrics and the song might be the same, but it's never going to reach the same highs as the original.

However, I also wondered - would I rather just watch the 4K Blu-ray remastered version on YouTube for the rest of my life, or some live band playing some version of the same song, even if it's not fully the original, but at least it's there, with agency, making choices about what to play next, and there's an audience listening and vibing to it and having a good time? A high-def recording of someone is just that - a recording, a digital avatar, a reconstruction, a beautiful archive. But a proper mind upload, even an imperfect one, is a live band. It has agency. It can improvise. It is playing the songs that the audience knows and love.

After a nonetheless beautiful opening, the tribute band played songs chronologically, from the band's earlier days that I was less familiar with, such as songs from Piper and A Saucerful of Secrets (where, in retrospect, they sounded a bit like the Beatles). As such, I wasn't thinking too much about how different the singer is from the original. I don't think I can tell the difference much anyways.

And that's when I realized - I was experiencing Pink Floyd, arguably more of it than I would have if I'd seen the real thing. e.g. the original band would never have done this setlist from their earliest works to the latest, and Roger and David would probably just fight about something dumb such as Ukraine.

Then I started wondering, what if this tribute band starts making music of their own that sounds like new stuff from the band, will I be OK with it? I liked Hey Hey Rise Up even if it's closer to a David Gilmour + Nick Mason collab than a Pink Floyd song. What if the band drums up an entirely new album that sounds like something the original would release in their golden era? What if it's AI? How would Shine on you crazy diamond Pt 10 sound like?

Maybe the mind, just like music, is meant to evolve with the times and the underlying substrate. What's Pink Floyd about Pink Floyd is not Syd, Roger, David, Richard, or Nick, or the tribute bands that play their songs, but the songs, soundscape, and lyrics from them. The music outlasts the creator. As long as it is performed somewhere, it exists.

Similarly, there are 8 billion minds on this planet right now, each of them unique. Does it matter which substrate a mind is living on, as long as it is celebrated and remembered and living with agency? I think we should all have the option to be uploaded to the cloud one day, to have our song keep playing after the original band calls it quits. Maybe the song of one's mind is meant to be played by a tribute band after death, and only those who are closest to the original would be able to tell the difference (and check out if they don't like it). Maybe this song will extend a bit as well.

On a side note, most people who showed up tonight were amongst the silver hair crowd. I wonder how many of them saw the original in person, and whether they could tell the difference. I also wonder what the average age of the audience was, and by how much I dragged it down (probably not much at this point now that I'm in the >30 club)