Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon is an iconic album that will live with the millions who love it (and no doubt many of their children who had to listen to it in the car!) for ever. One of the best selling albums of all time, it stayed in the album charts for a staggering 741 weeks.

Not surprisingly, plenty of bands have covered Floyd tracks over the years. Scissor Sisters raised the bar significantly with their version of Comfortably Numb and tribute bands strive to scrupulously match every note and effect as closely as possible.

But it’s unlikely you’ll have seen or heard Dark Side of The Moon played the way James Hollingsworth does it. On Friday night, he performed the whole album from start to finish to a delighted audience at The Palladium Club in Bideford. 

On his own. On just an acoustic guitar!

To be fair, he did make occasional use of a mouth organ too, along with a few pedals and effects, a rather wonderful Buddhist gong and what looked like an ice cream carton full of rattling coins to help with the introduction to Money. And it was wonderful!

Hollingsworth started the evening with a mix of covers and his own songs before launching into Dark Side.

There are parts of the album that will not easily stand up to being “re-interpreted” and what made the performance so impressive was the way he captured all the moods, colours and nuances of the original in such a startlingly innovative way.

By the end, the Bristol based guitarist had the crowd singing along to the final track, “Eclipse” and if that wasn’t enough, he then gave us a storming version of Comfortably Numb before finishing with Wish You Were Here as a third encore that had the whole place cheering and clapping long and loud.

I don’t know if he does a version of The Wall but as and when he does play in the area again, make sure you see him – it’ll be a Great Gig.