A One-Man Pink Floyd Band Creates Note-Perfect Covers of “Echoes,” “Comfortably Numb,” “Mother” & Other Classics: Watch 19-Year-Old Wunderkind Ewan Cunningham in Action

If you’re a 19-year-old wun­derkind like Ewan Cun­ning­ham, who can play any num­ber of instru­ments, it’s a great time to be alive. Record­ing is cheap, video is just as cheap, and YouTube pro­vides a venue to share a slew of his home­made cov­ers of rock clas­sics.

Above is one of his most ambi­tious ven­tures: a full note-for-note cov­er of Pink Floyd’s “Echoes,” all 20 min­utes, that uses video trick­ery to have four Ewans side-by-side play­ing at Dob­bie Hall. (From what we can tell, Dob­bie Hall is locat­ed in Lar­bert, Scot­land, a town about equidis­tant between Glas­gow and Edin­burgh.)

Div­ing down into all six years of Ewan’s videos and we find, at first, not a 13-year-old Ewan, but his dad, play­ing and singing an acoustic cov­er of Coldplay’s “Par­adise”. So we know where Ewan got the music bug.

In fact, he tells us “I start­ed play­ing drums at the age of 4 and con­tin­ued to only play drums until I start­ed branch­ing out into oth­er instru­ments such as gui­tar, bass, key­boards and vocals. I’ve been teach­ing myself to mix, record and film music since I was 10 years old and this is my pas­sion.”

Ewan start­ed upload­ing drum cov­ers at 14, play­ing along to every­one from Evanes­cence to Foo Fight­ers. At 16 he uploaded his first Floyd drum cov­er (“Brain Damage/Eclipse”) and, like many a teen before him, fell hard for the band.

Then the cov­ers begin in earnest, with him shar­ing duties with his dad (“Wot’s…Uh the Deal” and “Brain Dam­age”) and then on to “Grantch­ester Mead­ows” (from Pink Floyd’s Ummagum­ma) and final­ly on Jan­u­ary 1, 2017, when Ewan pre­miered his three song set from Dob­bie Hall, fea­tur­ing “A Saucer­ful of Secrets,” “Care­ful with that Axe, Eugene,” and the afore­men­tioned “Echoes.”

After a suc­cess­ful Indiegogo cam­paign, he returned lat­er in 2017 to Dob­bie Hall for three cov­ers from “The Wall,” which cheek­i­ly includ­ed a papi­er-mache air­plane crash­ing into the stage at the end of “In the Flesh?”.

The ques­tion this rais­es is obvi­ous: does Ewan record any­thing orig­i­nal? Indeed, a few months ago he start­ed a new YouTube chan­nel of his own songs. It’s up to you, dear read­er, to check them out.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Scenes from the “Pink Floyd Bal­let:” When the Exper­i­men­tal Rock Band Col­lab­o­rat­ed with Bal­let Chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Roland Petit (1972)

Hear Lost Record­ing of Pink Floyd Play­ing with Jazz Vio­lin­ist Stéphane Grap­pel­li on “Wish You Were Here”

Pink Floyd Plays in Venice on a Mas­sive Float­ing Stage in 1989; Forces the May­or & City Coun­cil to Resign

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.