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Hypnotic, newly colorized footage of Pink Floyd on ‘American Bandstand’ in 1967


Pink Floyd circa 1967.
 
Ten years ago, upon the passing of Dick Clark, a long-time contributor to Dangerous Minds Marc Campbell homaged Clark by posting footage of Pink Floyd’s appearance on American Bandstand. As Campbell pointed out, Clark would select acts for Bandstand and his choice of Pink Floyd in 1967 demonstrates how far ahead of the musical curve Dick Clark was. Now, with a hat tip to another long-time contributor for DM, Ron Kretch, let me treat your eyes to newly colorized footage of Floyd dreamily miming along to their third single “Apples and Oranges” on stage at ABC Studios in Burbank (or perhaps ABC Television Center studios as an intrepid DM reader has noted), California on November 7th, 1967.

Before we get to this nothing short of glorious colorized footage, I’d like to touch on the fact that it took nearly a year of work to recreate this moment and it shows. A YouTuber based in Sweden known as Artist on the Border has been creating their own visual representations of Pink Floyd for the last two decades. The colorization adds a dream-like appearance to the members of Pink Floyd who had just arrived in America for the first time a few days before their appearance on American Bandstand. So stop whatever it is you were doing and let the colorized chill of Pink Floyd wash over you. Also, beware the colorized version of Syd Barrett may give you a hell of a contact high. In the event the footage below becomes unavailable, click here to view it on YouTube. 

 

Pink Floyd’s performance of ‘Apples and Oranges’ on American Bandstand, 1967.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Lose your mind and play’ Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd ‘live’ on TOTP, 1967
‘The Wall’: Stunning behind-the-scenes images from Pink Floyd’s harrowing cinematic acid trip
A Momentary Lapse of Reason: When Dario Argento Interviewed Pink Floyd in 1987 
Interstellar Zappadrive: When Frank Zappa jammed with Pink Floyd
Rare collectible figures based on the animated characters from Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’

Posted by Cherrybomb
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01.11.2022
04:22 pm
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A Momentary Lapse of Reason: When Dario Argento Interviewed Pink Floyd in 1987 


Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and director Dario Argento.
 
Let’s get a few fun facts out of the way before we take a look at the eight or so awkward minutes shared between Pink Floyd vocalist and guitarist David Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason and Italian horror master, Dario Argento. For Pink Floyd, 1987 was a new beginning without bassist Roger Waters—a founding member of the Floyd along with Nick Mason. After years of legal hassles, the Waterless version of Pink Floyd released A Momentary Lapse of Reason. The subsequent tour (which started before the album was completed), was full of challenges, legal and otherwise. When it was all said and done, the tour in support of A Momentary Lapse of Reason would be the most successful U.S. rock tour of 1987. And that’s saying something, as David Bowie’s Glass Spider tour played 44 U.S. dates that same year. When it comes to Dario Argento and his relationship with Pink Floyd, we go back to 1975 when Italy’s version of Alfred Hitchcock tried, unsuccessfully, to engage the band to record the soundtrack for Profondo Rosso (aka, Deep Red, and The Hatchet Murders) as they were deep in work on their ninth album, Wish You Were Here. This, of course, didn’t turn out to be a bad thing. It gave us all the gift that is Italian prog-rock pioneers, Goblin, who were engaged to rewrite the score composed by Giorgio Gaslini, who had previously composed the score for Argento’s 1973 film The Five Days. It would also leave room for Argento’s collaboration with Keith Emerson of ELP, who composed the insanely good soundtrack for Argento’s 1980 film Inferno

Now, let’s get back to the eight minutes of international time-delayed satellite video connection which had to be translated live in Italy and New York City. You might want to sit down because the combination of Dario Argento and members of Pink Floyd can make one quite dizzy. 

Dario Argento was perpetually busy in the 1970s and 1980s. But he still somehow found time to do a self-hosted television show in Italy called Gli incubi di Dario Argento (The Nightmares of Dario Argento). Only nine episodes of The Nightmares of Dario Argento were filmed as part of the television series Giallo. He was often joined by Italian actress Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni dolled up like Siouxsie Sioux. You may recall, Cataldi-Tassoni was the star of Argento’s 1987 film, Opera. Though it’s a little unclear exactly when this segment aired, Pink Floyd was noted to be in New York City at the time. Since the video shows both Gilmore and Mason staying at the Ritz Carlton’s Central Park location, that would probably put the filming of this magic mushroom moment sometime during their three-night stint at Madison Square Garden. At the beginning of the “interview” Argento praises A Momentary Lapse of Reason, calling the album “stupendous.” Then, Argento’s complex, esoteric questions seem to mystify both Gilmour and Mason—and the live translation, which at times is not accurate, does not help matters one bit. I don’t want to reveal any more of what goes down in this very strange video, but had Roger Waters seen it back in the day, it would have pissed off his already very pissed off self.
 

Dario Argento interviewing David Gilmour and Nick Mason of Pink Floyd in 1987 via satellite. What a world.
 

Another segment of ‘The Nightmares of Dario Argento.’

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Can’t look away: Go behind the scenes of films by Dario Argento, John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper & more
Dario Argento’s horror classic ‘Suspiria’ and the most vicious murder scene ever filmed, 1977
First look at Waxwork’s expanded soundtracks for three Dario Argento classics
Stunning fluorescent stills from Dario Argento’s horror masterpiece ‘Suspiria’
The creeptastic ‘mad puppet’ in Dario Argento’s shocker ‘Deep Red’ will haunt your dreams
Watch Keith Emerson and Dario Argento work on the soundtrack to ‘Inferno’ in 1980
The original ending for Dario Argento’s 1971 thriller, ‘The Cat O’ Nine Tails’ (a DM premiere)
Illustrations of films by Dario Argento, David Cronenberg, Ridley Scott & more from Cinefantastique

Posted by Cherrybomb
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08.30.2021
11:41 am
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Barrett: The catalogue raisonné of Syd Barrett’s artwork
09.28.2020
12:22 pm
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There’s an interesting publication listed on the Rocket 88 Books website: a book of Syd Barrett’s artwork produced in conjunction with Barrett’s family. It’s the first time that his art—as well as photographs taken by the Pink Floyd founder—has been cataloged in book form. The large format book also contains rare and unseen images of Pink Floyd taken during Barrett’s tenure in the band. Very few of Barrett’s original paintings that were created during his final quarter century are still extant. Syd would spend weeks working on something, he’d photograph the finished piece and then burn it.

According to the publisher, the Barrett book is organized into three sections:

Syd’s life in photographs – from growing up through to working and performing with Pink Floyd and his life as a solo artist.

Unseen and unpublished illustrated letters sent to Libby Gausden-Chisman and Jenny Spires between 1962-1965, as Syd was finding himself as a painter and a musician.

All of Syd’s existing work as a visual artist from 1962 until his death.

The book contains over 250 images. These include:

Over 100 completely unseen images and many more reproduced in fine art quality for the first time.

Over 40 artworks including: paintings, drawings, mosaics, collages, and sculptures.

Over 50 unseen photographs taken by Syd of his artworks, including: images of his “destroyed” works seen here for the first time, studies in preparation for his artworks, images of his work area.

Although it’s not cheap, it’s clearly the definitive volume on Barrett’s artwork and the website indicates that the stock is getting low. (The best Syd biography is Rob Chapman’s A Very Irregular Head: The Life of Syd Barrett. I highly recommend it.) Barrett will also contain commentary by Will Shutes, an expert on Syd’s visual output, and excerpts from diaries, notebooks, scrapbooks, plus a listing and dating of all Barrett’s artwork known to have existed.

Some of Syd Barrett’s artwork follows. You can see much more at the book’s official website and at SydBarrett.com.


 

 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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09.28.2020
12:22 pm
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Tiny Tim’s delirious covers of Bon Jovi, Pink Floyd, the Bee Gees, AC/DC, and more!
09.25.2018
01:25 pm
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Tiny Tim is one of the great eccentrics of the classic era of rock. Born Herbert Buckingham Khaury, he was a pretty dorky tween, holing up at the New York Public Library learning about the ancient heroes of the early days of recorded music and learning how to play the violin, the mandolin, and (of course) the ukulele. His first album, God Bless Tiny Tim, is a classic of a sort and featured the only song he would ever become famous for, “Tip-Toe Thru’ The Tulips With Me,” a song that dates from the 1920s.

He sang with a falsetto and for many years was pretty much the only human being actively associated with the uke. He had terrible teeth and terrible hair and never, ever seemed to lose his sunny disposition about just about everything. If you check out pictures of him online, he sure did smile a lot, and it didn’t seem remotely like a put-on.

For reasons that are impossible to reconstruct from this distance, his 1969 marriage to Victoria Budinger was a gargantuan sensation—it happened on The Tonight Show and it landed the best ratings in the history of that show—including Johnny Carson’s final show in 1992.

Tiny Tim is a picture-perfect one-hit wonder, but the issue with such figures is, what do you do for the next 30 years of your life? Various people have tackled that issue in different ways. Tiny Tim did not release a huge amount of material but did release several albums, most of which centered on renditions of decades-old curios and self-consciously odd covers of far more recent material. Interestingly, most of his covers dispense with both the falsetto and the ukulele, relying on regular rock guitar and a surprisingly rich and deep vocal style.

God Bless Tiny Tim featured a cover of Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” with Tiny Tim singing both parts, of course. It’s as odd a cover as you’re likely to find, but certainly not unpleasurable to listen to. Another early cover that featured a canny blending of falsetto and non-falsetto parts was his version of the Doors’ “People Are Strange,” which he recorded as a demo; it appeared on Rhino’s 3-CD reissue of God Bless Tiny Tim.
 

 
In 1980, for an album called Chameleon, Tiny Tim essayed a cover of the recent smash hit “Staying Alive” by the Bee Gees, a song that is also notable for featuring falsetto singing, which Tiny Tim didn’t use in the cover. You can find a quote online from Maurice Gibb that runs, “Tiny Tim? Anyone could sing like that. It’s atrocious. It’s hideous, really.” Ouch. I don’t know the facts of the matter, but I would imagine Maurice probably said that back when Tiny Tim was first a sensation—in any case, it’s fun to imagine Tiny Tim doing the cover as a cheeky form of revenge/solidarity.

At some point Tiny Tim perceived the tender underbelly of a certain kind of rock song that he could totally do something with. In 1993 he released an album called Rock, the second half of which is consumed mainly with jukebox hits from the 1950s. But the first half tackles three songs that might be considered classics of the arena rock era, AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell,” Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name,” and Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell.” All of them are quite listenable, although the Billy Idol cover stands out for being in excess of 20 minutes long! Your imagination might be concocting some nightmarishly unlistenable track but I’ve listened to it and it’d be more accurate to say that Tiny Tim just ran with it. Indeed, you might say he was genuinely inspired by it.

In 1996 Tiny Tim had a heart attack while on stage playing his hit “Tip-Toe Thru’ The Tulips With Me” and died shortly afterward. This event led to this unusual headline:
 

 
A couple of years earlier, Tiny Tim had released an album for Seeland/Ponk called I Love Me, which featured a number of unusual tracks such as “I Saw Mr. Presley Tip-toeing Through The Tulips” and “She Left Me With The Herpes” as well as a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2).” 

Listen to it all, after the jump…....
 

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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09.25.2018
01:25 pm
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London Underground: Early counterculture doc with Paul McCartney, Allen Ginsberg, Pink Floyd


 
Granada Television produced this fascinating TV time capsule “It’s So Far Out It’s Straight Down” as a special part of their Scene at 6:30 series. The program focused on the young counterculture / hippie scene in London and features Miles, the Indica Gallery and the editorial board of The International Times underground newspaper. Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti are seen at the International Poetry Incarnation and we are taken to The UFO Club where Syd Barrett and the Pink Floyd are playing a live version of “Interstellar Overdrive” (Also heard on the soundtrack is an early version of their “Matilda Mother,” then called “Percy The Ratcatcher” and “It Can’t Happen Here” by The Mothers of Invention).

Paul McCartney is a talking head interviewee in the studio, intelligently discussing the nascent underground scene. Macca was an active part of the London underground, financially supporting the Indica Gallery and bookstore—he even built the bookshelves himself—and IT. McCartney, the Beatle who soaked up cutting-edge culture and avant garde influences long before the rest of them did, is seen in four segments during the show, and as a wealthy, intelligent and well-respected person representing the counterculture to people who might fear it, as you’ll see, he knocks the ball straight out of the park:

If you don’t know anything about it [the counterculture], you can sort of trust that it’s probably gonna be alright and it’s probably not that bad because it’s human beings doing it, and you know vaguely what human beings do. And they’re probably going to think of it nearly the same way you would in that situation.

The straights should welcome the underground because it stands for freedom… It’s not strange it’s just new, it’s not weird, it’s just what’s going on around.

“It’s So Far Out It’s Straight Down” was broadcast in March of 1967, so it’s pre-Summer of Love. The time seems so pregnant with promise. This is the exact moment, historically speaking, when pop culture went from B&W and shades of gray to vivid color. If you put yourself in the mind of a kid from, say the north of England watching something like this on television during that era, it’s easy to see how this film would have brought tens of thousands of young people into London seeking to find these forward-thinking cultural movers and shakers to become part of “the happening” themselves.
 
Watch it after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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08.08.2018
01:15 pm
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That time a dog named Seamus joined Pink Floyd in 1971
11.29.2017
10:27 am
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I have a soft, fuzzy spot in my heart for bands with animal performers. The genre is often categorized as a mere novelty but, in my opinion, it should be considered as nothing less than it actually is: artistic genius.

I’m sure the first band of this category that will to come to mind for most is the notorious deathgrind band Caninus, once fronted by pit bulls Budgie and Basil. There is also Hatebeak, the Baltimore death metal band with Waldo the African grey parrot as its lead singer. Both groups released a likeminded split EP in 2005 on Reptilian Records.
 

Caninus
 

Hatebeak
 
Of the non-metal variety, Beatle Barkers was a parody record from 1983 that used animal sounds (mostly human barking) in place of the vocals on Beatles covers. Similarly, acts like popular holiday favorite, Jingle Cats, as well as its 1950s predecessor The Singing Dogs, manipulated animal noises to serve in lieu of vocals. There’s even something now called Whalestep, which has me at a loss for words.

But let’s not forget about the musical groups that are made up entirely by animals. Thai Elephant Orchestra is a rotating cast of up to fourteen elephants in Northern Thailand. Improvised on heavy-duty versions of traditional and mostly percussive Thai instruments, the ensemble has released three records to date and the music is actually quite beautiful. One of the more recent additions to this list is Tuna and the Rock Cats, the traveling feline circus band made up of five cats and a chicken. The Rock Cats play every instrument of your average rock band and, as you would have guessed, their live shows are more of a performance art.
 

Thai Elephant Orchestra’s self-titled debut record from 2000
 

Tuna and the Rock Cats
 
Now that we are all on the same page, I wanted to pay tribute to probably the most famous, yet often overlooked animal musician of our time: Seamus the dog. As the story goes, David Gilmour was caring for his friend’s German Shepherd at some point in 1971 while Pink Floyd was in the studio recording their sixth studio album Meddle. The dog, whose name was Seamus, belonged to Humble Pie and Small Faces frontman Steve Marriott, who at the time was on tour in the United States.
 

Steve Marriott with his dog Seamus
 
Seamus was a dog who responded well to music and as a result, had previously performed a small role barking in the background of Small Faces’ 1968 cut, The Universal. The members of Pink Floyd were quick to act upon the musical capabilities of their new canine friend when it was discovered during recording that Seamus could howl in tune with their instruments. Acting on the bizarre opportunity, the band quickly wrote a twelve-bar, slide guitar blues track for Seamus to “sing” over. Additional instrumentation and Gilmour’s lead vocals were later added. Meddle was released on Halloween of 1971, with “Seamus” closing out side A.

Critics have panned “Seamus” as one of Pink Floyd’s worst songs ever written, claiming the spoof to be dispensable to both the record and the band’s discography. In response to such objection, Gilmour defended the track, once stating that “It wasn’t really as funny to everyone else [as] it was to us.” Perhaps due to song’s unpopularity or the unavailability of its backing vocalist, the group and Gilmour have never played “Seamus” live in concert. That is, with the exception of in their monumental concert documentary, Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii.

Live at Pompeii was filmed over four days in October 1971. The primary focus of the film is Floyd’s psychedelic concert set in an ancient Roman amphitheater somewhere in Italy. Since the recording coincided with the release of Meddle, most of the songs included on the original version of the documentary were from the new record. The film was re-released in 1974 to include footage of Pink Floyd while recording The Dark Side of the Moon at Abbey Road Studios.

The song “Seamus” made its way onto Live from Pompeii in the form of a segment titled “Mademoiselle Nobs.” The scene presents the song in altered form with David Gilmour playing harmonica and Roger Waters on blues guitar. Laying beside the two is a howling Russian Wolfhound, Nobs the dog. Nobs was a female Borzoi who belonged to Madonna Bouglione (daughter of circus director, Joseph Bouglione). At the request of the band, Madonna brought Nobs to the studio during shooting so they could re-create Seamus’ performance for the documentary. The scene was shot outside of Paris.
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Bennett Kogon
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11.29.2017
10:27 am
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They Were There: Composite photos of Queen, Jagger, Beatles and Floyd on London streets then and now

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I’m reliably told that photographs are polysemous—that is they have multiple meanings which can change depending on mood or understanding of what the image represents. Seems legit.

So let’s take, for example, the picture posted above of three long-haired guys hanging around some city street in the 1970s. It kinda looks like a regular snap of buddies hanging together. But, as soon as we realize its a pic of John Deacon, Roger Taylor, and a rather cool-looking Freddie Mercury of Queen, this picture takes on a whole new meaning.

Now that we know who it is, we probably want to know where this picture of Freddie and co. was taken. The trio was photographed standing outside 143 Wardour Street, Soho, London, in 1974. Next, I suppose we might ask, What were they doing here? Well, from what I can gather, it was taken during a break in the recording of the band’s second album, Queen II at Trident Studios directly opposite. Then we might inspect the image to glean what feelings these young nascent superstars are showing.

Photographer Watal Asanuma beautifully captured the personalities of these three very different individuals (and to an extent their hopes and ambitions) in a seemingly unguarded moment. Queen was on the cusp of their chart success with the “Seven Seas of Rhye” and the imminent release of “Killer Queen.” This photo now has a historical importance because of what we know this trio (and Brian May) went on to achieve.

I guess some of us might even want to go and visit the location to see where exactly Freddie or Roger or John stood and maybe even recreate the photo for the LOLs. It’s a way of paying homage and drawing history into our lives.

For those who can’t make it all the way to London, Music History, the Twitter presence of Rock Walk London, has been compiling selections of such pictures and making composites of the original image with a photo of what the location looks like today. Okay, so it saves the airfare but more importantly It’s a fun and simple way of bringing to life London’s rich history of pop culture in a single image.

If you like this kinda thing and want to see more, then follow Music History here.
 
01musichistoryqueen.jpg
 
09musichistorylondonq.jpg
 
02musichistoryqueen.jpg
 
More then and now pix of Jagger, Clash, Floyd, and more, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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10.16.2017
11:34 am
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Every review you’ve read of the new Roger Waters album is wrong (except for this one)
06.06.2017
06:53 pm
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Last Friday, June 2, I spent the entire day checking the mail. I’d preordered the new Roger Waters album—his first album of original rock material in nearly a quarter century—and was eagerly awaiting its arrival when I got notice from Amazon at about 7pm that evening that the delivery would be delayed, possibly until the following Tuesday. Being as I am, a married middle-aged man, this was going to be the highlight of my fucking week and listening to it on headphones, stoned to the gills, constituted most, if not the entirety of my weekend plans. Drats! Foiled again! My disappointment was palpable, but I googled the reviews to sate my curiosity only to read one critical appraisal after another of the most vaguely worded, tepidly positive sentiments. I’d seen the second (not including the dress rehearsal in NJ) show of Waters new Us + Them tour in Louisville, KY (more on this below) over the recent Memorial Day holiday weekend and the reviews I was reading didn’t really jibe with my expectations for the new album, having already heard a handful of the songs from the upcoming album played live and being blown away by how great the set’s new material was. It was difficult to tell what anyone really thought of it from the early reviews.

Rolling Stone’s reviewer was one of the worst offenders. The nearly pointless review of Is This the Life We Really Want? read as if he’d played the album once and dashed it off in about 15 minutes to collect a couple hundred bucks. (One commenter sighed “This review has zero substance. ‘It’s just Roger being Roger.’ Way to phone it in.”) One after another of these empty calorie reviews used the same words—“bitter,” “bleak” and “dystopian” prominently among them (and all referenced President You-Know-Who)—and indicated that good ol’ Rog was still up to his same old bag of tricks, etc, etc, etc. As the editor of a website like this one, I’m well aware of what lazy writing looks like and frankly nearly all of last Friday’s release date reviews of Is This the Life We Really Want?—at least the ones I read—smacked of it to my trained eye. In aggregate they equaled almost nothing useful. I wondered how it was possible not to have a strong opinion about a new Roger Waters album after so many years. Many of them, I imagine were written by underpaid millennials with only the dimmest idea who Roger Waters is, who were just cribbing from the press release.

The next morning the album was delivered before 10am and my weekend plans were back on.

Now don’t get me wrong, while anyone could be forgiven for assuming a priori that the first new release in decades from a 73-year-old multi-millionaire rock star would not necessarily be something to jump up and down about, by the time the first side was over I was completely gobsmacked, stunned at the darkly gorgeous poetry and sonic brilliance of the musical gold that had just been poured into my ears. I flipped it over for two even better, even more emotionally powerful songs. Riveting stuff. Oh sure, it’s true that not every new album by a septuagenarian rock superstar is going to be an instant classic, standing alongside their best work, but Waters’ astonishing and deeply profound Is This the Life We Really Want? is one, and does. I think it’s the best thing he’s done since Animals and I feel like that is saying quite a lot. This is a major event in pop culture. A big fucking deal with sirens blaring.

Now obviously, if you’re Roger Waters and you’ve got something (anything) to say, you (he) can say whatever you want, whenever you want and however you want to say it and a major media conglomerate will rush to exploit this to the hilt and squeeze every last bit of money they can out of your every utterance. Roger Waters and “the music of Pink Floyd” (as the current tour is billed) is a very big business—his multi-year worldwide The Wall Live trek is the highest grossing solo rock tour in history—but admirably, rather than put out one uninspired going-through-the-motions album after another like so many classic rockers of his vintage, Waters waits—25 years if he has to—to make sure that he’s got something important to say before going into the recording studio. No Sinatra covers for him. No Christmas albums. He’ll never record one of those awful “Great American Songbook” things. It’s just not going to happen. There is no squandered goodwill in that way between Waters and his fans. Since 1999 Waters has toured extensively, but without releasing any new material since 1992’s Amused to Death save for the recording of his French Revolution opera Ça Ira. After decades of playing the hits (and amassing a ridiculous fortune that’s managed to survive four divorces) the material on Is This the Life We Really Want? is just about the most potent musical statement imaginable for the Trump era, even if many of the songs were probably written and recorded before his surprise election. Perhaps the ferocious “Picture This” doesn’t refer directly to Trump, although it certainly seems like it does.

Picture a courthouse with no fucking laws
Picture a cathouse with no fucking whores
Picture a shithouse with no fucking drains
Picture a leader with no fucking brains

Top that! The song pulses and throbs like the best mid-70s Floyd barnburner, obviously quite purposefully and by deliberate design. Producer Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, Beck) has surrounded Waters with a crack band of some of the finest musicians in America—among them Jonathan Wilson on guitar; vocalists Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig from Lucius; REM/Beck drummer Joey Waronker, a Mason-esque octopus-armed pounder to be sure; and Roger Manning Jr. of Jellyfish on keyboards—with what seems to be the canny dual intention of simultaneously providing Waters with some inspired and well-chosen collaborators who bring their own magic to the table, and using this A-list crew to record what is probably the closest thing to a full-on Pink Floyd 70s headphones album experience as could possibly be hoped for (minus the obviously missing participants). The gorgeous string arrangements were done by David Campbell (Beck’s father, who Wikipedia tells me made his recording debut playing cello on Carole King’s Tapestry) and… wow… just wow. This album is just crazy fucking good on every level.

Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.06.2017
06:53 pm
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Stoner doom-mongers The Sword recreate Pink Floyd’s ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ in doom metal style
06.05.2017
05:35 pm
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To celebrate 50 years since the August 5, 1967 release of Pink Floyd’s debut The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Kyle Shutt, the guitarist from Austin, TX’s foremost stoner/doom-mongers The Sword, is releasing a complete cover of that seminal psych/prog band’s most popular album, The Dark Side of the Moon—by far a more metal-friendly album to rework than Piper.

The idea came to me after getting baked and wanting to hear a heavy version of “Time.” I thought, why not just cover the whole album? After sitting down and working out some loose concepts, the arrangement for “Money” materialized and I realized that I could totally do this if I assembled the right band.  It felt a little strange messing with someone’s legacy, but I’m treating it as a celebration of one of the greatest bands to ever rock, a party that everyone is invited to.

 

 
This is far from a new move—baby’s-first-prog-metal band Dream Theater has covered the entire album live, and a CD and DVD were released in the mid ‘oughts. Here’s a YouTube link to a live performance that’s probably my favorite Dream Theater thing I’ve heard. Make of that nugget of praise what you will.

Much more after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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06.05.2017
05:35 pm
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Concert screen projections from Pink Floyd’s 1974 and 1975 tours
03.31.2017
11:11 am
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Few bands did as much to push forward the visual experience spectators could enjoy at arena shows as Pink Floyd—the very phrase “a Pink Floyd concert” conjures a very specific idea of an arena show as a kind of hallucinogenic mass orgasm, an event not to be experienced without some form of pharmaceutical enhancement.

In the 1970s the Floyd periodically worked with a filmmaker named Ian Emes. For the 1974/1975 Dark Side of the Moon tour they hired Emes to make some suitably mind-blowing short movies to be projected on the back of the stage while the band went through the comparably mind-blowing songs “Time,” “Money,” “Speak to Me/Breathe,” and so on. 

Dark Side of the Moon is one of the few albums where the band toured the material extensively before fans could buy the album in March 1973. That long tour began in January 1972—more than a year before the album was released—and lasted through the early summer of 1973, technically coming to an end in London on November 4, 1973. Emes’ films were unveiled for Floyd’s 1974 tours of France and England and the 1975 Wish You Were Here tour of North America.

The French/England tours of 1974 saw Floyd’s use of a circular screen onstage for the first time, a facet for which the band would become renowned. The only non-American date on the 1975 tour was the closer, at the Knebworth Festival on July 5, which was the last time that Floyd would perform “Echoes” and the entire Dark Side of the Moon album with Roger Waters.

The sights and sounds of the Pink Floyd, after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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03.31.2017
11:11 am
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Rockstars with balls: Bob Marley, Rod Stewart, Elton John, Pink Floyd & more playing soccer


Bob Marley playing football backstage in 1979.
 

I love soccer. That’s all I ever watch. I’ll watch it all day if I can. But I’m too bloody old to play now.

—Lifelong soccer devotee, Geezer Butler of Black Sabbath.

 
I’m posting theses images today because I, and perhaps many of your reading this require a bit of a “mind cleanse” every now and then to blow all the bad shit out of your brain. And what better way to clear your mind of all the gloom and doom currently running amok in the global brain than to lose ourselves for a while looking at pictures of pretty people playing around with soccer balls. Ah, I feel better already.

There’s Robert Plant cavorting around in tiny sports briefs on a soccer field looking not-so-pleased that he was being photographed while doing so. There’s also a shirtless Roger Daltrey, a spandex-clad Rod Stewart, and a straight-up amazing shot of Bob Marley backstage at a show in San Diego in 1979 kicking a soccer ball around. Many other bands like Iron Maiden and Def Leppard actually actively played in amateur football leagues of their own during their time away from their headbanging duties, so I’ve included a few choice images of both bands suited up for gameplay as well.
 

Robert Plant.
 

Roger Daltrey.
 
More rockin’ footballers after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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03.13.2017
09:24 am
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Recording console used by Pink Floyd for ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ heads to auction
03.02.2017
03:43 pm
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EMI TG12345 MK IV. The console that Pink Floyd used to record ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ in 1972 at Abbey Road Studios. Photo credit Mike Ross.
 
Only two of these custom EMI TG12345 MK IV consoles were ever made and according to former Abbey Road engineer Brian Gibson—long considered to be one of the foremost authorities in the world on such things—this particular console is the “greatest to ever be constructed.”

This particular EMI TG12345 MK IV was in use for over a decade in Studio 2 at the world-renowned Abbey Road Studio. The mythical studio that has stood on 3 Abbey Road, St John’s Wood, City of Westminster, London, England since 1931 has recorded notable bands from The Beatles to The Buzzcocks during its long history. When it comes to the history of this console, it is as rich as the studio it occupied during its heyday. Though it was used by other prestigious artists such as Paul McCartney and Wings, George Harrison, Kate Bush and later on by The Cure—as the title of this post indicates—the most noteworthy piece of musical history created with the help of this console was Pink Floyd’s 1973 mind-bender The Dark Side of the Moon. Whoah.

More after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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03.02.2017
03:43 pm
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Interstellar Zappadrive: When Frank Zappa jammed with Pink Floyd
03.01.2017
08:43 am
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This post was originally published in 2012, but at that time, the actual footage of Frank Zappa jamming with Pink Floyd had yet to materialize. That changed with the release of the mammoth Pink Floyd box set, The Early Years.

“The Actuel Rock Festival,” sponsored by the fashionable Parisian youth culture magazine Actuel (along with the BYG record label) was to be the first ever major rock festival in France, and was heralded as Europe’s answer to Woodstock. French authorities, still smarting from the riots of May 1968, forbade it and the festival, which was originally going to take place in or near Paris, was held just a few miles beyond the French border, in Amougies, Belgium.

The festival took place over the course of five freezing cold days in late October (24-27) of 1969. The audience numbered between 15-20,000 people who were treated with performances by Pink Floyd, Ten Years After, Colosseum, Aynsley Dunbar (this is allegedly where Zappa met his future drummer), former Yardbird Keith Relf’s new group Renaissance, blues legend Alexis Korner, Don Cherry, The Nice, Caravan, Blossom Toes, Archie Shepp, Yes, The Pretty Things, Pharoah Sanders, The Soft Machine, Captain Beefheart and many more.

From the notes of the 1969 The Amougies Tapes Zappa bootleg:

Frank Zappa was present at the festival in a twofold capacity. First, as Captain Beefheart’s road manager; secondly, as M.C., assisting Pierre Lattes, a famous radio/TV presenter at the time (and the pop music editor for Actuel magazine). The latter task proved problematic given Zappa’s limited French, the prevailing language among the audience, who themselves didn’t seem to understand much English. Instead, Zappa relinquished his M.C. job for one of occasional guest guitarist. He plays with almost everybody, especially with Pink Floyd, Blossom Toes, Archie Shepp and Aynsley Dunbar, a fabulous drummer he will hire shortly thereafter. He introduces his friend Captain Beefheart and provides a powerful stimulant to all the other musicians. Most legendary, of course, is Frank Zappa’s jam with Pink Floyd on a very extended “Interstellar Overdrive”. The festival was filmed by Jerome Laperrousaz, and the film was to be called MUSIC POWER. Due to objections from various bands (most notably Pink Floyd) whose permission hadn’t been properly secured, the film was never officially released.”

Simpsons creator Matt Groening asked Zappa about the festival in a 1992 interview, but oddly he doesn’t even mention sitting in with Pink Floyd:

Frank Zappa: I was supposed to be MC for the first big rock festival in France, at a time when the French government was very right-wing, and they didn’t want to have large-scale rock and roll in the country. and so at the last minute, this festival was moved from France to Belgium, right across the border, into a turnip field. They constructed a tent, which was held up by these enormous girders. They had 15,000 people in a big circus tent. This was in November, I think. The weather was really not very nice. It’s cold, and it’s damp, and it was in the middle of a turnip field. I mean mondo turnips. And all the acts, and all the people who wished to see these acts, were urged to find this location in the turnip field, and show up for this festival. And they’d hired me to be the MC and also to bring over Captain Beefheart. It was his first appearance over there. and it was a nightmare, because nobody could speak English, and I couldn’t speak French, or anything else for that matter, so my function was really rather limited. I felt a little bit like Linda McCartney. I’d stand there and go wave, wave, wave. I sat in with a few of the groups during the three days of the festival, but it was so miserable because all these European hippies had brought their sleeping bags, and they had the bags laid out on the ground in this tent, and they basically froze and slept through the entire festival, which went on 24 hours a day, around the clock. One of the highlights of the event was the Art Ensemble of Chicago, which went on at 5:00 a.m. to an audience of slumbering euro-hippies.

 
More (including video footage) after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.01.2017
08:43 am
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Spend New Year’s Eve 1968 with The Who, Small Faces, Françoise Hardy & Pink Floyd
12.30.2016
09:02 am
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New Years Eve, Paris, 1968. Amidst a volatile political climate of civil unrest that nearly brought the entire country to a virtual halt, rock ‘n’ roll music was still prevailed as “teenage entertainment” before being overthrown by the hippie culture of Woodstock the following year. The 3 1/2 hour New Years Eve Surprise Partie broadcast from the ORTF Studios (the only French TV channel at the time) is a beautiful, ultra-mod, time capsule that features rare performances by Jacques Dutronc, The Troggs, Françoise Hardy, Aphrodite’s Child, Johnny Hallyday, Fleetwood Mac, The Who, The Small Faces, P.P. Arnold, Booker T & The MGs, The Pink Floyd, Marie Laforet, The Equals, and many others. The invitation-only guest list included hundreds of fashionably dressed Parisian partygoers wearing the latest styles, and casually lounging about every inch of a cool, modern, space-age set.
 
Many of the artists here are documented during a very specific transition period in their careers. The Who lip-sync to “I Can See for Miles,” “Magic Bus,” and the rare Jigsaw Puzzle version of “I’m a Boy” with high energy despite the fact they had just suffered a year long dry spell devoid of commercial hits. Just a few months later they would switch gears with the musical Tommy and go on to become one of greatest stadium rock bands of the ‘70s. Later, during the Small Faces performance Keith Moon and Pete Townshend can be seen sitting behind Kenney Jones’ drum riser grooving to the music and having a good time without drawing attention to themselves. The Small Faces didn’t even bother to plug their gear in—they were only weeks away from breaking up—and performed tracks from their final album Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake.
 
The Pink Floyd can be seen still finding their way after the loss of vocalist and songwriter Syd Barrett just one year prior. In 1969 they would get back on track becoming the premiere live space rock band, incorporating their success into their fourth album Ummagumma, recorded five months later. The Equals (notable for being one of England’s first racially integrated bands) perform their million-selling chart-topper, “Baby, Come Back,” with guitarist Eddy Grant looking as if he had just time traveled from the 1981 punk scene, sporting bleached blonde hair and an orange vinyl suit. Eddy Grant‘s futuristic vision would serve him years later with a very successful solo career that included the platinum single “Electric Avenue.” Fleetwood Mac is also in wonderful form here with Jeremy Spencer taking the lead on two of the three songs, he would abruptly leave the band just two years later to join a religious group called the Children of God.
 
In an impressive television debut, English singing, French-based rock band Les Variations belt out some classic ‘60s garage tunes in front of a wildly enthusiastic home crowd. In his memoirs, guitarist Marc Tobaly remembers everyone getting a little bit drunk at the canteen down the street from ORTF Studios, insisting that the viewers at home were indeed watching a “real” party on television. American soul singer P.P. Arnold sang her interpretation of the Bee Gees song, “To Love Somebody.” Sadly, her performance here suffers from a poor sound mix, and she is not joined by The Small Faces for “If You Think You’re Groovy” despite the fact that they played on the recording and were present at the TV studio during the taping. While YouTube videos of Surprise Partie are constantly being removed because of content-ID matching, the fine folks over at Modcinema are selling a fantastic looking transfer on DVD as a 2-disc set. Dig it!
 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Doug Jones
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12.30.2016
09:02 am
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Pink Floyd’s BBC ‘moon-landing jam session’ of 1969: ‘So What If It’s Just Green Cheese?’
11.17.2016
10:31 am
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One of the posters that came with copies of ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ LP

The landing of Apollo 11 on the moon easily qualifies as one of the truly epochal moments of the twentieth century. The three American astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin, spent about 21 hours on the moon, during which time countless thousands of people surely looked up and thought, “Wow, there are human beings up there.” In fact, we know for sure that David Gilmour of Pink Floyd was one of those people, as we shall see.

With some assistance from its colleagues in the Netherlands and Germany, the BBC mounted programming to celebrate the great event. One of the shows featured a live jam by Pink Floyd. The program was a one-hour BBC1 TV Omnibus special with the whimsical title of So What If It’s Just Green Cheese?. It was broadcast on July 20, 1969, at 10 p.m. Interestingly, the program featured two actors who would become much more famous about three decades later—Ian McKellan and Judi Dench. Dudley Moore and the Dudley Moore Trio were also on hand.

The Floyd jam session eventually came to be called “Moonhead.” It’s included in Pink Floyd’s massive new box set The Early Years 1965-1972, which was released just last week (its 2,840 minutes makes its $571 price tag seem almost affordable. Almost.).
 

Bootleg cover

David Gilmour reminisced about the appearance in an article he wrote for the Guardian in 2009:

We were in a BBC TV studio jamming to the landing. It was a live broadcast, and there was a panel of scientists on one side of the studio, with us on the other. I was 23.

The programming was a little looser in those days, and if a producer of a late-night programme felt like it, they would do something a bit off the wall. ... They were broadcasting the moon landing and they thought that to provide a bit of a break they would show us jamming. It was only about five minutes long. The song was called “Moonhead”—it’s a nice, atmospheric, spacey, 12-bar blues.

I also remember at the time being in my flat in London, gazing up at the moon, and thinking, “There are actually people standing up there right now.” It brought it home to me powerfully, that you could be looking up at the moon and there would be people standing on it.

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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11.17.2016
10:31 am
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