The March issue examines how Pink Floyd survived the shift from Syd Barrett to David Gilmour — and thrived!
Gillian G. Garr takes the reader through the story of Syd Barrett — from Pink Floyd’s signature spark and enigmatic creative leader to a rumored recluse who became lifted to cult status.
Goldmine is then proud to present a book excerpt from author Bill Kopp’s new book, Reinventing Pink Floyd: From Syd Barrett to The Dark Side of The Moon.The chapter discusses how members of Pink Floyd continued to be involved in Syd Barrett’s short-lived solo career.
Kopp also gives Goldmine a Top 10 of Syd Barrett’s songs. A Pink Floyd fan might be surprised at some of the choices.
And finally, Goldmine reaches into the vault and pulls out our experiment of how to sync The Dark Side of The Moon to The Wizard of Oz. Laugh if you will at it being an old urban legend but the results are somewhat uncanny.
Dave Kilminster was recently in Melbourne as guitarist for Roger Waters’ Us + Them tour.
Australian Musician’s Greg Phillips sat down for a chat with Dave about his gear, solo career and touring with Roger Waters
Roger has Just announced some new dates for our visitors in Mexico later this year as part of the 2018 Us & Them Tour
Tickets are on general sale from Wednesday 21st February
Presale ticketing starts on Monday 19th February and will be available through Ticketmaster
New Announced Dates Are :
November 28th – Palacio De Los Deportes, Mexico City, Mexico December 4th – Arena VFG, Guadalajara, Mexico December 8th – Arena Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico
As part of our 20th Aniversary celebrations we are proud to share with you an exclusive wallpaper for your PC / Mac / Android Devices.
Step 1: Click on the image you wish to download
Step 2: PC users: Right click on the image and choose “save image as” or “set as desktop background“
iPad/iPhone/Android users: Tap and hold the image for 2-seconds and choose “save image“
Our sincere thanks go out to Julie Skaggs for conducting the interview.
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I thoroughly enjoyed Bill Kopp’s new book Reinventing Pink Floyd and was grateful to get a chance to speak to him fan-to-fan on behalf of AFG regarding the process of writing it and the journey he undertook via a close examination of the music of Floyd’s transitional period. As he notes in our exchange, Bill conducts over a hundred interviews a year for various music publications as well as his website Musoscribe and possesses a thoroughly professional and insightful view of rock music and the people who create it. And also my thanks to Bill for his closing comment to me that this was the most enjoyable interview he had experienced overall in the publicity cycle for the book.
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I thought it would be best to begin by discussing how you became a Pink Floyd fan, which I’m assuming coincided with the initial popularity of Dark Side. That’s the impression I got from your introduction.
Yeah, that’s about the size of it. The music was everywhere when I was a kid, I was intrigued by the album covers and then hearing the music. When I was a kid and first started buying albums, I used to have a rule: I had to like at least three songs on a record before I would buy it. And Dark Side of the Moon, certainly, there were three or four that I had heard on the radio and thought, “Wow, this is really good, I’d like to hear the rest of it.” So yeah, I fell in love with their music early on.
How would you characterize the perspective of your particular book? And I ask this because it seems to be about more than just an examination of the transitional period from a primarily musical viewpoint. I know that’s how you express it, that you’re providing something that really hasn’t been done in-depth previously, but it seems like it’s about more than just that.
I think for a lot of people – not to over-generalize – but to people who discovered the band around the time of The Wall, or even, say, Animals, or even Wish You Were Here, I think to a lot of those listeners they might have rightly developed the perspective that The Wall was largely Roger Waters’ vehicle, and in a lot of ways it really really was. And then if you go way way way back to the very beginning, back to ‘67 with the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, a strong case could be made that at that point it was Syd Barrett’s band: he was the face of the band, he was almost the sole songwriter, he was the guiding force of the band. To me, the period in between – from ‘68 until through Dark Side of the Moon – to my way of thinking it was more of a collaborative band. Maybe not four exact equals in terms of their influence and standing within the group but they seemed to have more of a collaborative band approach to things, and for me there’s a real appeal in that. Not to take a single thing away from the work they did post-Dark Side of the Moon but to me it’s inconceivable that any of that could have come about had they not had the foundation of those formative years in which they were really working together.
On the 4th February, 3AW693 News Talk hosted an interview with one of the founders of the Pink Floyd, Roger Waters who is currently on one of the most successful solo world tours in history.
Ross Greenwood had the pleasure of speaking to Roger ahead of the Australian leg of his world tour, asking why they started the band.
“We weren’t there for the art. We were there because we wanted to pull chicks and make a few quid. People don’t go into rock and roll bands for the art, old boy. We were 25 years old or something.”
Ross also spoke to Roger about new music streaming services and his new album Is This The Life We Really Want.
The original lead singer, songwriter and guitarist for Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett burst onto the London rock scene in the mid 1960s as a mysterious, charismatic and eccentric figure.
Widely celebrated as a visionary and influential songwriter who laid the groundwork for the psychedelic rock sound, as a guitarist, Barrett remains somewhat underappreciated. While he was never a virtuoso in the mold of Jeff Beck or Eric Clapton, he was a versatile and innovative player who accomplished pioneering work using dissonance, distortion and feedback.
The electric guitar Barrett was most closely associated with was known as the “Mirror Disc Telecaster,” which is a misnomer, because for starters, it wasn’t a Telecaster. It was in fact a 1962 Esquire, and while the metal discs attached to it were reflective, they weren’t mirrors.
Barrett acquired the Esquire, which was originally white, in late 1965. Sometime in 1966 he had it shrink-wrapped in silver plastic film. The discs he attached to it were thin, polished silver metal plates that were in vogue in hippy London at the time; adorning everything from doors and walls, to jeans, dresses and floppy hats.
The Esquire’s cosmetic modifications made the it an important element of Pink Floyd’s otherworldly stage show, the discs reflecting the bubbling, psychedelic lights and projections back at the audience.
Apart from the visual enhancements, the only other mod to Barrett’s Esquire was a raised pickup, which fattened up the guitar’s tone. An early pioneer of creativity over technique, Barrett’s guitar work on Pink Floyd’s early singles and debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, was fairly basic, something the simplicity of the Esquire lent itself to nicely.
While some regard it as a poor man’s Tele, the Esquire actually has its own unique wiring. The lack of a neck pickup reduces magnetic pull on the strings. This gives the Esquire better harmonic overtones and helps create a more percussive attack, elements that can be heard in Barrett’s guitar work with Pink Floyd, which swings between between jangly and melodic to edgy, aggressive and near proto-punk.
Towards the end of 1967, Barrett acquired a white Telecaster (probably from the early ‘60s). Although he kept hold of his Esquire through the end of the sessions for the Floyd’s second album, A Saucerful of Secrets, he stopped using it live and typically played the white Tele at gigs.
Although, by that time, spurred on by rampant LSD use and the pressures of coping with pop stardom, Barrett’s psychological troubles had accelerated and his appearances with the band were becoming increasingly infrequent.
Somewhere in the middle of 1968, Barrett traded his beloved ’62 Esquire for a black Telecaster Custom. This would prove the last electric guitar he would ever own. He used it during his remaining time with Pink Floyd, on his two solo albums–1969’s The Madcap Laughs and 1970’sBarrett–and up until he withdrew from music and moved back to his mother’s house in Cambridge in the late 1970s.
So what became of the silver, reflective Esquire? Like Barrett himself, the guitar basically went missing. After it was traded in for the black Telecaster, it was basically lost to history, becoming yet another element of the mystery of how such a charismatic and visionary talent as Syd Barrett could’ve gone off the rails just at a time when he was poised to conquer the world.
Goldmine’s March 2018 issue is out now!
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The electric guitar Barrett was most closely associated with was known as the “
Although, by that time, spurred on by rampant LSD use and the pressures of coping with pop stardom, Barrett’s psychological troubles had accelerated and his appearances with the band were becoming increasingly infrequent.