Category Archives: News

Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason wants to play drums for Harry Styles

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Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason has said that he wants to play in Harry Styles‘ band.

The One Direction star released his self-titled debut solo album on Friday(May 12). To promote the record, he appeared on Radio 2’s Breakfast show with Chris Evans this morning, alongside fellow guest Nick Mason.

On the show, Mason described first hearing Styles’ song ‘Sign Of The Times’. He said: “I happened to be driving along and I heard Harry’s single. I listened to it and the DJ said afterwards, ‘It sounds a bit like Pink Floyd to me’ and I thought, ‘Yeah, I could play that’. I listen to music on the radio in a particular way, which is [in terms of the] drums and bass. My belief is that bands are made up of bass, drums and a bunch of novelty acts. Anyway, I heard [Style’s single] and I thought I’d ask Harry if I could play drums on a track on his next album.”

“I would say yes,” Styles replied, adding that Mason could play on his live tour. “My drummer Sarah [Jones, former New York Pony Club/Hot Chip drummer] is actually a major fan of yours,” Styles continued

The world’s first Pink Floyd exhibition is coming to Dortmund in 2018

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Spring 2018 the world’s first Pink Floyd exhibition is taking place in Dortmund. Dortmund is the only city in the German-speaking world and the Benelux countries where the exhibition is shown. Visitors are expecting a multimedial hearing and visual journey into the Pink Floyd cosmos.

On May 13, 2017, the first Pink Floyd exhibition opens in London: “The Pink Floyd Exhibition: Their Mortal Remains”. The Pink Floyd Exhibition: Her Mortal Remains. The exhibition runs from 13 May to 1 October at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Edwin Jacobs, director of Dortmund U, has taken the first international retrospective of one of the world’s most influential music bands to Dortmund, where she is shown on the 6th floor of Dortmund U.

The visitors are expecting a multimedial hearing and visual journey into the band’s 50-year history and an exclusive insight into the Pink Floyd cosmos – the music and the instruments, the visual design of the albums and the stage design The tours and performances. In the process, the visitors follow the workings of the band and their transformation – from the psychedelic rock group in the 1960s to one of the most commercially successful bands.

The Dortmund U

The Dortmunder U is a cultural center with international appeal and the most impressive building in Dortmund. It was built in 1926/27 as the first high-rise building and beer factory of the Union Brewery. Crowned with a light pyramid, the ferry and warehouse was one of the most modern buildings at that time. Since 2010 the Dortmunder U with its unique installation is a center for art, culture and creativity. The U is one of the youngest and most innovative houses in Germany, about 70 per cent of the guests are under 50 years. Last year the Dortmund U was awarded the “European Cultural Brand of the Year”.

 

Pink Floyd : Their Mortal Remains Exhibition, Review / Sneak Peak in Telegraph

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Pigs fly at the Victoria & Albert Museum, alongside sheep, replica warplanes, exploding fridges and UFOs, while a giant psychotic inflatable headmaster descends from the ceiling wielding his cane over a huge purple replica of Battersea Power Station. Like the band it celebrates, Their Mortal Remains certainly does not lack ambition.

Visitors enter through a replica of a touring van, advance down a psychedelic rabbit hole of swirling op art and emerge into a dazzling space of hard reflective surfaces and audacious installations. Room after room is packed with a veritable treasure trove of artefacts and information about one of Britain’s most innovative and revered rock bands. You can walk through album sleeves, remix classic tracks, peer closely at lyric notebooks and vintage instruments, all the while listening to the band and their collaborators articulate the creative steps behind some of the most astonishing music and iconic imagery of the rock era.

Imaginatively conceived, fascinatingly curated, beautifully designed and stunningly realised, the Pink Floyd exhibition is something of an audio-visual tour de force for a museum that has become adept at putting pop culture in a highbrow gallery space. If, ultimately, it does not have the revelatory impact and intense personality of the V&A’s ground-breaking David Bowie Is exhibition in 2013, that is perhaps inherent in the nature of an oddly faceless band. As the joke used to go, “Which one’s Pink?”

There is an absence that haunted Floyd throughout their career, and haunts this exhibition too. Their 1975 masterpiece Wish You Were Here is evoked in a shiny, square, white space filled with images of the cryptic album sleeve. The warmth and beauty of the music itself plays second fiddle here to the contributions of Floyd collaborator Storm Thorgerson and his Hipgnosis design team.

In a glass cabinet, however, you can find one small Polaroid of a plump, bald, unassuming fellow, which close examination reveals to be founding member Syd Barrett visiting Abbey Road Studio unannounced as the band recorded their spine-tingling tribute to him (and Wish You Were Here’s opening and closing track), Shine On You Crazy Diamond. Barrett was Floyd’s only real rock star, the maverick genius who set them off on their extraordinary trajectory, but whose contribution was cut short by psychosis (exacerbated by drug use). He is affectionately recalled on one wall display but, without him, the rest of the exhibition is beset by a peculiar lack of human focus.

The core four piece line up from 1968-1985 (guitarist-vocalist David Gilmour, bassist-vocalist Roger Waters, keyboard player Rick Wright and drummer Nick Mason) were all middle-class, educated, intelligent, accomplished musicians. Their inventive use of sound technology, explorative approach to avant-garde musical ideas and astute incorporation of wider artistic, social, philosophical and theatrical concepts made them key figures in the psychedelic explosion (and its progressive rock offshoots), but they were not particularly psychedelic in themselves.

Interrogated on short, three-minute films accompanying each exhibit, they tend to be quite dry and dispassionate, creating a very cool and cerebral mood, with the madder and more enigmatic aspects of Floyd conjured by emphasising sleeve and stage designs.

Also, it may be stating the obvious to say that music is vital to the Pink Floyd story, but this exhibition would be much diminished as a walking tour without the Bluetooth headphones bringing static installations to musical life. While it is a treat to walk through a darkened corridor illuminated by a holographic representation of the pyramid prism from Dark Side of the Moon, it is still the swirling keyboards and cosmic lead solo that really blow the mind.

As it is, the exhibition fades off into empty spectacle towards the close, suffering much the same fate as Pink Floyd’s career. It is hard not to conclude that chief lyricist Roger Waters was right, and that Floyd should have ended when he left in 1985. The spikiest character in the band, Waters apparently insisted that Floyd’s remaining years as a touring and recording heritage act be kept separate, in this show, from their imperial Sixties and Seventies phase. But the result is three later rooms featuring recreations of overblown cover and stage designs that lack any intellectual rigour or artistic purpose, effectively a monument to a band who had by then become a monument to themselves.

There is, however, one final act of grace in a concert experience room at the very end, where you can see and hear the briefly reunited Pink Floyd’s valedictory performance of Comfortably Numb at Live8 in 2005, delivered in Sennheiser surround sound. It is absolutely gobsmacking, putting you right in the centre of one of the greatest pieces of music ever performed. Wish you were there? You will feel like you were.

Flying pigs inspired by Pink Floyd’s Animals will obscure Chicago’s Trump Tower this summer

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Flying pigs inspired by Pink Floyd’s Animals will obscure Chicago’s Trump Tower for one glorious day this summer
Roger Waters himself signed off on the design.

Inspired by Pink Floyd’s famous Battersea flying pig, an architect is working to relieve commuters of having to see our President’s name emblazoned on the side of Chicago’s Trump Tower, which looms over the Loop as a constant reminder of our country’s current state. The solution? Four flying, gold-colored pigs, strategically placed to obscure Trump’s name.

Architect Jeffrey Roberts first announced “Flying Pigs on Parade” back in November and it’s now queued up for a tentative launch this summer. According to Architectural Digest, each pig will measure 30-feet by 15-feet and be tethered to a barge on the Chicago River. The pigs will fly for just a single day, but Roberts plans to take them around to other Trump-infested cities throughout the country.

“In 1977 Pink Floyd rendered their musical interpretation of the allegory into the concept album Animals in response to social-political conditions in late-70’s Britain,” Roberts writes on the project’s website. “Like Orwell’s book, the interpretive messages of Animals have unfortunately become highly relevant again.”

As he holds the image rights, Roger Waters himself needed to sign off on Roberts’ re-appropriation, which he was apparently happy to do.

“The art folly has been created to provide visual relief to the citizens of Chicago by interrupting the view of the ostentatious Trump Tower Chicago sign,” Roberts says. “The design follows rigorous rationale in providing layers of meaning but ultimately allows for interpretation by individual viewers.”

“Ultimately,” he continues, “this is a very rational design and is in direct contrast to the chaotic nature and bizarre antics of our current leadership.”

Roger Waters To Perform On ‘The Late Show With Stephen Colbert’

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On Monday, May 8, Roger Waters will stop by the Ed Sullivan Theater to be the musical guest on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.

The former Pink Floyd bassist appearance comes ahead of the release of his newest studio album Is This The Life We Really Want?, and his upcoming North American Tour. Is This The Life We Really Want?, Waters’ fifth solo album and his first of original material since 1992’s Amused To Death, will be released on June 2 via Columbia Records.

Waters is set to kick off his lengthy Us + Them Tour later this month on May 26 at the Sprint Center in Kansas City, which he promises will “be a mixture of stuff from my long career, stuff from my years with Pink Floyd, some new things. Probably 75% of it will be old material and 25% will be new, but it will be all connected by a general theme. It will be a cool show, I promise you. It’ll be spectacular like all my shows have been.”

Pink Floyd drum technician Clive Brooks has died

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Pink Floyd drum technician Clive Brooks has died.

The news was announced by the official Nick Mason Facebook account. “With a heavy heart our Pink Floyd family say(s) farewell to dear Clive Brooks, drum technician extraordinaire, who sadly passed away,” the post reads.

Brooks, a London native, was drummer with bands Uriel, Egg and The Groundhogs in the late-’60s through mid-’70s.
He became a drum technician for Pink Floyd in the ’80s, working on the Momentary Lapse of Reason tour, and The Division Bell album and tour.

He also served as drum tech for Jeff Wayne‘s 2007 “The War of the Worlds” tour, Toto, Robbie Williams and Floyd tribute act The Australian Pink Floyd Show.

According to Wikipedia, on June 13, 1981, opening night of the last leg of “The Wall tour,” Brooks filled in for surrogate band drummer Willie Wilson who was ill.

Phil Taylor has kindly sent us in some further information to share with you all  “Clive Started with Pink Floyd in 1981 as the drum tech for the Wall shows and as you mentioned he did indeed fill in for Willie Wilson on one of the shows as Willie was taken ill just prior to the star, He was involved with Pink Floyd at the Live 8 reunion and also drum tech’ed with Leonard Cohen.”

 

50 Years Celebration Of Pink Floyd’s Iconic First Official Photoshoot In Ruskin Park

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In London 50 years ago photographer Colin Prime took Pink Floyd for their first official photoshoot. It took place in Ruskin Park in Denmark Hill and came about after Prime had met the band as an up and coming new group playing the London clubs—Prime was also a disc jockey as well as a photographer.

The photos see the band— Nick Mason, Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, and Richard Wright—larking about in jovial spirits in the park. Sitting on benches posing, or in or near the Ruskin Park Portico, a remaining part of the 18th century villas that once encircled Denmark Hill.

To read the full article and see more photos please head over to rock archive by clicking here

Nick Mason : Drummer Opens Up His Garden For Charities

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THE gardens of Middlewick House in Corsham will be open to the public again this summer, raising money for the Wiltshire Bobby Van Trust and Wiltshire Air Ambulance’s Airbase Appeal.

The estate, which is now home to Nick Mason of Pink Floyd fame and his wife, actress Annette Lynton Mason, was formerly owned by HRH The Duchess of Cornwall.

The proceeds from the open gardens will be split between the two local charities. This will be the fourth year running that the couple have welcomed people in to raise money for charity.

Nick Mason said: “Annette and I are really looking forward to opening our garden again – it’s a really great way of supporting two of our favourite and enormously worthy local charities. Our visitors seem to enjoy the experience and it gives us a really good excuse to tidy the garden and polish the odd car!”

Visitors will have the opportunity to explore the beautiful gardens, as well as the chance to see the collection of wild animals. One of Bath’s leading fine art sculptors, Alan Dunn, will be showcasing some of his pieces and there will be a variety of stalls selling unique gifts and plants.

Cakes will be available along with other refreshments and a barbecue.

Jennie Shaw, director of The Wiltshire Bobby Van Trust, said: “This will be the fourth year Mr and Mrs Mason have supported local charities, they have raised over £60,000. It’s a super weekend which thousands of people have attended. I do hope you can join us.”

Cheryl Johnson, head of Wiltshire Air Ambulance’s Airbase Appeal, said: “We are so grateful to Nick and Annette Mason. Our Airbase Appeal is raising the remaining £1.25 million needed to complete the building and equipping of our new airbase at Semington, near Melksham. Funds raised at the open gardens event will enable us to save lives for many more years to come, operating from our custom-built new airbase.”

The event on June 10-11 runs from 11am-4.30pm. Entry will cost £7 and the event is free to children under 12.