Pink Floyd – A Fleeting Glimpse

“The Pink Floyd Exhibition: Their Mortal Remains” has just opened at the Vogue Multicultural Museum, making its first U.S. stop on an international tour in the heart of Hollywood. Down on the corner, and in surrounding blocks, you can find tourist shops selling “Dark Side of the Moon” T-shirts (mostly unlicensed, probably) — but it’s not because they’re capitalizing on the Floyd exhibition being in the neighborhood; it’s that they sell them every day of every year, just like most other T-shirt shops in the world. That’s the power of the iconography being celebrated in “Their Mortal Remains.”

And it’s the power of the graphic and photographic work done in the ’60s and ’70s by Aubrey Powell and his late partner, Storm Thorgerson, who as the founders and creative principals of Hipgnosis defined much of what was great about album art in that era. The current exhibition is almost as much a testament to the power that they held over the public imagination during Hipgnosis’ glory days as it is to the band’s aural intrigue. Powell is one of the co-curators of the exhibition, which ensured it has deep insights into the imagery they created for Floyd from their second album on through to essential creations like “Ummagumma,” “Atom Heart Mother,” “The Dark Side of the Moon,” “Wish You Were Here” and, finally, “Animals.

The exhibit also goes well into the covers Hipgnosis didn’t do, like “The Wall,” before Thorgerson rejoined the fold in the post-Roger Waters era. After he died in 2013, Powell (or “Po,” as he’s known) took the baton, and has served as art director on recent projects like the recent “Later Years” boxed set, a remix drawn from it of “A Momentary Lapse of Reason” coming out as a singular remix this fall, and an “Animals” boxed set due in 2022.

On the eve of the opening of the exhibition , Po spoke with Variety about some of the indelible Floyd images he and Thorgerson designed.

You can read the full interview conducted by Variety by Clicking Here

Among all the controversy regarding the original origins of Yet Another Movie. A video has been scheduled to go live on Friday 24th September at 9:00am GMT which features one of the original ideas / demos that became the song we all know and love.

David Gilmour has issued the following supporting comments

” I thought, this week, that we would put up the original demo, written by Pat Leonard and myself, for what was to become ‘Yet Another Movie’ on the ‘A Momentary Lapse of Reason’ album. Pat Leonard and I met up at Astoria in September 1986 a couple of days after I had played on a Bryan Ferry track that he was producing.

We had a glass or two of wine and jammed for hours. For some reason that I can no longer remember I had chosen the fretless bass as my instrument of the day. But it turned into a beautiful song.

David Gilmour“

The bad blood between Pink Floyd members has continued, this time with Roger Waters slagging off his ex-bandmates in a new interview.

As per Ultimate Guitar, Waters was appearing on the WTF with Marc Maron Podcast when he less than fondly looked back on his time in the iconic British band. When asked about Pink Floyd’s massive contribution to music, he was unbothered. “I was never that intellectual about it,” he said casually. “It’s something that happened, that development. Now I understand a lot more than I did about it.”

Waters was less dismissive about his influence on arena rock: “What happened was that the band became popular, and my major contribution to rock ‘n’ roll, if you like – I’ve written some decent songs but it was really to develop the theater of arena rock, which I did almost single-handedly back in the mid-’70s.”

He wasn’t done with the boasts there, saying that “over the years, I’ve come to realise that actually, I have quite a sophisticated musical brain and that I get a lot of things that other people don’t notice.” And he put that development down to escaping the Pink Floyd bubble. “I’m serious, I think it was really important that I got away when I did,” he insisted.

It was at this point Waters turned his fire on his former bandmates. “Well, I was in a very toxic environment where I was around some people…Well, David (Gilmour, guitar) and Rick (Wright, keyboards) mainly were always trying to drag me down. They were always trying to knock me off.”

Waters stated that they tried to undermine his artistic vision “by claiming that I was tone-deaf and that I didn’t understand music. ‘Oh, he’s just a boring teacher figure who tells us what to do but he can’t tune his own guitar…’. They were very snotty and snippy because they felt very insignificant, I think.”

He did end with a moment of more considered reflection though. “Those years that we were together, whatever it was like socially, there is no question but that we did some really good work together,” he recalled. “We didn’t share the vision but we shared the work.”