Category Archives: News
R.I.P Khan
“Khan. Best Boy. Beloved. R.I.P. Forever grateful to @batterseadogsandcatshome,Hemangiosarcoma is something that even Mighty Khan couldn’t beat but he died at home without suffering and surrounded by those he loved.”
Best wishes go to the Gilmour Family
Snowy White (Pink Floyd / Roger Waters Touring Band Fame) : Releases New White Flames Album
Almost a year since his last release, Acclaimed British guitarist Snowy White presents his new studio album !!
For his previous album, Released , Snowy spent two years working mainly on his own in his home studio; this time around however, he recorded the bulk of the tracks with his tried and trusted pals Kuma Harada (bass), Max Middleton (keys), Juan van Emmerloot, Richard Bailey (both drums) and Walter Latupeirissa (bass).
In Snowy’s own words: “When I play music with friends that I respect and admire, both as players and as people, either doing live shows or in a recording environment, I feel that I’m exactly where I want to be. I feel at home. It’s been a year or two since I last got together with the musicians who appear on this new album, called, for obvious reasons,’Reunited’. We had a great time working together again and I’m very happy with the way they interpreted my ideas, helping me evolve the songs from the simple outlines that I took into the studio into complete pieces of music. So I would like to thank my friends Kuma, Max, Walter, Juan and Richard for adding their good vibes to the sessions. I feel very honoured that my music was transformed and improved by these fine musicians, and I consider myself very lucky to have had the opportunity to work with them once again. Because of them, recording ‘Reunited’ was a lot of fun and has created yet another store of good memories, and, for me, that’s what it’s all about.”
Music and musicians evolve and change over time, so this album is just snapshot of how it was at that moment in Snowy’s career. Tracks like ‘Have I Got Blues For You‘, ‘Headful Of Blues‘ and ‘Emptyhanded‘ cover the bluesier side of things, whereas ‘Where Will You Belong‘ and ‘In California‘ are more reflective. ‘Nuff Said‘ and ‘I Know Our Time Ain’t Long‘ are examples of the more up-tempo and rockier Snowy White. There’s something for everybody, from the weird ‘Long Time No C‘ to the tight latin groove of ‘Heard It All Before‘. Whatever the tempo and the groove, Snowy’s distinctive soulful guitar runs like a golden thread throughout the album, connecting all together and making for a satisfying and very listenable offering.
Pink Floyd : Their Mortal Remains Exhibition Heading To Next Home
According to the exhibitions social media page they are taking #TheirMortalRemains on the road to its next home.
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Pink Floyd : Director Adrian Maben Hosts Live At Pompeii Event Screening In Paris
On Until Clignancourt University Center,
” The Evening consists of a screening of the film Pink Floyd in Pompeii followed by a interview and discussion in the presence of the director Adrian Maben and his script editor Zoé Zurstrassen.
In 1971 a two thousand year old open stone amphitheater hosted a young English rock band called Pink Floyd for a musical feature film.
A distinctive sound and performance worthy of Abbey Road, images of beauty, and especially a moment of rare creativity, this is what the film of Adrian Maben offers us in its exceptional timelessness.
The event has been Organized by Improvisades and the Cultural Service of Paris-Sorbonne, in partnership with Structures Sonores Baschet.
Tickets are free of charge and available to book online by clicking here.
(Article translated from French using google translate)
Pink Floyd : Unseen Footage From KQED 1970 Uncovered.
“At that point, they were really anxious to have whatever publicity they could,” remembers the program’s co-producer at KQED, Jim Farber. “We did not have much of a budget. Pink Floyd did the performance and offered the rights for a certain number of airings for practically nothing. My memory is we paid them $200.”
Widely bootlegged in the decades since, the performance is now officially available on DVD from the band. Recently, KQED unearthed raw footage of Pink Floyd’s performance, which included a half hour of music not included in the original program. After months of negotiations, KQED has been granted the right to exclusively premiere film of one of those songs, “Astronomy Domine.”
You might be wondering: in 1970, KQED was more known for Sesame Street than psychedelic rock. So how in the world did the Pink Floyd program happen in the first place?
Connecting with Pink Floyd
Simulcast on KQED radio, the special was set up as a direct result of Farber’s enthusiasm for the group. He first saw Pink Floyd in a basement club in London in 1967, when Syd Barrett (soon to be replaced by David Gilmour) was still the band’s lead guitarist and principal singer-songwriter.
“When I went to work at KQED June of 1969, I proposed the idea that we do a program with them,” he explains. “John Coney, the other producer [who also directed the special], really liked their music. So we decided we might as well make a proposal to them.”
The KQED production team brought “a huge mobile truck the size of a boxcar that held the video recording equipment” outside the original Fillmore Auditorium so the performance could be “recorded as well as you could outside the studio at that time. There’s a certain amount of vibration that was caused just from the sound of the amps. Because the technology just wasn’t that advanced yet. Portable video, the way we think of it, didn’t even exist.”
The original Fillmore wasn’t hosting rock concerts in 1970 — Bill Graham had transferred his operations to the Fillmore West on Market and Van Ness — but it was made available to the band and KQED for this special TV performance. Pink Floyd played a concert in front of paying customers at the Fillmore West the following night, reprising all of the half dozen songs they’d performed for KQED’s cameras, as well as other early favorites like “Astronomy Domine” and “A Saucerful of Secrets.”
Unexpectedly, the program opens with aerial shots of desolate fields and marshes in the San Joaquin Valley — indeed, seven minutes of “Atom Heart Mother” pass before any of the musicians are seen on screen. During “Grantchester Meadows,” the performance is interspersed with what Farber calls “nature footage.
” The cinematography is marked by close-ups of the casually dressed musicians and slow pans around the band’s perimeter. Periodic smoke effects and solarization add to the late-psychedelic-period mood. John Coney was doing some very experimental video work at KQED, and KQED at that time was really wide open in terms of they would let you do,” enthuses Farber.
“So John mapped out a visual scheme for the production. There’s no narration, there’s not the usual PBS thing of explaining everything you’re going to see. It was very abstract. We had one go at getting the Pink Floyd performance, and one day to essentially do all of the effects and lay in everything in the studio. There was no such thing as stereo TV. People could put on the FM channel and then watch it on the TV, and that was how we approximated getting the best audio we could out of it.”
Reception
It wasn’t unusual for KQED to broadcast rock concerts in psychedelia’s heyday, especially by local icons. Big Brother & the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver Messenger Service all got airtime.
In the more experimental realm, a long raga by minimalist pioneer Terry Riley sparked, reveals an amused Farber, “more nasty phone calls than anything we ever did at the station.” But Pink Floyd, for as strong an underground following as they building in the United States, were so eager for an American audience that they played a free concert at UCLA a week later. (Farber traveled to Los Angeles with the band in the hopes of getting some additional footage, but none was used. The free concert, he explains, “was really a disaster.”)
Not broadcast until Jan. 26, 1971, the special “got an incredibly positive response when we aired it in San Francisco,” says Farber. “After that, it had two national broadcasts on PBS.”
Pink Floyd’s concert for KQED hasn’t been broadcast on television for many years, and wasn’t made commercially available until its appearance on a massive 27-disc Pink Floyd CD/DVD box set in 2016, The Early Years 1965-1972. But Farber recently oversaw a meticulous transfer from the two-inch masters to DVD — “we cleaned them up as much as we could and the audio is superb”—that is now in the permanent collection of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, in whose library it can be viewed.
“I’m amazed we got it done,” reflects Farber, now a Los Angeles-based writer. “We did it on such a shoestring, and it all came together at the right moment. They really wanted to do it, we wanted to do it, and we got a good performance. You could take out certain little glitches, but I kind of like it for its roughness. ‘Cause it was a reflection of who we were at that time. The ‘60s were still very alive in San Francisco in 1970, and the thing that I loved about KQED is that you had a public television station, but the people on the staff were exceedingly hip. The amount of energy that was being generated at KQED at that time was remarkable.”
Nick Mason : Return To Battersea Power Station
Pink Floyd drummer and founder member Nick Mason made a rare public appearance when he returned to Battersea Power Station last night.
Mason came back to the scene of the band’s ‘Animals’ album that was released 40 years ago in 1977.
The event commemorated the anniversary of the band’s popular album, which featured an inflatable pig, as he was joined on stage by broadcaster and journalist Penny Smith on November 7.
The 73-year-old spoke about the moment the giant inflatable object, tethered to one of the station’s chimneys for the photoshoot, broke free from its moorings.
It was later spotted by airline pilots at 30,000 feet before making it back to the ground after help from police helicopters in Kent.
The musician also spoke about seeing the newly rebuilt and repainted four chimneys that have remained in the regeneration project.
Mason said: “It was one of those moments you just can’t predict. Needless to say, I’m pleased the pig made it back to earth in one piece! ’m delighted to be back at Battersea Power Station 40 years after that photoshoot and it’s great to see the place coming to life with restaurants, shops and venues like this one. I’m pleased to have been a part of its history and can’t wait to see what its future holds.”
Mason was a guest of honour at the event held at Battersea Power Station’s new multi-use arts venue that was in collaboration with the Battersea Arts Centre, The Village Hall, where a photography exhibition will be held from Friday, November 10, to Sunday, November 12.
‘Visions of Battersea Power Station’ is an exhibition by British photographer Adrian Houston, who has photographed figures such as the Princess of Wales, the Dalai Lama and Luciano Pavarotti.
Mr Houston said: “It was back in 2000 that I was commissioned by Guy Laliberté, co-founder of Cirque du Soleil, to photograph Battersea Power Station.The resulting images have always been very special to me, with one of the very first, ‘Through the Wall’, selected for the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. To host this retrospective in the building itself, now being restored to its former glory, is very poignant. I hope this celebration of one of the nation’s most iconic and beloved structures will be equally embraced by the public.”
‘Visions of Battersea Power Station’ is open from 12 noon to 6pm on November 10 and 11, before it opens from 11am to 5pm on November 12.
It is free to attend and The Village Hall is located in Arches Lane, Circus West Village.
Rob Tincknell, chief executive of Battersea Power Station Development Company, said: “It’s great to welcome Nick Mason back to Battersea Power Station. Battersea has over the years become a huge cultural icon, not only appearing on the ‘Animals’ album cover, but featuring in all sorts of popular culture from ‘The King’s Speech’ to Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Sabotage’ in the 1930s. We hope lots of people will come down and check out the free exhibition and also visit the new restaurants and shops that have opened at Circus West Village.”