Felix Atagong's Unfinished Projec

Pink Dreams

Entry 1608

Some exciting news arrived last weekend through a Pink Floyd portal. Alex Paterson, head spinner of the band The Orb, said in an interview that he and David Gilmour had entered a studio ‘to work on an album’.

The news was vague and titillating enough to make all kind of assumptions. Did this mean that LX & DG were attempting a Fireman trick à la Youth and Mc Cartney? Perhaps Alex had finally lured Dave in his spider web with a little help from Guy Pratt who can be found as bass player and co-composer on several Orb, Pink Floyd and David Gilmour records from the past? (Pratt and Paterson also teamed up in a band called The Transit Kings.)

The Orb's record output is prolific and even then a lot of tunes and mixes stay hidden in the closet until LX decides to put them on a compilation album somewhere. They just celebrated a third release in the Orbsessions series from record company Malicious Damage and according to some online reviews I read it is either brilliant or utterly irritating, which makes it typically Orb, I guess. I haven't bought Baghdad Batteries yet, my days that I ran to the shop to get me their latest release are over as The Orb has left my attention span somewhat thanks to the record Okie Dokie that wasn't okie dokie at all but a mediocre Thomas Fehlmann album with the brand name glued over it to sell a few extra copies more.

It took me over a year to listen to The Dream that followed Okie Dokie and although it has Youth written all over it the result is pretty average. Not pretty average as in pretty average but pretty average as in pretty but nevertheless a bit average. Probably I’ll get to Baghdad Batteries one of these days but I wouldn’t hold my breath, if I were you…

Although one fan found that the announcement came about two decades and a half too late the GilmOrb collaboration was making both Floyd and Orb communities very excited but excitement is something David Gilmour does not favour anymore in his line of work. This week the following comment could be found on his official website…

David & Orb Rumours True – Up To A Point

Recent comments by ambient exponents The Orb's Alex Paterson that they have been collaborating with David Gilmour are true – up to a point. David has done some recording with The Orb and producer Youth, inspired initially by the plight of Gary McKinnon. However, nothing is finalised, and nothing has been confirmed with regards to any structure for the recordings or firm details re: any release plans.

In other words: forget it…

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Andy Hughes (1965 - 2009): gone to Orblivion 

Barrett: first in space!

Entry 1287

It is a good thing that for the last few weeks I have been busy with several walkthroughs for the adventurous nookie monster ArianeB and that my review for the most recent French Syd Barrett biography, Syd Barrett, le premier Pink Floyd by Emmanuel Le Bret vegetated in that small Bermuda triangle called My Documents.

Right after I had read the book my opinion about French authors was as follows; I give you an unpublished exclusive excerpt from my first draft:

As long as French biographers keep on insisting that les Pink Floyd is part of their national treasury just because David Gilmour had a fling with BB once they will need to be hunted down by a mob of critics armed with boiling tar and blood stained feathers.

According to the credits on the back cover Emmanuel Le Bret is not only a Sixties collector and connoisseur but also a well known lecturer, although in French this is described as a conférencier what is not exactly the same. Anyway and this is a cheap blow under the belt, I apologize beforehand, a search on the world wide web doesn’t reveal any of his performing qualities to me but perhaps he only reads on private parties.

Syd Barrett, le premier Pink Floyd, is not Emmanuel Le Bret's first book so tells me Google . He debuted with an esoteric study about Uranus, a subject he knows more about than you dare to imagine. I could add in a joke or two here, but I won't. Uranus is not something one makes jokes about, unless you're from Klingon territory.

The biographical planet orbits between two opposing points. At the sinister side all attention goes to meticulously verified, double verified and triple verified facts. This does not always lead to readable books, I'm afraid. Spiralling at the other side are those who will not hesitate to add a good, albeit probably untrue, anecdote because it goes down so well. They probably think they're writing telenovelas instead.

Emmanuel Le Bret certainly admires the second biographical viewpoint. Several times he warns us, the innocent reader, not to give too many attention to the many legends around Syd Barrett and continues then by giving us a page and a half of the wildest rumours circling around about the madcap. Some of these were even unknown to me but this could be due to the French and their legendary lust for the baroque and the bizarre. It took them until the mid nineties to finally understand that Pink Floyd wasn't a bird so one juicy Syd rumour more or less can't hurt Emmanuel must have thought. Le Bret is as passionate about the rock star as he is passionate about Uranus and this shows in the many sentences that end with an exclamation mark! Like this! And that! And then just another one when you least expect it! French love this kind of stuff as you can see in their many movie comedies filled with screaming people who keep on smashing doors.

If you want to know what the general tone of the book is, I invite you to read the following post that I found at The Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit. The author of that blog is a complete nutter, ready for the strap jacket, but I can follow the Reverend in what he has to say about Syd Barrett, le premier Pink Floyd: Tattoo You.

I am now also pretty sure that the French lack the proper DNA string that give other nationalities the magic force to copy and paste English words. For fuck's sake how moronic do you need to be to keep on insisting throughout the entire book that Syd's one time girlfriend is named Libby Gausdeen or that David Gilmour's early band is called Jocker's Wild?

There must be a zillion Internet joints, from Albania to Zambia, where they do manage to spell these names right, except in France. I made a list of the dozens of spelling mistakes in the book, and boys and the one single Nordic girl reading this blog, you are lucky that it has disappeared mysteriously from my harddisk, and I am too fed up to look for them again. Spoken about a narrow escape!

One could say that Emmanuel Le Bret writes English like officer Crabtree (from Allo Allo fame) speaks French (I know that this blog is not spotless either but we Belgians are semi-French anyway).

One time I really had to laugh out loud and that was when le brat re-baptises the hippy couple Jock and Sue, you know those hipsters that according to popular believe and certainly to our brave Uranus spotter spiked the drinking water and the cat food with LSD, as Mad Max and Mad Sue.

In real life Mad Jock was Alistair Findlay and Mad Sue was Susan Kingsford, and they both deny that they have ever mixed LSD in Barrett’s tea. Alistair Findlay even stated in Tim Willis’ Madcap biography that ‘spiking was a heinous crime’. Although these testimonies date from 2002 (and were repeated in Mark Blake’s biography from 2007) Emmanuel Le Bret still describes this as a proven fact and categorizes the couple as:

…un couple infernal (le mot n’est pas trop fort) [qui] biberonne le genie, rêvant sans doute de l’accompagner dans son voyage, à défaut de partager son talent…
…a devilish couple (that depiction is not too harsh) boozing the genius, without doubt dreaming to accompany him in his voyage and to share his talent… (translated by FA, original found on p. 138)

Pure bollocks, if you ask me, and further proof that the French are at least 7 years behind compared to the rest of the world.

What is there more to say? Le premier Pink Floyd has no pictures, although some French photo material does exist, and no index, what is a pity, especially for a biography. Basically the book reads like a train but flies like a brick...

To end this misery, a positive note. Here is a proposal to all French would-be authors who want to write the next Floydian biography, if one more is still needed: send me a copy before it goes to the publisher and I will check it for copy and paste errors. It will cost you nothing except a free copy once it does gets out, promised!

Le Bret, Emmanuel : Syd Barrett. Le premier Pink Floyd., Editions du Moment, Paris, 2008

Notes (other than the above internet links)
Willis, Tim, Madcap, Short Books, London, 2002, p. 75, repeated in:
Blake, Mark: Pigs Might Fly, Aurum Press, London, 2007, p.83.

Illustration (top left) by synofsound - thanks syn!

Seedfloyd has some articles and an audiolink concerning this book at the following pages:
http://www.seedfloyd.fr/livre/syd-barrett-le-premier-pink-floyd?s[]=emmanuel
http://www.seedfloyd.fr/forum/index.php?topic=1120.0
http://www.seedfloyd.fr/forum/index.php?topic=1199.0
Radio Canada interview.

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Other Pink Floyd related books that were trashed by me can be found here:
Cheap Tricks 
Si les cochons pourraient voler…  
The Rough Guide To Pink Floyd 

Cheap Tricks

Entry 1157

The best Pink Floyd book I've read in years is of course Mark Blake's Pigs Might Fly. Don't tell this to his friends and relatives but I know from a reliable source that he prays at the Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit from time to time.

The funniest book about the Floyd are the memoirs, not of Nick gentleman drummer boy Mason, although they are good for a chuckle or two, crusty apple pie indeed, but those of Guy Pratt. About a third of My Bass and Other Animals colours pink as Guy joined the diet Floyd, although diet was not exactly the right word to describe the intake of Mr. Gilmour at that time, on their A Momentary Lapse of Reason world tour. Pratt has a very weird kind of humour and one of his pranks was an attempt to crash the Pink Floyd tour plane by frantically running up and down the corridor, in mid-flight! Normal bands have a tour bus; Pink Floyd has a tour plane and the drummer was flying it. If you don’t want to read the book, you can watch an interview where Guy tells about his Floydian encounters.

The best, best as in anoraky, Syd Barrett biography is Julian Palacios' Lost in the Woods, he is a silly bugger if you ask me as he invited the Church on the SBRS forum. Around this time a second (more condensed, I’m afraid) version of his book should finally appear. So far for this commercial break-up.

Speaking about Barretthings, the amount of Syd related books is slowly overhauling the man’s solo output and recently two new ones (in French) have made it onto my desk. Written by Jean-Michel Espitallier, Syd Barrett, le rock et autres trucs, looked the most promising. It doesn't claim to be a biography but a personal rendition, part essay, of a French Barrett connoisseur.

In my opinion France and rock go together like Germany and humour, Italy and efficiency, Belgium and world soccer finales but this one, I hoped, could be an exception as Mr. Jean-Michel Espitallier is not only is a devoted Barrett fan, but also the translator of the French edition of Tim Willis' Madcap biography, a renowned minor poet (dixit Francis Xavier Enderby) and drummer of the French rock band Prexley? (although that last is not exactly a reference, see above).

The title is a nice pun, un jeu de mots, as it can be interpreted as rock and other stuff but also as rock and other tricks. That is why I preferred to start with this tome instead of the other French Barrett book lying on my desk, called The First Pink Floyd, already deserving the price for lamest title of the year.

Stuff & tricks

It is 30 November 2004 and Jean-Michel Espitallier is nervously strolling around St. Margaret’s Square hoping to get a glimpse of the man who was once known as Syd but now prefers to be called Roger. When Syd-Roger drives by (in his sister's car) and the vehicle has to stop at the crossroads - I deliberately use this term here - where Jean-Michel is sitting on a bench, both men meet in the eye and both pretend, for a couple of minutes, not to see the other one. This anecdote sets the tone of the book, marvellously described by the drummer who can't hide his poetic roots. Strong stuff. Nice trick.

I once remarked at the, now defunct, Astral Piper forum that I couldn’t understand the romantic feelings some female Barrett fans had for Syd. I mean, this guy was a slightly disturbed diabetic elderly and if I should have asked them to have a fling with my grandfather they would’ve been insulted… Espitallier is aware of this dichotomy and compares Syd Barrett to Peter Pan. Syd was a Cambridge youngster who refused to grow up and died in the early Seventies when he, like Icarus, reached for the sky too soon. After all these years, fans were still hoping to find a glimpse of Syd, although only Roger had survived.

From old aged Roger it goes to old aged rock. Espitallier makes the point that we have forgotten about the My Lai massacre but only remember its soundtrack. Good Morning Vietnam has turned into an infomercialised cd-compilation (I have a Tour Of Duty TV-Shop-six-pack myself). Television documentaries use The Mamas and The Papas to comment napalm warfare. We look at a vintage take of an American soldier who has just placed a bullet through a women’s head but all we discuss is Suzy Q by the Creedence Clearwater Revival. Although the above is not really new, innovative or original, it is good to see it in print from time to time.

Infotainment

Jean-Michel Espitallier is not always well informed. I can forgive him that he mistakes the Dutch designer duo Simon Posthuma and Marijke Koger for a couple of Germans but when it comes to Syd some facts should better have been checked before putting it into print. That Mick Rock did not shoot the cover of The Madcap Laughs is perhaps stuff for anoraks (Mick Rock himself has always hinted he was behind it anyway, a fact that Storm Thorgerson denies) but the story that, shortly before his death, Syd Barrett found a guitar from his brother-in-law and started strumming it can be found in the Mike Watkinson & Pete Anderson Crazy Diamond biography, that appeared 15 years before Syd Barrett passed away. And that particular anecdote probably dated already from a few years before it went into print. There are so many myths about Syd Barrett that one doesn’t need to create new ones.

It is perhaps understandable, the man is a poet and not a biographer. His book is about the Barrett phenomenon and not about the historical Barrett.

Lost in translation

Jean-Michel Espitallier writes : Il y a la musique qui nous rentre dans le cerveau musical et il y a la musique qui passe directement dans la poitrine…

Espitallier not only has been hit in the stomach by Syd’s music but received some hits on the head as well, resulting in some serious brain damage. He heard his first Syd song in 1973 and remembers it as Babe Lemonade; actually it is Baby Lemonade. And Jean-Michel’s lethargic song title memories keep on going on. Barrett’s James Joyce adaptation is baptized Golden Air (not Hair) and Syd’s final Pink Floyd statement Jugband Blues is changed to Jugband Blue. A couple of decades ago I started reading a promising French novel but quit after a dozen pages because the author kept on insisting on a Beatles’ song called Eleanor Rugby. Things like that make me grind my teeth. It makes me even wonder if Jean-Miche Espitallier is a real Barrett fan or a mere fraud trying to cash in, like a few others, on the Barrett legacy. For Ig’s sake, it just takes a 10 seconds look on a record sleeve to see if a title has been noted down without mistakes.

Arthur Rambo

The book ends with a list of creative geniuses who stopped being creative at a certain point in their lives. One of these persons is the 19th century poet Arthur Rimbaud, who stopped writing at 21 and proclaimed: Merde à la poésie! I would like to end this review with: Merde au poète! But let’s have a look at the pros and cons of his Syd-hiking first (bad pun, I know)…

Pros: instead of the umpteenth biography this book is a personal journey from the author through music, art and literature, using the Barrett legend as a guide. Interesting viewpoints about music, fandom, culture and politics are intertwined with nice wordplays such as ‘Bob Dylan had a Plan Baez’.

Cons: actually Jean-Michel Espitallier gets more Barrett song titles wrong than he gets them right. At a certain moment I even thought he did it on purpose, the man is a poet after all.

I used to have this philosophy teacher who subtracted points from our exam results if we made spelling mistakes. Although we were angry with the man in those days I can now see he had a point (our points, actually). So out of 10, Syd Barrett, le rock et autres trucs gets an 8 for its content, but I feel obliged to subtract at least 5 points for its many mistakes.

Suddenly...

...it is silent in here. Did a poet pass or did someone fart?

Espitallier, Jean-Michel: Syd Barrett, le rock et autres trucs, Editions Philippe Rey, Paris, 2009, 192 pages, 17 €.

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Note: This book grew out of an essai radiophonique Jean-Michel Espitallier gave on radiostation France Culture on 4 November 2007. Called Syd Barrett Quand Même it can be found on the (interesting) French Floyd fansite Seedfloyd. Webbrowser version: http://www.seedfloyd.fr/article/syd-barrett-quand-meme. Direct downloads in MP3 or WMA format can be found on the same page.

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Si les cochons pourraient voler…  

Si les cochons pourraient voler…

Entry 1066

Have you ever seen President Sarkozy on the telly giving a speech? He always thinks he is doing a bloody Hamlet. His performances, because that is what he thinks they are, remind me more of Louis de Funès (or for the non-Francophiles among us: Benny Hill) than Napoleon Bonaparte, another one of those short short-tempered little men with a short fuse who think they can rule the world.

This post contains a fairly well hidden review of the Pink Floyd biography Pigs Might Fly by Mark Blake. To cut the intro, press here.

Flamingoes might fly

Eloquence is a French way of speech but that was not what I was thinking of when I read the following, decades ago:

Je ne sais qui doit le plus à l’autre! La France ou le Pink Floyd?
Le Pink Floyd peut-être.

(translation) I don’t know who owes the other more! France or Pink Floyd?
Pink Floyd perhaps.

The above is the start of a French rock biography (1977 edition), called Pink Floyd, written by Rock & Folk journalist Jean-Marie Leduc and issued by Albin Michel. Rock & Folk was an excellent French music magazine, that started in 1966, hence its name, and that wanted to inform the French public from the new trends in modern pop music. Jean-Marie Leduc hopped to London and wrote several articles about the London Underground music scene and le pouvoir des fleurs. He discovered this incredible band that would soon be the French progressive student movement’s darling, le Pink Floyd.

Although the most common language at London at that time was the language of love it would’ve helped Jean-Marie Leduc a little bit if he had actually understood some English. Which he didn’t. Probably the acid didn’t help either. That didn’t stop him to write a Pink Floyd biography that was published in October 1973, and that could still be found, a decade later, in every bookstore and self-respecting newspaper and magazine shop in France. Selling figures nearly must have achieved the same height as a regular Pink Floyd album; Leduc’s Pink Floyd was an instant classic and a steady seller.

It was also full of blunders. At page 19 Leduc wrongly mistakes the Pink Flamingo club for the band and throughout the book he will name the lads le Flamant Rose (it would take Rock & Folk until July 1994 to officially denounce the fact that Pink Floyd is a Phoenicopterus Roseus). Another botch is on page 49 where Leduc claims that ‘le 2 novembre (1967) (…) un nouveau simple du groupe “Apologises / Jugband blues” est commercialisé en Angleterre’. This one simple sentence has made French speaking Pink Floyd fans look for this non-existent track of the band for over a decade. At the end of the book the mistake is repeated at the discography, Jean-Marie Leduc keeps on maintaining that the Floyd’s third single was Jugband blues / Apologies (please note the different orthography and running order).

Jean-Marie Leduc’s biography was probably the very first biography on the band, as Charles Beterams wrote in the Echoes, a Dutch fan club magazine, and despite the mistakes it also contains a stunning revelation about the bands first recording, forgotten by most of the biographies that would come next. Leduc interviewed Nick Mason in 1973 and asked if Astronomy Domine was the Floyd’s first composition. Mason answered (translated from French back into English): “Not true. Our first composition was titled Lucy Lee in blue tight or something similar. We recorded it on acetate but it was never commercialised.” Once again Jean-Marie Leduc’s average knowledge of the English language made him note the song as Lucy Lee, and not as Lucy Leave, although Nick Mason’s pronunciation of the song title may not have been too comprehensible as well. It would take ages for another journalist to re-discover the truth about the band’s first recording.

Floydstuff

One bloke who does remember Lucy Leave is Mark Blake. In 2007 he wrote a Pink Floyd biography entitled Pigs Might Fly but because I am such a stingy money spender I wanted to wait until the paperback came sailplaning to me. The last couple of years it is raining Pink Floyd related books and accessories as if all kind of shady people want to have their free ride on the gravy train. It is of course a double feeling, here we are Pink Floyd fans wanting to know everything (and we mean everything) on the band but on the other hand we feel as if we are inside an orange squeezer (or to use Gerald Scarfe’s weird world of Floydian symbolism: a meat grinder). The last thing I’ve read on Pink Floyd merchandising is that Converse will bring out a range of shoes based on the cover art of three of their albums. Part of me is yelling yuck!, but another part is jumping up and down, not a pretty sight if you would catch me on my webcam.

About a decade ago, perhaps a bit longer, small record companies suddenly discovered the tribute album. I jumped on it as a hungry louce on a passing German shepherd dog. But when my heap of tribute records, all made to honestly commemorate the band and not to make a quick buck, started to become bigger than my genuine Pink Floyd collection I simply gave up. I think that Babies Go Pink Floyd was the last tribute album I bought, partially because the concept attracted me. If you also feel tempted to listen to it.
Don’t.
Not only the record is tripe and you wouldn’t want to confront any baby with it without giving him or her a lifelong phobia for Pink Floyd music but also it doesn’t actually motivates grown-ups either to start procreating, normally a quite amusing and satisfactory pastime.

Recently I found this add from Dwell records that goes something like this:

The biggest names in hard rock and avant-garde metal have come together to pay tribute to the madcap genius of Syd Barrett. Featuring some of heavy-metals most influential players, this is a hard-rocking trip through the music world’s most idiosyncratic minds.

Some of the bands present on the record are the following: Dreg, Giant Squid, Jarboe, Kylesa and my favourite Stinking Lizaveta. Except in some distant Norwegian fjordic regions where these bands are probably world famous amongst the local satanic black metal scene these bands don’t really merit the eptitheton ‘biggest name in hard rock’ to begin with. I would have written the add for this album a little bit less triumphant:

Several virtually unknown hard rock and avant-garde metal bands that are constantly struggling to have a record contract have come together to rip off the musical heritage of Syd Barrett. Featuring some of heavy-metals obscurest players, this is a fruitless hard-rocking trip trying to get a fan-base that exceeds the dozen.

Now that is what I call a more realistic description of the project. You can listen to the songs at MySpace and I have to confess they don’t all sound like rubbish to me.

But all the above was merely a long, way too long, way to say that I quit buying Pink Floyd tribute records a while ago as most were, are and will be… full of crap. I had the same compulsive buying disorder when it came to Pink Floyd related music magazines and books. Despite the fact that I can’t play guitar I have dozens of guitar magazines that promise you the tablature of the third guitar solo in Comfortably Numb and a brand new exclusive Pink Floyd interview that was in fact already published in another guitar magazine from three years before that I already had in my scrapbook.

I define myself more than the average Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett fan, but less than an anorak, fanorak suits me fine.. Anoraks have the tendency to start flame wars because someone has told that Syd Barrett was wearing green socks on the 7th of August 1967 while every aficionado knows he was wearing brown socks that day. (To avoid death threats: I’ve just made this whole sock-thing up, but the 7th of August 1967 was of course an important day in Floydian history, about the importance of green socks, just check David Gilmour’s inside sleeve of his About Face album and shiver.)

So I quit buying Pink Floyd books as well, more or less… the last I bought was The Rough Guide To Pink Floyd that can now be found at local lo-price bookshops for the third of the price I bought it for. That is a very nice Pink Floyd biography by the way, and if you are in search for one, well don’t hesitate and get it. It’s cheap and cheerful.

Pigs Might Fly  

But this post was originally intended as a review of Pigs Might Fly, a Pink Floyd biography by Mark Blake and all I did until now is take the piss out of:

a) the very first Pink Floyd biography by Jean-Marie Leduc;
b) the various tribute cds that do exist;
c) the growing pile of Pink Floyd biographies…

So I had given up buying Pink Floyd biographies but when I wrote on the Late Night forum that nobody had ever tried to locate Syd’s girlfriend we know as Iggy Mark Blake promptly replied that he certainly had. I more or less apologised and answered that I would read his biography.

So I did.

Who am I to post a review about a book that Record Collector choose as book of the year, that Q magazine described as a ‘detailed, orderly, first-rate read’, while Mojo praised its ‘heroic research’. It’s excellent, well written, full of anecdotes and it seems to please the casual and the more ardent fan of the band, although it still forgets to mention the colour of socks Syd Barrett was wearing on the 7th of August 1967. Anoraks will always find something to grumble about. I did. I found a mistake from microscopical importance about the Publius affair but only people daft enough to look for the Enigma mystery will probably realise that.

A while ago I started a side-project called the Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit. In it I am looking for the whereabouts of the girl who appeared on the cover of the Syd Barrett album The Madcap Laughs. It is rather amazing how many bits and pieces can be found after all these years, but apparently Iggy was quite a character in those flowery powery days. The time was ripe as other people suddenly started to reveal their Iggy memories, amongst them Anthony Stern who made a four-minute movie about her in the Sixties that was premiered this year.

I wrote some things about Iggy that I thought were revolutionary but apparently Mark Blake had unravelled these before in his biography, only he didn’t need as many space to write these things down than I did and if this review goes on like this it might be longer than the book itself.

On page 140 Mark Blake writes about how Iggy performed The Bend (Church article: Bend It!),on the next page he reveals the existence of the Anthony Stern movie (before it became an item on YouTube) and how she used to go dancing at The Orchid in Purley (Church article: Shaken not stirred). And all this a year before the Church was started and something of an Iggy hype was created. Hats off to Mark Blake.

Mark Blake is not only an accurate but also a beautiful writer (I’m not speaking about his physical appearance here), reading the bit about the Live 8 reunion gave me tears in my eyes although I normally only weep when I read sweet little things about dying puppies. That more or less sums it up really; Pigs Might Fly moved me and I thank Mark Blake a lot for that.

(In America the book has been published under the alternative title Comfortably Numb, this was the working title of the book but as the cover has a snapshot from Battersea Power Station, including flying pig balloon, this was changed for the European market.)

A final word about Jean-Marie Leduc

One of the funnier parts of the very first Pink Floyd biography are the translated song texts. The Floyd’s first album is called Le joueur de flûte aux grilles de l’aube, but my favourite still is a song that is called Bonbons et pain aux raisins. And what to think about the following, I let you guess what song this has been taken from:

De tortueux signes voltigent.
Lueur. Lueur. Lueur.
Fla. Pom. Pom.
Escaliers d’épouvante et lois de mort…

And a final word for collectors

If you are looking for a copy of the Pink Floyd book by Jean-Marie Leduc be sure to buy the Albin Michel / Rock & Folk versions (several editions from 1973 till 1983). In 1987 another book by Jean-Marie Leduc, also called Pink Floyd, and in the same mini format, was presented to the public by Le Club Des Stars / Seghers. Although based upon the previous versions this book has been completely rewritten and most of the errors have been edited out.

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Kopfgeburten 

Kopfgeburten

Entry 991

This week, sad week, brought me scattered thoughts, feelings and sensations. Let me empty my cerebral scrapbook first before I continue with the subject of the day. Activate cynical mood warning…

1

Three weeks ago a Belgian soldier was killed in Lebanon attempting to dismantle an Israeli bomb. He was posthumously decorated and the big shots praised him for his bravery. Strange enough nobody from the Belgian government had the guts to convene the Israeli ambassador and to officially demand for an explanation what the fuck these bombs were doing there and how on Earth they were going to indemnify the Blue Helmets, the family of the deceased soldier and last but not least the hundreds of innocent victims who have been mutilated and killed and will still be mutilated and killed for years after the initial conflict has taken place.

Whenever a believer of the true Zion faith discovers a swastika on a wall a mind-boggling tidal wave of complaints hits the media. One of the silliest moments of an anti-Semite counter reaction took place decades ago when the Belgian-Israeli Weekly accused Albert Uderzo to be racist because he had caricatured a Jew in Asterix and the Black Gold.

Don’t get me wrong. The Jewish people have suffered a lot, especially in the last century, and I’m not here to minimise or contradict the Holocaust or anti-Semitism. But I don’t like the fact that these historical barbarisms are still used today as a scapegoat to defend military actions against civilians. Just make the following headbirth: what do you think the international reaction would be if a Blue Helmet was be killed in Afghanistan by a Taliban cluster bomb? Catch my drift?

I needed to get this off my chest.

2

Some silly people bombard my mailboxes with funny PowerPoint presentations, funny jokes, funny movies and the odd portion of pornographic material. Depending on the mood I’m in I just delete the crap (with exception of the pornographic material, I confess) and nod very friendly when I meet the senders, mostly at the local pub, when they feel it necessary to loudly analyse what they send me a couple of days before.

This one nearly made me piss my pants: Statue of St George falls and gets beheaded in a church.

But it also made place for another headbirth. Why do I find this Christian blasphemous act rather funny and the bombing of the Afghan Buddhas of Bamyan not?

3

A second movie that cracked me up involves a hidden camera prank that turns bad. A moron with a bucketful of paint decorates a parked car and is promptly attacked by its owner. When the nose bleeding actor explains that the scene was set up for the general amusement of the tv glotzing community this isn’t appreciated by the victim, quite the contrary. The man doesn't feel invited to laugh in front of the camera and kicks the prankster a bit more. I sincerely hope the authorities gave the mental bloke a medal instead of a fine. But at the same time a little silly bird keeps on fluttering in my head.

Time for a headbirth. What if the beating was a scenario driven thing as well? These days it is so hard to trust television.

4

My Live In Gdansk cd/dvd/goodies box arrived yesterday and although I pissed on the concept a couple of weeks ago the situation has somewhat changed since then. Rick Wright, the quietest of the brothers Floyd, is no longer among us and thus this 5 double disc is more or less his musical testament. Friday evening I watched Echoes on disc 3 and cried a bit, alone in front of the computer screen. Thank God my webcam is broken or it would’ve been a hidden camera item all over the world. (Now on YouTube: grown man cries in front of a Pink Floyd song.) The close ups of Ricks Wright’s fingers floating forever and ever over the keyboard keys only strengthened me in my belief that the man was a fucking genius. The last track on the DVD is the obligatory Comfy Numb. Rick sings the parts that are normally done by Roger Waters. Justice is done.

This reminds me of the unchecked fact that somebody, EMI probably, waved a bucketful of dollars in front of the Floyd politely informing if they were interested in doing a sequel to Dark Side of The Moon. Apparently they all said no.

Headbirth: although Roger Waters did sing about a surrogate band in the Eighties he apparently doesn’t realise that the Floyd songs he does on his live shows sound more like a tribute band than anything else.

5

What is it with these sequels and remakes anyway? Those who know me know I am a bit a fan of the original The Wicker Man, a cult horror movie from the early Seventies. The protagonist is a 30 years virgin policeman, not even a wanker, who gets lured to an island where Christopher Lee, dressed like Neil the hippie from The Young Ones, is a pagan high priest. Although the women on the island have the tendency to dance naked in the daylight, dance naked in the moonlight and even dance naked when there is no distinctive source of light present, singing Scottish folksongs, the copper refuses to get involved. When the town’s main hottie, played by Britt Ekland, juggles her bare buttocks in front of him, he still refuses to spill his seed on the ground and thus he is exactly the right spicy man to be sacrificed to their sun god.

Recently I came across the American remake with Nicolas Cage. Frankly, I don’t like the guy and in this movie Cage proves once again that he is not a method actor but merely uses screaming as a method. Somebody should explain him that modern movie sets have hi-tech microphones that can record sweet whispers as well.

HB: Why do people make remakes and sequels if they already know for sure that the result will be worse than the original? Is this some kind of a postmodernism thing?

6

Part 5 was a mere intermezzo, because the real message is here: Eoin Colfer, his name reveals that he probably has been living on The Wicker Man island for too long, has been commissioned by Penguin books and the Adams family to write the sixth sequel of the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy trilogy. The book will be titled And Another Thing and will resuscitate Arthur Dent, Zaphod Beeblebrox and Ford Prefect. I’m not sure about Marvin, the paranoid android, as he did the decent thing of dying in So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, but we can’t be too sure with all these parallel universes floating around, can we?

Kopfgeburten. Should I be happy or should I be sad with this news? I’m not sure and I don’t really care.

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Ringmaster  

When the right one walks out of the door...

Entry 981

It has been a sad week for us, music lovers. Rick Wright, one of the founding fathers of the band Pink Floyd, died of cancer. Wright was a member of the 1963 R&B cover band Sigma 6 that would grow, a couple of years later, into the next hip thing when Syd Barrett joined the gang. The hip thing would soon become a monster, a gravy train, a dinosaur, it had its up and downs, it was praised and loathed by the so-called serious music press.

I am not good at obituaries, and who am I to write one anyway, so I’ll pass the word to David Gilmour, not only a colleague but also close friend of him.

In the welter of arguments about who or what was Pink Floyd, Rick's enormous input was frequently forgotten.

He was gentle, unassuming and private but his soulful voice and playing were vital, magical components of our most recognised Pink Floyd sound.

I have never played with anyone quite like him. The blend of his and my voices and our musical telepathy reached their first major flowering in 1971 on 'Echoes'. In my view all the greatest PF moments are the ones where he is in full flow. After all, without 'Us and Them' and 'The Great Gig In The Sky', both of which he wrote, what would 'The Dark Side Of The Moon' have been? Without his quiet touch the Album 'Wish You Were Here' would not quite have worked.

In our middle years, for many reasons he lost his way for a while, but in the early Nineties, with 'The Division Bell', his vitality, spark and humour returned to him and then the audience reaction to his appearances on my tour in 2006 was hugely uplifting and it's a mark of his modesty that those standing ovations came as a huge surprise to him, (though not to the rest of us).

Taken from: http://www.davidgilmour.com/

I admit I was one of those many fans who sheered louder for Rick than for the others on David’s last tour. Hearing him sing Echoes with David was probably my best Floydian encounter ever, topping Dogs that Roger Waters used (and still uses) to sing on his solo tours.

Roger Waters, normally a man of many words, has put the following appropriate statement on his website:

Taken from: http://www.roger-waters.com/

Julianindica wrote some great stuff about Wright at Late Night:

Wright’s keyboard style had a unique melancholic grandeur. He had an ear for exotic sounds, bringing in Middle Eastern Phrygian scales into his mix. Never one to play lightning fast or pound the notes out, Wright conjured up his unique style with patience. What was left out was as important as what stayed in, and Wright took a calm and methodical approach. The influence of Davis sideman Bill Evans introspective, melancholic piano was strong. Modal jazz had minimal chords and relied on melody and intervals of different modes. A slow harmonic rhythm opened space in the music, in contrast to bebop’s frenzy.

The full text can be found at Late Night.

The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say...

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Wright related comments can be found at the following places on this blog:

2006
The Rough Guide To Pink Floyd

2007
Easter Eggs Lost On An Island

2008
Random Blueß aka sucking for statistics
John Lennon called him 'Normal'....
Solidarnosc
The Orb On Mars

Rick Wright portrait by Huug Schipper (1974) from the (unauthorisedl) The Pink Floyd Songbook, ca. 1978.

Stardust

Entry 920

1

A couple of days ago Amazon delivered me my semestrial bunch of Pink Floyd related books. It came in a carton box so big that I feared I would have to build a library next to my house. Amazon cares about books, obviously, and that is why they give books enough space to breathe and to stroll around a bit during the journey from Amazon Ville to Felixtown, where I live. But during the adventurous journey two of them not only had made acquaintance in a formal, but also in an amatory way. When I opened the box they were still in a deep orgiastic penetrative mode and I felt a bit ashamed to have to interrupt their ongoing game of love.

I took a picture of the couple in action and send it to Amazon who promptly replied: "The packaging methods we use have proven over time to protect the books effectively. However, in your case it had been proved incorrect."

Now I fail to understand how putting 4 small books in an enormous carton can be called an effective method of packaging. Protecting each book in a brown paper envelop, to name just one of the 3 simple solutions I can immediately think of, would be less damaging, but who am I to think about these things. I am certainly not qualified and there must be a team of package resource managers at Amazon who make a million bucks a year only by contemplating the most effective ways to send books from Z to A.

2

For years Pink Floyd biographers kept on repeating the same story they had probably read in a previous biography of the band. Syd Barrett named Pink Floyd after two obscure Georgia blues singers from his record collection: Pink Anderson and Floyd Council.

This story however was not entirely true.
First: these blues singers weren’t from Georgia.
Second: Syd Barrett did not have records from them.
Third. Well let’s start with the third point.

Pink Anderson isn’t really that obscure. He is not BB King of course, but his name does ring some tinkle bells amongst blues collectors. There was a kind of Pink Anderson revival in the Sixties and records of him can still be purchased today. So it was perhaps not that farfetched that Syd Barrett owned a record by him. But only he didn’t.

Floyd Council is an entirely different matter. Now this guy really is a footnote in blues history. He is most known as sideman on about a dozen Blind Boy Fuller songs and only recorded a couple of tracks himself. If you happen to own one of these originals you have hit the jackpot. And even now, with his name tied to the Pink Floyd legacy, it is difficult to find his solo oeuvre. It was nearly impossible, and I dare to say it was entirely impossible, for a Cambridge youngster to find a Floyd Council record in the UK in the early Sixties.

Little by little the Pink Floyd biographies altered the story. Well, perhaps these blues men didn’t come from Georgia, well, perhaps Syd didn’t actually own their records, well… perhaps these names were only mentioned on the sleeve notes of a blues record. A Blind Boy Fuller compilation perhaps?

But it lasted until 2001 before anyone (clearly not a biographer) asked the following question to a bunch of blues collectors: "Does a Blind Boy Fuller record, from before 1965, exists that mentions both Floyd Council and Pink Anderson on its sleeve?" The answer was yes. David Moore from Bristol even had the record in his collection. The rest is history and it has been repeated over and over again in Pink Floyd biographies ever since. It is even repeated in one of the books I received from Amazon a couple of days ago…

All it took to find the answer was, oddly enough, to ask the question to someone who knew, a thing nobody had ever thought of in 35 years.

3

Another thing that has bothered me lately is the who, what and where of the mystery person whose (splendidly shaped) buttocks can be found on the back sleeve of the Syd Barrett album The Madcap Laughs. All we seem to know is that the beautiful people of the Underground used to nickname her Iggy the Eskimo. There is a bit of an Iggy revival going on, not only on the Late Night discussion forum, but also on The City Wakes that gives us a preview of a previously unreleased Iggy Eskimo Girl (home) movie, directed by Anthony Stern.

Maybe the movie will stir some things up, because when Mark Blake wanted to trace her for his Pink Floyd biography Pigs Might Fly all he could come up with was:

There were others, including some of Syd Barrett's ex-girlfriends, whom I couldn't find; not least the fabled Iggy, whose bare arse appeared on the cover of The Madcap Laughs. In these instances, the letters were returned from an overseas address, or the telephone number I'd been given was no longer working. I soon learned that the women were harder to find, as marriage and divorce plays havoc with the names on the electoral register, and nobody could even remember Iggy's surname, or, indeed her real first name. Or they weren't telling. Taken from: Me & Pink Floyd.

Now here’s a biography I still want to buy, so Amazon you better beware!

Why am I writing this, you might think, if thinking is one of your stronger points, well, I am making this little web-thingy that listens to the name The Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit where I will try to publish some facts and rumours about her. It’s time somebody asks some questions before it is too late…

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Solidarnosc

Solidarnosc

Entry 847

Years ago I used to make some fun with those Iron Maiden fans who wanted to buy every piece of vinyl defecated by their favourite band. Each album contained at least four singles. Every single existed in different formats and they all had one or two unreleased numbers. Probably Iron Maiden has got more unreleased bonus material floating around than regular album tracks.

"Look.", said one of these metal (although in those days we still called it hardrock) guys when he ran to me out of breath on the schoolyard: "This single is wrapped inside an exclusive Eddie calendar. Wow, an exclusive Eddie calendar! Can you believe it!" What the fuck are you gonna do with an exclusive Eddie calendar, I thought, and my inner reflections wandered back towards that unknown island, somewhere near the Greek coast, were Pink Floyd was believed to have a villa were you could nookie all day long for free.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love a good chunk of Iron Maiden, especially their recent work that tends to be a bit more - uhm - philosophical. Somewhere on my cd pile I’ve got a DVD-single, and don’t laugh at me now, please, that ‘includes (an) extensive exclusive selection of tour photos’. Never bothered to put it in my player though, I was tempted just a few seconds ago but then I thought: naaah, my life will not be less miserable with or without a bunch of exclusive tour photos. Most metal fans are ugly anyway, not to speak about the Maiden themselves…

Lucky for me I was a fan of Pink Floyd in the Seventies and the band was known for not issuing singles, maxi singles, remixes and additional – previously unreleased – material in any audio format you could dream of. True? Well, as any anoraky knows, not quite…

Follows a small interlude for anoraks. Skip if you don’t want to read it.

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Let’s trash a few Pink Floyd myths to begin with…

1. Seventies Pink Floyd never made any singles. Right? Wrong!

It is true that classic Pink Floyd wanted to be known as an album, not as a singles, band and refused to release singles in the United Kingdom (and the USA), but in other European countries their demand was simply ignored by the local subsidiary of EMI (Harvest). Pink Floyd singles have been released in Belgium, Germany, France and the Netherlands and a bunch of other countries.

2. Learning To Fly was the first global cd-only single. Right? Wrong!

Of course Pink Floyd started to bring out singles again in the Eighties and beyond, starting with the smash hit Another Brick In The Wall (for anoraks: Part 2). In 1987 the reformed Pink Floyd made the newspapers by stating that Learning To Fly was the first global cd-only single (with the exception of a few vinyl promo NOT FOR SALE copies for the radio stations)

If this is the case, how does it come that I could purchase a 7-inch 45RPM on pink vinyl at the local record shop? Germany, France and the Netherlands released those.

3. Pink Floyd were ‘first in space’. Right? Wrong!

When Pink Floyd released Delicate Sound Of Thunder in 1988 a copy (on tape) was given to the Soviet (and one French) cosmonauts who played it on board of the MIR space station. Pink Floyd and French president François Mitterand attended the launch of Soyuz TM-7 on the 26th of November 1988. A global press release was made to commemorate the fact that Pink Floyd was the first rock band to have its record played in space.

As a matter of fact French synthesizer composer Didier Marouani whose Space Opera cd was flown to the MIR space station by Soyuz TM-3 on the 22nd of July 1987 beat Floyd with more than a year. (This is not the entire story and I am planning to make a post about it in the future – if you can’t wait you can already check this post on alt.music.pink-floyd).

Interlude End  

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But if we’re not too nitpicky one could say that Pink Floyd wasn’t a singles band. Period. The good thing about this all was that as a fan with about 100 Belgian francs pocket money per week I could easily get drunk at the pub instead of planning how to beg, borrow or steal this week’s exclusive release. That’s why these metal fans are all criminals to begin with, too many fucking releases, not enough money! (the previous is obviously a joke, I have never met nicer people than on hardrock gigs).

But recently there has been a change in Mr. David Jon Gilmour’s behaviour. Perhaps the metal polish for his CBE medal has taken an unpredicted lump out of his household budget because the man is in an urgent need of money. Our hero, whose epitheton ornans is ‘the voice and guitar of Pink Floyd’, will release his fortcoming album Live In Gdańsk in 5 different formats and or versions. A rather nice overview of these can be found on his blog.

Live In Gdańsk will be the second complete live release from Gilmour’s latest solo album. On An Island isn’t entirely a bad album, but it isn’t groundbraking either. I quite like it, other’s don’t. But does one really need two live versions of it? When I attended a Gilmour show (with Richard Wright on keyboards) a couple of years ago the audience politely applauded after each of his Island songs, that made the first part of the show. When the axe, for the second part, played a hitbox selection of his Pink Floyd tunes the crowd went berserk. Some fans were even spotted dancing without holding tight to their rollator.

Alexis Machine, a member of the Echoes mailing list, describes the On An Island continuing story as follows. It is an excellent overview so I won’t pretend I made this one myself (I have added some comments here and there):

It's amazing how much David Gilmour has been able to generate from one album! While we can say he is generous, would someone else interpret it as greedy? Here's all that I found that is available related to this release:

1. On an Island CD (FA: the green spine cd)
2. On an Island with bonus CD of "Island Jam", available through Best Buy (FA: Island Jam could also be downloaded at Gilmour’s website)
3. On an Island LP
4. On an Island CD + DVD package (FA: the red spine cd)
5. On an Island Single
6. Smile 7" Single
7. Arnold Layne 7" Single (FA: sung by David Bowie)
8. Arnold Layne 10" Single (FA: sung by David Bowie)
9. Arnold Layne CD Single (FA: sung by David Bowie)
10. Remember That Night DVD
11. Remember That Night DVD with bonus CD, available through Best Buy
12. Remember That Night Blu-ray
13. Live at Gdansk 2 disc set
14. Live at Gdansk 3 disc set
15. Live at Gdansk 4 disc set
16. Live at Gdansk 5 disc set
17. Live at Gdansk 5 LP set (FA: to add insult to injury, this one will contain one track not included on the other formats. The official reason is, and I quote the Gilmour blog: "There wasn't enough room for it on the CD". Yeah, sure.)

(.../...) ...removing all the different formats, I still have 2 live shows coming out of one album. Even Pink Floyd were never given that luxury!! I loved Remember That Night and I'm sure I'll enjoy Gdansk as well, but it's just that I HAVE to get everything, so having to buy the 5 different variations of Gdansk, along with the vinyl version is really irritating.

With some of the Gdansk versions comes a Web Pass to download 12 additional live songs (one per month) although 83% of the fans voted against it on the official blog. But here is a fine opportunity to offer other downloads at supplementary rates later on…

So hold on tight, cause gravy train is coming and it is going to hit your wallet very hard. Big man, pig man, charade you are.

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Pink Floyd Mini-Vinyl Studio Box Set 

Late Night

Entry 769

The Late Night forum – a haunt for the Syd Barrett obsessed – as it epithets itself, has changed location and can now be found at http://www.latenightdiscussion.com/.

For the moment there is a discussion going on if this forum should advertise its existence. There are of course pros and cons.

Pros

Pro is that people who are seeking information about the life and works of Roger Keith (Syd) Barrett should be able to find this place. If one googles for Syd Barrett (or even tries Syd Barrett Discussion or Forum) Late Night will not be found, at least not on the first half dozen of pages. The initial website that hosted the forum, Astral Piper, says that that the forum has been deactivated. This is only partially true. It would take me too far her to give – again – a historic overview. Well here it is in a nutshell: first came the Astral Piper forum, it started somewhere in 2005 but was abruptly shut down, due to personal problems, in May 2007. An alternative forum, Late Night, was put into place and is still quite alive and kicking but has never been approved (nor mentioned) by the Astral Piper website.

Cons

Late Night is a small secretive place, I once joked that you practically need a godfather (or godmother) who invites you to become a member. It is a small village with people that know each other very well. This false notion of intimacy sometimes leads to personal disclosures and emotional outbursts. Less and less Barrett issues are discussed by lack of Syd, although from time to time the odd question is asked if Barrett was wearing green or pink trousers on the 2nd of May 1967. It is not that Late Night is a secret society, with strange rules, rituals and relics; everybody is free to join, provided you can find the entrance to the temple.

Wots... uh the deal?

Deciding in favour for the one or the other is what Günter Grass once defined as the einerseits andererseits dilemma in his novel Kopfgeburten. Eternal Isolation, administrator of Late Night, offers us a partial solution to the problem. The forum will remain low key (the posts will not be indexed by search engines for instance) but individual members may promote its existence on their blogs and websites. And that is exactly what I’m doing right now.

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Astral Pipers Forum Down Under

Astral Pipers Forum Down Under

Entry 618

Hey, is that Charley?
Yes...
Hello Charley...
Great.

This week I have been trying to write a eulogy for the fact that the Astral Pipers #2 forum has disappeared, but alas what is there to say?

The first Astral Piper forum, a very successful spin off of the Astral Piper website, collapsed when some people started to accuse some other members from things that really don't matter anymore. A partial account can be found here but is not always pleasant to read.

What also wasn’t nice was that a few dozen members, including me, had lost their place to ventilate their feelings. Eternal took it upon him to create a new forum, called Late Night, and the game of tracing back the shattered members could start. This was done by mail, by telephone, by letter (some virtual friendships had grown into real-life friendships). Pink Chick, who I will cherish for the rest of her life, warned me through MySpace that a new place had been created. I am just a little proud to say that I could rescue at least one member from oblivion by putting a guerrilla graffiti on the message board from the Astral Pipers website itself.

Days went by and became weeks, weeks went by and became months. A very close friend of the administrator of the original Astral Piper had joined us as well meaning that there was finally some kind of frail truce between both fighting camps.

After a while a second Astral Piper (#2) emerged again, attracting some newcomers who had been looking for Syd Barrett news on the Astral Piper website, that hasn’t updated since March 2007.

But old wounds run deep and this week the plug was again pulled and the second Astral Pipers forum went out again without a single warning. This time it will probably be for good. On the Astral Piper website a message has appeared that the site will be no longer updated and that the subscription will (probably) not be renewed (news that had already reached me almost a year ago).

But life outside cyberworld goes on. It flourishes too. I can only wish J & D and their soon to be born Sydney all the best.

And Dion, that offer is still valid you know… Felix (Piper 24)

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