2013/03/26

Happy Easter for all fans!!!





2013/03/24

Roger Waters Calls for Boycott of Israel - Rolling Stone, March 20, 2013

Pink Floyd rocker accuses government of 'running riot'


By JON BLISTEIN
MARCH 20, 201




Pink Floyd's Roger Waters says a boycott of Israel, similar to the one implemented against South Africa during apartheid, is the "way to go." He accuses the Israeli government of running a similar regime by occupying the West Bank and Gaza territories in a new interview with the Electronic Intifada.

Waters became an outspoken supporter of the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel after visiting the West Bank in 2006, where he spray-painted the lyric "We don't need no thought control" from Pink Floyd's famous anthem "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)" on the Israeli West Bank barrier.


"They are running riot," said Waters of the Israeli government, "and it seems unlikely that running over there and playing the violin will have any lasting effect."

Waters currently serves as a juror on the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, which seeks to bring attention to how Western governments and companies assist Israel in what they perceive to be violations of international law. The singer plans to publish an open letter to his peers in the music industry asking them to join him in the BDS movement.

In the interview, the musician also spoke about reaching out to Stevie Wonder before he was set to play a gala dinner for the Israeli Defense Forces in December. "I wrote a letter to him saying that this would be like playing a police ball in Johannesburg the day after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. It wouldn't be a great thing to do, particularly as he was meant to be a UN ambassador for peace," Waters explained. "It wasn't just me. Desmond Tutu also wrote a letter."

"To his eternal credit," Waters continued, "Stevie Wonder called [the gala's organizers] up and said 'I didn't quite get it' [and canceled the performance]." Waters went on to criticize the lack of media attention given to Wonder's cancellation, as well as discuss his own speech to the U.N. about the conflict last week.

From www.rollingstone.com




2013/03/20

Turn The Moon Dark on March 24th - global playback event


Pink Floyd and EMI Music will mark the 40th anniversary of the original UK release of The Dark Side of The Moon on Sunday (March 24th), as fans around the globe unite to turn a specially designed moon dark. Centred around a global playback of the album on PinkFloyd.com, each memory, thought and photo tweeted as fans rediscover the album will count towards the creation of a dark side of the moon.
Starting at 00:01am GMT on Sunday, for the entire day, fans all over the world will be able to share thoughts and comments via Twitter using #DarkSide40 and witness the impact as the volume of messages combine to turn the moon dark.


Written by Matt  www.brain-damage.co
Monday, 18 March 2013

Pink Floyd - The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) [Full Album]




Track 1 (Speak to Me)
Track 2 (Breathe)
Track 3 (On the Run)
Track 4 (Time)
Track 5 (The Great Gig in the Sky)
Track 6 (Money)
Track 7 (Us and Them)
Track 8 (Any Colour You Like)
Track 9 (Brain Damage)
Track 10 (Eclipse)

2013/03/13

Pink Floyd - Live at Pompeii - Directors Cut - Full Length! - 720p HD





Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii is a 1972 concert film featuring the English progressive rock group Pink Floyd performing at the ancient Roman amphitheatre in Pompeii, Italy, directed by Adrian Maben. Although the band are playing a typical live set from this point in their career, the film is notable for having no audience.
The main footage in and around the amphitheatre was filmed over four days in October 1971, using the band's regular touring equipment, including studio-quality 24-track recorders. Additional footage filmed in a Paris television studio that December made up the original 1972 release. The film was then re-released in 1974 with additional studio material of the band working on The Dark Side of the Moon, and interviews at Abbey Road Studios.
The film has subsequently been released on video numerous times, and in 2003 a "Director's Cut" DVD appeared which combines the original footage from 1971 with more contemporary shots of space and the area around Pompeii, assembled by Maben. A number of notable bands have taken inspiration from the film in creating their own videos, or filming concerts without an audience.


2013/03/11

Watch: Pink Floyd's 'Wish You Were Here' meets Liszt


"Watch our incredible performance video of AyseDeniz Gokcin performing Pink Floyd's 'Wish You Were Here' and 'Another Brick In The Wall' in the style of Liszt at Steinway Hall, and a fascinating interview with Classic FM's John Brunning."  

Watch here






2013/03/08

Nick Mason talks about Dark Side of the Moon



BBC Radio 4 - The World Tonight, 28 February 2013

"PinkFloyd's groundbreaking concept album "Dark Side of the Moon" is FORTY years old tomorrow. You could say its themes are just as relevant today - madness, money, identity, disorientation, all the stresses of the modern world. But in 1973, its construction was startling - with its musical episodes flowing one into the other, and its looped and layered sound effects. Its credited as one of the most influential rock albums of all time. This afternoon we sat down with Pink Floyd's drummer Nick Mason in his North London loft, and asked him whether they'd ever suspected the album would be so big..."

http://www.bbc.co.uk
audioboo.fm





2013/03/04

Concert review: Roger Waters, 'The Wall' at Wrigley Field, June 8, 2012

June 09, 2012|Greg Kot | Music critic





Roger Waters has been touring his Pink Floyd-era double-album “The Wall” around the world for the last two years, giving the 1979 warhorse a long, lavish victory lap that landed Friday at Wrigley Field.

Perhaps only Waters could build a wall without ivy in the Cubs playground. He unleashed massive inflatables that likely gave high-rise dwellers in Wrigleyville the shock of their lives. It’s not every evening you see a fascist pig the size of a bus drift past your window bearing Big Brother slogans such as “Trust me” and “Everything will be OK.” What’s more, this particular pig covered more ground than any Cubs centerfielder in recent memory, eventually crashing in the grandstand behind home plate.



This is a show about ideas and visuals as much as music, and Wrigley Field provided an appropriately epic setting for one of the most over-the-top rock operas ever staged. Wrigley made the United Center, where Waters first staged the tour in Chicago in 2010, seem rather quaint by comparison. With listeners filling the rooftops and the streets outside the stadium, the setting was the equal of the show’s outsized ambitions.

Waters didn’t play the traditional rock front man, and how could he? For a good part of the show he was obscured by that 35-foot-tall, 424-cardboard-brick monstrosity, which doubled as a massive video screen and art canvas upon which bombers buzzed, hideous cartoons marched and slogans were flashed like Times Square billboards.

The bassist and conceptual mastermind in Pink Floyd wasn’t content to merely replicate the original 30-date “Wall” tour from 1980. Back then, the album could have been subtitled, “Roger’s Difficulties With Authority Figures,” including his mother, ex-wife and schoolteachers. His narrator becomes a paranoid recluse prone to sociopathic fantasies. “If I had my way I’d have all of you shot,” he shouts.

But “The Wall” tour Mach II tries to come off as less solipsistic, with Waters at one point mocking “miserable, (messed) up little Roger from all those years ago.” Strumming an acoustic guitar, he performed a duet with a 1980 video of himself singing “Mother,” and it remained one of the night’s most moving moments in a show otherwise brimming with monsters, demons, psychotics and gun-wielding tyrants.

In trying to update his most ambitious album and make it more universal, Waters gave it a socio-political spin: the wall as a symbol of the barriers that divide nations. The wall was transformed into a memorial for war victims of the last century, starting with Waters’ own father, who died in World War II. Violent set pieces threaded through the show, beginning with a spectacular plane crash into the wall, complete with flames, and finishing with the wall’s destruction. In between Waters played one of his most convincing roles: the lean, gray-haired dictator in a trench coat and shades with red arm band.

Subtlety was not a strong suit in this rather cartoonishly broad evening of multi-media entertainment – the cartoonish hammers that marched across the wall are Waters’ favorite instruments when driving home an idea. But even if the connection between rock stars and despots isn’t particularly novel, Waters made it in memorably chilling fashion. As the familiar chords of “Run Like Hell” rang out, he led the crowd in a cross-armed salute, than swung his arms overhead, the fans dutifully following suit, as if to prove their leader’s point. “Follow me! All together now,” Waters commanded. “Good! Enjoy yourselves!” Later he was firing a toy machine gun, wearing a maniacal smile, then removed his gloves with a self-satisfied smirk.


It added up to one of the darkest evenings of “entertainment” that $250 could buy. There was just enough vulnerability and humanity, and a handful of truly memorable songs, to keep things from sliding into nihilism: the 15 dancing children who shooed away the demon-eyed teacher in “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2,” the poignantly unanswerable questions of the bewildered son in “Mother,” the desperate cry of “Bring the Boys Back Home.”

Three guitarists took the place of Waters’ old sidekick, David Gilmour, who wrote some of the most indelible melodies on “The Wall.” When it came time for Gilmour’s showpiece, “Comfortably Numb,” one of the stand-ins replicated his solo note for note, while Waters played cheerleader. Like everything else during the two-hour show, it was scripted and executed precisely – a near replica of the concert Waters first played in Chicago two years ago.


In the end, when Waters and the band played in front of the wall’s ruins as a scruffy acoustic street band, they celebrated the “bleeding hearts and the artists,” presumably much like the Waters of three decades ago who poured out his anxieties in what would become one of the best-selling double-albums of all time. It may be a relic of a more grandiose era, but “The Wall” still saturates the senses and invades nightmares like few stadium spectacles ever have.

greg@gregkot.com

Roger Waters set list Friday at Wrigley Field:
Part 1 (60 minutes)



1. In the Flesh?

2. The Thin Ice

3. Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1

4. The Happiest Days of Our Lives

5. Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2

6. Mother

7. Goodbye Blue Sky

8. Empty Spaces

9. What Shall We Do Now?

10. Young Lust

11. One of my Turns

12. Don't Leave Me Now

13. Another Brick in the Wall, Part 3

14. The Last Few Bricks

15. Goodbye Cruel World

Part 2 (55 minutes)

16. Hey You

17. Is There Anybody Out There?

18. Nobody Home

19. Vera

20. Bring the Boys Back Home

21. Comfortably Numb

22. The Show Must Go On

23. In the Flesh

24. Run Like Hell

25. Waiting for the Worms

26. Stop

27. The Trial

28. Outside the Wall

From chicagotribune.com
 

Behind The Mask Of Pink Floyd - Chicago Tribune, July 09, 1991


July 09, 1991|By Reviewed by Lynn Van Matre, A Tribune writer.



Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey


By Nicholas Schaffner

Harmony, 348 pages, $20











`By the way, which one`s Pink?`` a cliche-spouting record company fat-cat casually asks members of Pink Floyd in a song on ``Wish You Were Here,`` a No. 1 album for the British rock band in 1975. Floyd fans, of course, were hip to the joke-there never was anyone called Pink or Floyd in the group, which took its name from two obscure Georgia blues singers, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council.

The line was a pointed jab at what Floyd lyricist Roger Waters saw as the greed and crassness of the music industry, one of the album`s two major themes. (The other was Floyd founder Syd Barrett`s drug-induced descent into mental illness, which resulted in his ouster from the group in 1968.) But as distasteful as the realities of the record business might be, in some ways the ``which one`s Pink`` question wasn`t all that odd. For years, Pink Floyd`s hypnotically spacey sound and stunning special effects took precedence over individual star trips; group members did virtually no interviews. They deliberately maintained such low profiles, in fact, that they could walk the streets unrecognized even as their albums soared to the top of the pop charts. The enigmatic facade crumbled a good deal in the early 1980s, when musical and philosophical differences between Waters and singer-guitarist Dave Gilmour exploded into an acrimonious split that saw both men eager to tell their side of the story to the media as they went their separate ways-Waters to embark on a solo career, Gilmour to head up a highly successful post-Waters version of Pink Floyd.

But for Floyd fans still hungry for details about the band, veteran pop writer Schaffner`s ``Saucerful of Secrets`` offers an entertaining and concisely written account of the quartet`s rise from a London underground cult favorite in the mid-1960s to a hugely successful mainstream band of the 1970s and `80s. (Their 1973 album, ``Dark Side of the Moon,`` stayed on Billboard`s charts for a staggering 736 weeks and is the fourth best-selling album in history.)

Schaffner was unsuccessful in his attempts to interview Waters, whose unremittingly bleak visions of life shaped much of the band`s output; the Waters quotes in the book have been drawn from other interviews he gave over the last 25 years. No attempt was made to interview Barrett, now a virtual recluse. Other members of the band and their associates were willing to talk, however, and the results are an even-handed look at a number of events in Pink Floyd`s history.

A healthy portion of the book is devoted to Barrett, who was with the band for only three years but remains a cult figure to this day. It was his idiosyncratic musical creativity-sparked by such diverse influences as fairy tales and the I Ching-and onstage charisma that fueled the band`s initial success, but he proved ill-equipped to cope with fame. Eventually, his behavior became so destructive (locking up his girlfriend for days, refusing to open his mouth during an appearance on ``American Bandstand``) that the band was forced to replace him with Gilmour.

As for other members of the band, there are occasional, brief glimpses into their personal life-mostly pertaining to divorces-but nothing of real depth and certainly no revelations. Still, ``Saucerful of Secrets`` is by far the best book around on this enduringly popular band.
 
Buy "Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey" on amazon.com

From chicagotribune.com