Pink Floyd's David Gilmour and Roger Waters in the Abbey Road studios recording "Wish You Were Here" in 1975. © Jill Furmanovsky/rockarchive.com

By Patrick Prince

The Pink Floyd launch officially began Sept. 27, 2011. Actually, ‘launch’ may be too mild of a word. Bombardment is more like it. The remaining members of Pink Floyd and EMI Music have come together and agreed upon the ignition of a large-scale campaign called “Why Pink Floyd?”

Pink Floyd Discovery Edition box set.

Scheduled over a six-month period, “Why Pink Floyd?” will offer up 14 individual remastered albums: a 14-CD Discovery Edition box set; a new “Best-Of” collection; and two expanded editions of “The Dark Side of the Moon,” “Wish You Were Here” and “The Wall.”

(Dig deeper into the history of Pink Floyd)

The expanded editions, divided into an Experience package and the more memorabilia-induced Immersion set, will be sold separately and can only be described as remarkable. Alternate takes give further insight into Roger Waters’ creative vision. Restored live recordings fortify adulation of David Gilmour’s guitar playing. Newly refined artwork from Storm Thorgerson (the legendary artist from the Hipgnosis design firm) expand the imagery of the band’s iconic art. And unreleased video, photography and musical tracks (unavailable on bootleg) add heft to the Floyd historical archive. All these factors make participating in the upcoming “Why Pink Floyd?” blitz a must for both collectors and casual fans.

So, Why Pink Floyd? The answer seems obvious. The better question is, “Why now?”

Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason performs in concert. © Jill Furmanovsky/rockarchive.com

“I think really, it is partly — to put it brutally — that time is running out,” explains drummer Nick Mason, “and that in terms of people who collect and actually buy vinyl, CDs and all the rest of it, if you don’t do it now, pretty soon everything will be downloaded.”

Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" Immersion Set features a several touches of Storm Thorgerson, including a booklet and scarf designed by him, an exclusive Thorgerson print, and coasters featuring early Thorgerson design sketeches.

“And, for me, it’s not only some of the sound things, but it’s also the packaging,” he continues. “All the Storm (Thorgerson) work — and Storm’s not been well for a while — and there’s so many good ideas he’s had and so much good artwork. Storm was given an ever-increasingly free hand to not just come up with one idea but to be able to use a series of ideas.”

Each album that receives the expanded treatment will have separate 180-gram vinyl available (complete with additional MP3 download). And Nick Mason openly expresses the importance of the vinyl format being included in the “Why Pink Floyd?” campaign.

“The two pluses of vinyl are that it has this sound quality that people like. There’s some straightforward physical reasons for that — with the way the sound is held, about headroom, basically — and that gives it that sort of warmer thing that digital cannot. And the other major thing for me is that on a 12-inch square piece of cardboard, you can read it. Once you take it down to a CD size, any lyrics are miniaturized and unreadable, really. And what was this great double-album picture in the middle is this tiny, tiny picture book.”

There will always be a number of music enthusiasts who believe that the inclusion of vinyl should be the centerpiece of any solid collector’s edition. They prefer everything vinyl has to offer — the warmth and detail of sound, the largeness of the artwork … in itself, the overall care and involvement of playing a vinyl record. Unfortunately, vinyl requires too much of a commitment for some music lovers.

“It is a bit like the Japanese tea ceremony,” Mason says, laughing a bit. “Actually, most of us just want a cup of tea.”
“The first thing to remember, one of the big reasons why vinyl disappeared, is it is incredibly delicate in comparison with the CD,” Mason said. “I’ve got two teenage sons and they don’t (even) have any CDs. Everything’s held on the MP3 player. So it’s where we are heading, like it or not. I think it’s interesting to sort of ruminate on better ways of doing things in the past. But if people don’t have room for stuff, and they can store it like that, then that’s how it’s going to be.”

Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, circa 1974. Photo by Hipgnosis © Pink Floyd Music Ltd.

Roger Waters and David Gilmour have had continuous input into the “Why Pink Floyd?” project, but it is Mason who rediscovered many of the fine extras in this project, including a version of the song “Wish You Were Here” with the French jazz violinist, Stéphane Grappelli, playing an atmospheric part at the song’s three-minute mark. The final version that made it to the record was certainly the right choice. However, it is an interesting alternate track that will delight fans of the extremely popular 1975 song.

“Stéphane Grappelli, to some extent, is the jewel in the crown,” says Mason. “The interesting thing is that we were all so convinced that it didn’t exist, that it’s never even been brought out and bootlegged — which would have happened if anyone had known about it. Come on, what else has ever been unearthed? It’s only because it has been in the pharaoh’s tomb for the past 35 years or whatever.”

The pharaoh’s tomb Mason is referring to turned out to be a simple cardboard box found in storage, according to Andy Jackson, one of the engineers involved in the project. Nick Mason met Jackson one day with a bunch of these boxes, and they found a wealth of goodies from the past. Mason had once announced that it was the band’s policy to never throw anything away. He seems to have taken that promise seriously.

“It is now coming out sort of fresh,” says Mason on the subject of extras like the Stéphane Grappelli take. “The story was that when Stéphane actually put it down on tape, we were, of course, on the 8-track at the time, and so we didn’t have many spare tapes,” Mason recalled. “We had already done them — the backing tracks, stereo, drums, bass, a couple guitars — we didn’t have room for many experiments. So I thought once we weren’t going to actually run it on the record, that it had to be thrown away in order to put down another guitar or something.

Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters, the architect behind "The Wall," performs. © Jill Furmanovsky/rockarchive.com.

“It’s lovely. I suppose it says a number of things. First of all, it’s wonderfully romantic — just what he plays. It’s sort of French and Gypsy, and it’s also a wonderful sort of fusion thing, because, actually, at the time, there wasn’t that much interplay between jazz and classical and rock ’n’ roll and so on, and to suddenly have one of the great players of the ’30s and ’40s coming in and playing with us … it is really quite moving, even if the music had been pretty average, which it’s not.”

The focus on fresh material is understandable. More than 350 Pink Floyd concerts have shown up as bootlegs, with pressings that included unreleased Floyd studio work. In 1999, the group was mentioned on the British Phonographic Industry’s list of most bootlegged British artists of all time. Mason, of course, realizes this.

“I think for a long time, we always felt that part of the reason why we always hated bootlegging and pirating is because we should be the arbiters of what we thought was the best work, and we put that out and that’s it,” Mason said. “So, I think we’ve definitely been selective in terms of what we think is interesting and what’s not. But I take the point that there are people who want to know in depth exactly how things were done. It’s sort of like publishing a library, I suppose, but it does at least go halfway, perhaps, in meeting the sort of fans who are a bit high-handed about not making things available.”

For more casual collectors or new fans, Discovery editions will be released for each Pink Floyd studio album. Reissued on CD and digitally remastered in a Digipak package, the Discovery edition albums come with a 12-page booklet designed by Storm Thorgerson. For budget-minded completists, a complete box set of all the Discovery edition CDs will be available.

Pink Floyd's new best-of collection is " A Foot In The Door."

And, what would a reissue project be without a greatest hits compilation? For “Why Pink Floyd?,” the best-of release is titled “The Best of Pink Floyd: A Foot in the Door.”

The Discovery discs are geared toward fans who wish to expand their Floyd catalogs, while the best-of will be an entry point for first-time listeners.

“We’ve done best-ofs before,” explains Mason. “(This is) meant to be, I suppose in some ways, more of a sampler than a best-of. It would be fairly easy to do it as a slightly technical exercise and take the best-of, meaning the most popular. But what we want to try and do is make sure there are not just things from the most popular albums.”

“There was some very interesting research done where people described themselves as devoted Pink Floyd fans — and how many records they’ve got,” continues Mason. “They’ve got one. A lot of people who went out and got ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ never really went out and bought anything else. Sometimes what seems to happen is that they join up somewhere halfway down the line, so to speak, and don’t perhaps realize what’s gone before. So, one of the things would be rather than introduce people to Pink Floyd, maybe introduce people to early Pink Floyd.”

Early Pink Floyd essentially means Syd Barrett — the troubled, charismatic singer-guitarist who was the early creative spark plug of the band. Along with his creative genius, Barrett brought plenty of drama. His bouts of mental illness and unstable behavior are well documented. And the mixed feelings of Barrett’s bandmates have made up the most enticing chapters of Floyd biographies. Mason himself once explained the perils of playing with Syd Barrett in the book “Comfortably Numb” by Mark Blake, stating “to annoy an audience beyond all reason is not my idea of a good night out.” Yet, almost at the same time, the drummer was quick to compare some of Barrett’s songs to the masterful artistry of a Roy Lichtenstein.

Richard Wright's expressive piano work that accompanies the vocal solo in the song "The Great Gig In The Sky" from "Dark Side of the Moon" shows the late musician's versatility. © Jill Furmanovsky/rockarchive.com.

“I mean, it (early Floyd) is not for everyone,” says Mason. “You can’t force it on people. And there’s always going to be people who think Pink Floyd really disappeared when Syd disappeared — that stands for people’s tastes — but sometimes, you can go back there and think, ‘Well, what’s all this about?’ And then maybe listen a bit more and realize those are the buds; those are the early shoots, of where we went later.”

Barrett did have incredible insight. He once told an interviewer from Disc and Music Echo, a weekly British music newspaper in the 1960s and early ’70s, that the band’s music is “like an abstract painting. It should suggest something to each person.”

That sentiment touches on the worth of the “Why Pink Floyd?” product soon to be available. It will bring more of a complete accessibility to the band’s art — which will set up a proper listening experience for the individual. The experience will be like having a Pink Floyd museum at your fingertips, with the possibility of coming away each time with your own interpretations. GM

Syd Barrett

In celebration of Record Store Day, which is April 16, Capitol/EMI will be offering limited-edition vinyl titles by The Beach Boys and Syd Barrett at participating independent music retailers in the United States.

The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations”/”Heroes and Villains” will be available as a double 78 RPM vinyl single set with the songs’ original single release mixes on one disc and alternate versions of both songs on the other disc.

“An Introduction to Syd Barrett,” featuring select solo efforts as well as his work with Pink Floyd, will be released as a 180-gram, double-vinyl LP package with a gatefold jacket and printed inner sleeves. The collection, executive produced by David Gilmour, was released on CD and digitally in November 2010.

Pink Floyd at its new beginning (left to right, Richard Wright, Roger Waters, Nick Mason, and David Gilmour).

By Dave Thompson

“Atom Heart Mother” was Pink Floyd’s first masterpiece.

Actually, that’s not strictly true. Their debut album, “Piper At The Gates Of Dawn,” three years earlier, is generally regarded as the peak of the early (pre-“Dark Side of the Moon”) band’s efforts.

But that work was also by a different band.

Helmed by the late Syd Barrett, and reliant on his whimsical genius for songs, the Floyd that dominated the psychedelic scene of 1967 was very different to that which drove underground in succeeding years. Once Barrett departed the group lost itself within the intricacies of improvisation and jamming.

Albums like “A Saucerful Of Secrets,” the soundtrack “More” and the sprawling, half-live “Ummagumma” all caught the band in states of metamorphosis, learning their way through members’ own developing capabilities. “Atom Heart Mother,” its first side devoured by a single musical piece and its second spread across four more conventional songs, was the first album on which those capabilities rose above the musicians’ uncertainty and inexperience. It presents a vista that any future Floyd fan would recognize.

Drummer Nick Mason certainly thought so. “We have never trod a particular path, but simply zigzagged our way about,” he said at the time. “For example, we are probably best known at present for our electronic effects, but in a few months you will probably be hearing an entirely different side to the group.” “Atom Heart Mother,” he declared, was “the beginning of an end.” It was, he confessed, still some way from the perfection that the Floyd strived for and with which they would soon become synonymous. “The LP could have been technically better, but the effect is there and that’s very important,” he said.

The first indication that Pink Floyd’s next album would be an epic came on June 27, 1970, three months before the LP released, when the band headlined the Bath Festival in Shepton Mallet. Fully backed with choir and orchestra, “Atom Heart Mother” was the centerpiece of their performance. The few who witnessed it were nothing less than blown away.

Three weeks later, on July 18, Pink Floyd repeated the exercise at the Garden Party free concert in London’s Hyde Park, on the same bill featuring Kevin Ayers, the Edgar Broughton Band and the Third Ear Band. All of these groups shared Floyd’s Blackhill management company. Ayers’ performance that afternoon has recently been released on CD.

Pink Floyd onstage, Rotterdam, Holland, 1970. Laurens Van Houten /Frank White Photo Agency

Just like at Bath, Pink Floyd’s set stuck to material that the audience was already familiar with – “The Embryo,” Green is The Colour,” “Careful With That Axe, Eugene,” “Set The Controls for the Heart of the Sun.” Then Roger Waters stepped to the microphone to introduce “The Atomic Heart Mother” – a brass ensemble and choir appeared alongside the band on stage and, for the next twenty-five minutes, one of London’s most beautiful parks was held enraptured.

“The piece began with an arrangement for the brass and then switched into a lengthy choir pattern,” explained “Disc & Music Echo’s” review the following week. “Followed by a dash of marvelous Floyd rock-jazz. In came the brass again, pursued by incantations from the choir and swirling special effects in twin-channel stereo. A reprise took up the original theme and group, choir and orchestra projected it together in fine combination.”

The following day, another performance of the majestic leviathan was broadcast on the BBC, from a recording made earlier in the week for DJ John Peel’s “Sunday Concert” show. It wasn’t until September before the band could again marshal sufficient resources to perform the full and renamed “Atom Heart Mother” in concert again. On September 12, the band appeared before an estimated half a million people at an open-air event in Paris, titled the Fete de l’Humanité.

On the road in the United States in the weeks leading up to the album’s release, “Atom Heart Mother” became a familiar and often dynamic presence in Pink Floyd’s live show, although the presence of the choir in the touring party did provoke some bizarre reactions from band and audience alike. At the old Fillmore West in San Francisco, the group decided to forgo their usual encore and send the choir out instead, to perform “Ave Maria.”

Their efforts were greeted with boos and cries of “we want Floyd” from the crowd and, while Rolling Stone did leap to the band’s defense (“If [people] don’t understand what Pink Floyd’s music is all about, it’s a bit puzzling why they spent $3 to come to see them”), one can also sympathize with the bemused masses. If you go to see a band, and reward its effort with an encore, you really don’t expect somebody else to appear on stage instead and perform music that has nothing to do with the main attraction. Pink Floyd obviously saw their point as well and didn’t make the same move again.

From the US, the tour moved across to Europe, for dates that carried the band through the end of 1970. The album was out now, topping the charts in the UK and elsewhere across the continent, and another song from the set, “Fat Old Sun,” had moved into the show. It would be December, however, before the full “Atom Heart Mother” presentation hit the road, with a UK tour that opened with what stands as one of the most unconventional pieces of music in the band’s entire repertoire, “Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast.” The song is, essentially, the sound of one of the band’s roadies, the eponymous Alan Stiles, preparing his breakfast. In concert, he would even fry egg and bacon on stage, to add scent to the sense of occasion.

For all its invention, “Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast” is the one track on “Atom Heart Mother” that really didn’t take off. The album version was recorded in “a fantastic rush,” which Roger Waters regretted later. It was largely built around sound effects, although Waters furiously denied that.

“I’ve always felt that the differentiation between a sound effect and music is all a load of shit,” he snapped. “Whether you make music on a guitar or a water tap is irrelevant.”

But Richard Wright admitted that “it didn’t work at all … quite honestly, it’s a bad number.” David Gilmour described it as “the most thrown-together thing we’ve ever done.”

Elsewhere, of course, “Atom Heart Mother” sizzled. “If,” a folk-like song composed by Waters, would return him to his live repertoire in the 1980s, an indication of just how much the lyric (a masterpiece of self-examination and even criticism) meant to him; Wright’s “Summer ‘68” was another of the beautiful melodies that the keyboard player was so adept at creating (and the band, sadly, was so skilled at understating); and the sweet nostalgia of “Fat Old Sun” was Gilmour’s unintentional homage to the Kinks – when the similarities between his song and Ray Davies’ “Lazy Old Sun” were pointed out to him, he simply laughed “one sometimes gets the feeling about something that maybe one pinched it from someone… [but] they’ve never sued me.”

Yet these gems were overwhelmed by the majesty of the title piece. For many people, their first exposure to “Atom Heart Mother” came from the LP’s distinctive cover portrait of a cow. Storm Thorgerson of Hypgnosis art studios snapped the image after hearing artist John Blake rave about a cow-motif wallpaper Andy Warhol produced.

The impression was reinforced by the subtitles appended to the movements within “Atom Heart Mother” itself, “Breast Milky” and “Funky Dung” included. One can see the piece as a precursor of Floyd’s later “Animals” album in which sheep, pigs and dogs cavort with the brown-eyed ladies of the meadow.

In truth, however, there is little to connect the dots. “Atom Heart Mother” was, is and will always be, a piece of music unlike any other in Floyd’s catalog.

The piece developed from a chord sequence Gilmour called “Theme From An Imaginary Western” (a title Jack Bruce had already used on his “Songs For A Tailor” LP). Intrigued, Waters and Wright set about adding further themes and variations to the concept. Both worked hard to keep the cinematic feel of Gilmour’s original piece. “We sat and played with it, jigged it around, added bits and took bits away, farted around with it in all sorts of places for ages,” Gilmour reflected, “until we got some shape to it.”

That shape was something they titled “The Amazing Pudding” and, as early as January 1970, they were confident to try it out on a stage in France. It was already the longest single piece of music they had yet attempted. It soon became the most ambitious as well, as the band reacted to the recent orchestral peregrinations of Deep Purple and the like. Avant-garde musician Ron Geesin was brought in to develop “The Amazing Pudding” into something truly amazing. He and Waters had already worked together in the past, on a project titled “The Body;” an experience successful enough to convince the band that Geesin would produce something no other rock band could envisage. Their instincts were correct.

In 1993, Paul Rodgers released two albums that paid tribute to his influences. The first was his Grammy-nominated Muddy Waters Blues: A Tribute to Muddy Waters. The album featured a Who’s Who of guitarists appearing as Rodgers’ guests. Jeff Beck, Buddy Guy, David Gilmour, Brian May, Gary Moore, Brian Setzer, Richie Sambora, Slash, Steve Miller and Trevor Rabin all contributed to the album while Rodgers wrote the title track “Muddy Water Blues.”

Rodgers also recorded a live album titled The Hendrix Set that paid homage to the world’s most innovative guitarist.

“I still put some Hendrix in my solo set,” Rodgers admits. “Hendrix was fantastic. Doing his songs really showed me just how special they were. I can step right into songs like ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ and ‘Little Wing.’ I tag ‘Angel’ onto the end of ‘Little Wing,’ and it is almost like it is supposed to be there.”
Rodgers confesses there is one more artist that he would like to pay homage to.

“One day, I would like to do the same thing for Otis Redding, but I don’t find myself worthy. I hold Otis in such high esteem. He got me through my early teenage years of emotional angst. I believe that I am following in a lot of great people’s footsteps. Otis is number one, but there is also Aretha, Sam Moore, the Four Tops, James Brown, Albert King, BB King, John Lee Hooker and Elmore James. I absorbed what they did when I was young, and now their influences come out in what I do.”

Rodgers actually shared the stage with one of his heroes at the Led Zeppelin reunion show in London. After performing two songs on the main stage, Rodgers played “We Shall Be Free” on a B stage with Sam Moore from Sam & Dave, making Rodgers the only artist to perform twice that historic evening. Rodgers proudly professes, “Sam is a hero of mine, and I’m still learning from him.”

In 2004, Rodgers was invited to close the first Annual U.K. Music Hall of Fame Awards show with “All Right Now.” Having just played the song on “The Strat Pack” DVD, celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Fender Stratocaster, with Brian May, Rodgers called May to see about performing the song again at the awards show.

Rodgers found out that Queen was among the inductees that night, and that if Rodgers would return the favor, then Queen could perform live, too. They performed “We Will Rock You” and “We Are The Champions” and followed with a hair-raising rendition of “All Right Now.” The creative sparks were palpable; the next logical step was to do more.

Queen + Paul Rodgers have, to date, completed two massive tours and released a live CD/DVD, Return of the Champions in 2005 and a studio CD of new songs titled The Cosmos Rocks in 2008.

On working with Queen’s Brian May and Roger Taylor, Rodgers says, “They are fabulous musicians. That little spark has taken us around the world twice and into doing a brand new album. Doing a new album is something that Queen have not attempted since Freddie [Mercury] passed. I think that, in itself, is a fantastic achievement. I am really proud of what we did together.”

Rodgers and May shared bass duties on the album.

While The Cosmos Rocks has charted across the world, there has been no major push by the record company in America.

“A lot of this business is marketing,” says Rodgers. “There is a lot of fantastic talent out there that some will never know