A Saucerful of Secrets

Last weekend we headed to Birmingham for a much-postponed (thanks to the pandemic) treat – a concert by Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets.

Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets

For anyone who doesn’t follow prog rock, Mason is a brilliant rock drummer who formed one quarter of the original line-up of Pink Floyd. Recently he’s put together his own band, including other rock legends such as Guy Pratt and Gary Kemp, to play some of Floyd’s older material. As he himself said, the other surviving members of the group tend to focus on Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall, but Floyd was so much more than that. It’s also his own tribute to tortured genius Syd Barrett, the front man of the original band, who wrote much of that early material.

We booked the concert pre-pandemic and had to sit on our hands while it was postponed about four times. This time, we were so used to being disappointed we hardly dared hope, but as it was, we arrived at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall clutching our tickets to find it was all happening at last.

Was it worth the two year wait? Yes, absolutely it was. Every last second was amazing, brilliant, masterful – and surprisingly good fun. Unlike the original band, who even a fan like me has to admit could occasionally be a bit po-faced, Saucerful of Secrets are a lot more relaxed and even, at times, mischievous. In between numbers, Mason provided entertaining snippets looking back at the history of the band and some of the songs they played. Like Vegetable Man, for instance, which he freely admitted was never recorded because it was never finished, because none of them had a clue how to finish it!

The highlight of the night was a complete, unabridged, and pretty much note-perfect rendition of Echoes, possibly the first Floyd track to really sound like Floyd, if you know what I mean. It’s one of my favourites, and I sat utterly spellbound for the 25 minutes it took to play. I could almost have been back in the 1970s, before all the splits and acrimony, listening to the Pink Floyd of old. A very special treat, and one I hope we can repeat some day.

The photo above isn’t mine, sadly – we took a few on a mobile phone, but the lights were so bright the lens focused on those rather than the band members, so all it really looks like is a lightning strike. This pic is courtesy of The Midlands Rocks.

Wish You Were Here…?

The title of this blog post is particularly ironic. I’ve realised that tonight we were meant to be in Birmingham for the Nick Mason / Saucerful of Secrets concert.

For anyone who doesn’t follow rock music, Nick was the drummer in Pink Floyd. He’s put together his own prog rock band, Saucerful of Secrets, and together they’ve been on tour performing some of Floyd’s earlier music.

As a mega fan of all things Pink Floyd I was really looking forward to the event but thanks to Covid-19 it’s had to be postponed. Currently it’s scheduled to take place in October but there are no guarantees and it may have to be put off until some time next year.

I absolutely understand the reasons, but you could say I’ve gone from ‘High Hopes’ to ‘Wish You Were Here’ in one sad step…

Pink Floyd concerts streaming

Good news for all fans of Pink Floyd and/or prog rock: the band have decided to release rare, remastered or unseen footage of their concerts for anyone to watch during the lockdown.

The concerts are streaming on the Pink Floyd YouTube channel and a new one will be uploaded every Friday at 5pm GMT – so make a note in your diaries. There’s already one available to watch: a restored, re-edited version of Pulse, filmed at Hammersmith in 1994. Guess what I’ll be doing this afternoon?!

Shrimp Floyd

Other Half and I recently spotted this great Weird Fish T-shirt in a local department store and just had to have it. Other Half beat me to it by ordering one in his size, which is about 67 times too big for me. Sadly, that was the smallest size available, so I shall either have to steal his and look like a tent with feet, or go without. But what fun!

For those of you who can’t read the small print in the picture, the T-shirt is titled Shrimp Floyd Classics, with four fishy pictures roughly approximating Pink Floyd album covers. Clockwise from top left we have Shark Side of the Moon, The Difishin’ Bell (groan), Fish You Were Here, and Clamimals. Hats off to the Weird Fish pun department, which is obviously alive and very well.

We love some of the details in the cartoons. The clam seen floating over Battersea power station, for instance, has a puncture which has been partly mended with sticking plaster. Not quite like the original inflatable pig, which broke free, floated into Heathrow airspace, eluded every attempt to shoot it down, and eventually came to earth in a field of cows somewhere well outside London… but then I guess those details are heavily copyrighted by the band!

I do wonder, too, if the header is a wry reference to the fact that a newly-discovered shrimp species was recently called after Pink Floyd, mostly because, er, it’s pink. I blogged about this colourful critter last year so you can see I’m not pulling any legs, not even of the crustacean variety.

Now I’m off to scour the Weird Fish website to see if they’ve got any more sensible sizes in stock. It’s a very funny place, so I may be some time…

 

 

The Right to Remain Silent

I didn’t remain silent, and perhaps it’s just as well. Nope, nothing to do with getting myself arrested (yet!) but a brilliant interview with a fictional (honest) introduction over at Jason Beech’s blog.

The interview is fairly standard although some of the questions really made me think. But the fictional bit is amazing. How Jason came up with the whole thing armed with only a few snippets of information I shall never know. Pink Floyd, murder, urban legends, they’re all in there. And if he can do that with just my bio, imagine what he’s like with a whole book!

Do head over to his blog and check the interview out. After all, it’s not every day that you’re in the presence of an urban legend. Cough. And while you’re at it, have a look at some of his other willing victims, because there are lots of them and they’re all just as good. And then have a look at his latest book, City of Forts, because that looks brilliant too.

2017: the good bits

Yes, yet another review of the year – but I will at least keep this short by just picking out a few of the year’s highlights! Here goes:

Best crime book: ‘Coffin Road‘ by Peter May – an ingenious mix of crime, amnesia and bee-keeping (yes, really!) set against the stunning backdrop of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides.

Best noir book: ‘Too Many Crooks‘ by Paul D Brazill – tongue-in-cheek Brit-Grit that hurtles between London and Warsaw, where neither the bad guys nor the good guys get what they deserve!

Best movie: Not sure if it quite counts as crime but I’ll say it anyway – Dr Strange, with Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role. I loved the historical/fantasy elements and it was much more intelligent than the usual frantic Marvel fare.

Best TV series: Follow the Money 2: another great slice of Scandi-noir but with fraud and money-laundering as the central themes rather than murder. Every bit as gripping as the first series with some knock-out performances from the two lead actors, Thomas Bo Larsen and Thomas Hwan, plus a surprisingly moving ending.

Best writing event: a toss-up between Crime & Publishment (friends new and old, valuable insights into the world of writing and publishing); and Mike Craven’s book launch for ‘Body Breaker‘ in Carlisle (witty banter between Mike and fellow author Michael J Malone plus a great night out).

Best non-writing event: the Pink Floyd ‘Their Mortal Remains‘ exhibition at the V&A Museum. Huge set pieces combined with smaller, more intimate exhibits that really gave an insight into the band. A real once-in-a-lifetime event.

Best news story (national): Probably this one, about yet another bungling criminal stuck in a window in Birmingham for five hours. Puns about ‘being framed’ spring to mind…

Best news story (friends): My writer friend Lucy Cameron getting her debut crime novel ‘Night is Watching‘ published by Caffeine Nights earlier this year. I missed the launch (drat) but I know how excited she was!

Best news story (me): Well, I had to say it, didn’t I? For me the highlight of the whole year was the news that All Due Respect have accepted my first crime novel, ‘Gravy Train’, for publication in November next year. I can’t wait!

So, how was your year? Good, I hope – and here’s hoping 2018 will be every bit as exciting/successful/interesting as this one has been, for all of us.

Their Mortal Remains

Their Mortal Remains is the title of the huge Pink Floyd exhibition at the V&A Museum in London, which we went to see last weekend.

I’d been excited about the trip for weeks, and it didn’t disappoint. It was huge, it was stuffed with material ranging from personal letters to the band’s own instruments to huge models of album covers and/or special effects. There were things to look at, things to read, and things to watch and listen to. Everyone was given an audio headset on the way in, which played a variety of Floyd’s music and/or interviews with the band, roadies, and various other connected folk, depending on where you were amongst the exhibits.  And at the end, past a collection of vast replica inflatables from Animals and The Wall concerts (not least the floating pig!), there was a big interactive space where you were surrounded on all four sides by film footage and walls of sound, so that it felt as though you had prime seats at a Floyd concert.

There was also a wider interest in terms of the cover art, designed by the British company Hipgnosis, and critical acclaim for both the music and the lyrics of Floyd’s work. One expert said that in his opinion, Roger Waters should be ‘up there on the podium’ with Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, a sentiment I totally agree with.

I found the whole experience incredibly moving, and as well as the sheer scale it also provided smaller items of note, like a handwritten letter describing the band’s first ever tour bus (you enter the exhibition through a larger-than-life version of it), and an explanation of where some of the album names came from.  Atom Heart Mother, for instance, was inspired by a newspaper headline about a woman who’d had a radioactive-powered pacemaker fitted, in the late 1960s.

A couple of small gripes – it was very hot, and very, very crowded.  There’s not a lot the V&A can do about the latter because this is turning out to be their most popular exhibition ever, and the queues just keep on building up. However, the twisty layout did create a few bottlenecks and as some of the fans wanted to read Every. Last. Word. on every label on every item, progress was slow and I kept getting elbowed out.  It was also pretty dark, which added to the overall atmosphere but made some of the exhibits and labelling hard to pick out.

However, this is an exhibition on the grand scale, entirely appropriate given some of Floyd’s own, dare I say, excessive set pieces.  But in amongst the replica aircraft, animals, and giant puppets, there are also small, intimate reminders that this was, first and foremost, a group of friends who gathered together to make the sort of music they loved.  And the interview about the inflatable pig breaking loose over London and getting into Heathrow airspace is just hysterical.

Their Mortal Remains was originally slated to end at the beginning of October, but it’s been so popular the V&A have extended it until the 15th. So if you’re a fan of Pink Floyd, prog rock or the history of music, do think about going along. It’s not cheap and it’s not a quiet ride, but it’s more than worth both the cost and the effort to see it.

(To give you some idea of scale, the model of the Division Bell cover at the top was over 20 feet tall; Battersea Power Station (below) probably larger still. But then Pink Floyd never did anything, well, small!)

Dark Side of the… cake?

A friend of mine sent me this wonderful photo after a recent trip to London.  It’s cake, but not as we know it… from the Victoria & Albert museum, who are currently hosting an exhibition on Pink Floyd.

The exhibition takes in the history of the band, their sound, and their very iconic ‘look’, from their earliest Syd Barrett incarnation right through, presumably, to the present day.  It includes sound, vision, and interactive elements and sounds absolutely fascinating; although it’s not cheap at a minimum of £20 per head to get in, it’s on my list as a ‘must do’ later this year.

The event ends on 1 October, but I’m assuming the cake won’t last anything like as long.  Apparently it was orange cake with chocolate ganache, and quite delicious!  Ten out of ten to the V&A for a bit of additional, tongue in cheek, advertising for the occasion.

If we get there, I’ll try a bit for myself and let you know what it was like.  And many thanks to Andy for letting me use the photo.

Hipgnosis in pictures

To celebrate the launch of a brand new book about cult design company Hipgnosis, the Guardian is running a picture gallery of some of their album covers.

Their work includes some of the most influential cover designs ever, for a whole range of bands and musicians from the 1970s including Yes, Led Zeppelin, Peter Gabriel, 10cc, and of course, Pink Floyd.  In fact, it’s thanks to Pink Floyd that Hipgnosis existed at all, after they asked two college friends, Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell, to design a cover for their album ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’.  Thorgerson and Powell went on to found Hipgnosis together, with the addition of Peter Christopher, and became highly sought-after, particularly in the prog-rock community where their ideas chimed with the themes of the time.

Sadly, album covers became more restrained from the late 70s onwards and work gradually dried up for Hipgnosis, but they are still remembered fondly by fans around the world, in particular for their most iconic work, Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’.  Unlike some of their other work this is simple, uncluttered and abstract, but strong enough to have survived as a classic, and one of the most-recognised album covers even today.

The book, ‘Vinyl. Album. Cover. Art: The Complete Hipgnosis Catalogue’ by Aubrey Powell himself, is available from Thames & Hudson.  I might just treat myself to a copy.

Pink Floyd – the shrimp

Meet the newest member of Pink Floyd – synalpheus pinkfloydi.  Ahem.  Well, maybe not.  But this isn’t a late April Fools joke, because scientists really have named their latest crustacean discovery after the band, as you’ll see from this BBC science news report.

It’s a nice way of honouring the band, and oddly appropriate given that the new shrimp is pink, and Pink Floyd had an album out called ‘Animals’.  Sadly, it didn’t feature shrimps – that would be too much of a coincidence – but it has inspired some amusing artwork showing a giant shrimp above Battersea power station!  Whether it was inflatable or not I don’t know, but I guess someone had to do it…

 

Tickled Pink…

Having been a massive fan of all things Pink Floyd for most of my adult life, on Saturday I was really excited to be heading for a concert by Think Floyd, one of the top British tribute bands featuring their music.

We’d originally been going back in the autumn but the concert was postponed due to a band member’s ill health, and Saturday was the re-scheduled date.  We’d never seen Think Floyd before and weren’t quite sure what to expect, but boy, was it worth the wait!

The concert took the unusual path of playing at least one track from each of Pink Floyd’s fifteen studio albums, from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn all the way to The Endless River.  Along the way the band visited some of the iconic tracks (‘Comfortably Numb’, ‘Breathe’) but also played some less well known stuff – so much so I’d never heard one or two tracks before.

The four main musicians were perhaps a little less comfortable with the earlier music, with its heavy folk influence courtesy of Syd Barrett.  But once they got onto ‘One of These Days’ from Meddle they suddenly hit their stride, and went from playing cover versions of Floyd tracks, to recreating with meticulous detail the whole Floyd sound and experience.  And when they got onto Dark Side of the Moon, from which they played pretty much the whole of the first side, they were a revelation.  Even better, their rendition of ‘Great Gig in the Sky’ was just brilliant – the best I have heard, anywhere including Floyd’s own concerts, with the exception of the original.  Most modern versions include two separate vocalists due to the sheer complexity of the track, but the young lass singing here managed it on her own, note (and perhaps more importantly, emotion) perfect, and got a standing ovation for her efforts.

And I was absolutely delighted when they also treated us to ‘Brain Damage’, one of my favourite tracks and the inspiration behind ‘Raise the Blade’!

Of course, they aren’t Pink Floyd and nobody but Pink Floyd ever will be.  The show also suffered very slightly, in my opinion, from a tiny (if immaculate) venue with a small stage, which couldn’t live up to the massive stadium concerts Floyd themselves put on.  If nothing else, there was no space for an inflatable pig – or any other sort of animal!  But they were a very, very close second, and since Floyd themselves rarely-to-never perform together (all the more so since the death of keyboardist Richard Wright), it’s a wonderful way of experiencing their music, live, all over again.  We would definitely recommend Think Floyd, and definitely go to see them again ourselves.  And it tickles me er, pink, to be able to say that.

Music to write books by…

Today I’m featured over at Sarah Ward’s excellent Crimepieces blog as part of her regular ‘Music to Write Books By’ series.  Although I don’t often listen to music while I write, that doesn’t mean my work isn’t inspired by it – and here I explain how Pink Floyd in general, and their brilliant track ‘Brain Damage’ in particular, helped to inspire my psychological noir novella ‘Raise the Blade’.

Floyd fans and the keen eyed amongst you will spot the obvious quote in the title, but it went quite a bit deeper than that with all sorts of hidden references (although no actual lyrics, for obvious copyright reasons).  I don’t spill the beans on what the references are (you can have fun spotting them when you read the book) but I do explain more about how the track worked its magic on me while I was writing the book.

You can find the post here, and many thanks to Sarah for taking the time out from Iceland Noir to host me, which can’t have been easy!