CharityStars.com are currently running a set of auctions under the festive title of "12 Drummers Drumming" - a reference to the famous "12 Days of Christmas" song.

The auctions are to raise much needed funds for the wonderful Teenage Cancer Trust charity, and offers a range of drums, drum heads and sticks from a range of artists. These include Nick Mason, Zak Starkey (son of Ringo, and The Who's drummer), Dave Grohl, and Nicko McBrain.

Nick Mason's offering, which can be seen here (click the thumbnail), is a framed drum head with the classic Pink Floyd "bubble" writing included in Nick's dedication. The auction for this ends on December 13th 2017, at 4:00pm GMT.

The charity to benefit from the twelve percussive donations is a truly worthwhile one - they strive to make the lives of young people (children, teenagers and young adults) suffering with cancer a little better, with dedicated wards, decorated and equipped with things to engage and take the minds off treatments and suffering. Visit the Teenage Cancer Trust charity website for more information and to support them via donations, or purchasing items such as their music related goodies including David Gilmour concert posters/t-shirts.

Our congratulations to Nigel Godrich, Sam Petts-Davies and Darrell Thorp, engineers, and Bob Ludwig, mastering engineer, for their nomination in the 60th Grammy Awards to be held on January 28th, 2018.

Their work on Roger Waters' recent album, Is This The Life We Really Want?, has been nominated in the Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical category, up against the likes of Bruno Mars.

Two years ago, Roger Waters received a pair of nominations - his Amused to Death reissue was nominated for Best Surround Sound Album, and his concert film for The Wall was nominated for Best Music Video/Film. Amused to Death won that category... is Roger in line for another success in these awards? We'll find out at the end of January!

The Pink Floyd Exhibition: Their Mortal Remains, the critically acclaimed major retrospective of the band which recently finished at London's Victoria & Albert Museum, has now confirmed its next location on its tour.

The announcement, via a press conference with Pink Floyd founding member Nick Mason, was that it will be opening at Rome's Museo d'Arte Contemporanea di Roma (MACRO) on 19th January 2018. Apart from a Rome-exclusive video, the organisers also note that there will be new exhibits added exploring Pink Floyd's relationship with Italy. This exhibition will be the first to take place at the museum under its new management, Palaexpo.

Following its highly-successful debut at London's Victoria and Albert Museum earlier this year, which saw over 400,000 people tear down the wall, the exhibition moves to Rome as its first international destination on the global landscape. The exhibition continues the first collaboration in decades of Pink Floyd's remaining members and is produced and promoted globally by Michael Cohl of Concert Productions International B.V. The Rome exhibition is produced in association with MondoMostre and Live Nation. Tickets are on sale today via Vivaticket.it, all Vivaticket outlet locations and by phone on +39.041.2719035.

The exhibition’s phenomenally successful and mammoth run at the V&A, described by national British newspapers as "stunning", "a real feast for the senses" and "almost as good as seeing the band live", was the most successful exhibition of its kind. The run at Rome's MACRO will be a continuation of this vast success. MACRO is located less than 1km from The Piper Club, which played host to Pink Floyd's first shows in Italy in April 1968.

As before, the flow of the exhibition, in chronological order, is enhanced throughout by music and the voices of past and present members of Pink Floyd, including Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, Richard Wright, Nick Mason and David Gilmour, talking about their musical experiences through their experiences and musical experimentation via sound specialist Sennheiser's intuitive GuidePORT system. This culminates in the Performance Zone, where visitors enter an immersive audio-visual space, which includes the recreation of the very last performance of all four members of the band at Live 8 in 2005 with Comfortably Numb, specially mixed using Sennheiser's ground-breaking AMBEO 3D audio technology, as well as a Rome-exclusive video of One Of These Days, taken from the band's iconic live performance in Pompeii.

Admission is priced from €18 for adults, with concessions available. Advance booking is VERY strongly advised; certain sessions for the London staging quickly sold out. We'd also advise you to book sessions that start no later than lunchtime if you really want to take your time over the exhibition - we had many reports of people spending five or more hours absorbing all the detail in London! 


On Thursday, AyseDeniz Gokcin, the Turkish pianist/composer/arranger AyseDeniz Gokcin, who combines classical music with other genres, particularly rock music, was in London for the UK Premiere of her Pink Floyd Classical Concept.

Held in the church of St James's Sussex Gardens, the evening made for a wonderful 'concert with a difference' for the packed pews - either for classical music enthusiasts, possibly exposed to the music of Pink Floyd for the first time, or for Floyd fans, enjoying some dramatically different interpretations to what they may be used to.

When AyseDeniz released the Pink Floyd Classical Concept album back in 2013, she gave us some background to the project. "This album initially started with my arrangements of three Pink Floyd songs, written in the form of a fantasia (Pink Floyd 'Lisztified': Fantasia Quasi Sonata) to celebrate Franz Liszt's 200th anniversary. Unlike other 'covers', my arrangements evolved out of the original songs and took their own shape, making the project an 'osmosis' of Pink Floyd's and Liszt's music.

"While these three songs were the seeds of this concept album, the new arrangements have developed quite differently. They are a further departure from the "Pink Floyd 'Lisztified': Fantasia Quasi Sonata" in the sense that they are more daring and experimental. The main driving force behind these arrangements was Liszt’s vision of viewing the piano as an orchestra, which tempted me to explore different sounds, to imitate rock instruments and to create new harmonies by manipulating the existing ones."

The performance certainly included some elements that would have taken the more classically minded by surprise - AyseDeniz would at times reach into the grand piano to pluck strings, or create unusual effects by using, say, a broken record or wooden spoon! It all added up to a hugely successful performance, in a wonderfully atmospheric venue - the high ceilings, pillars and pews all gave the music a resonance and mood to make for a memorable evening.

The set consisted of Welcome To The Machine; Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun; Pink Floyd ‘Lisztified’: Fantasia Quasi Sonata: Hey You / Wish You Were Here / Another Brick In The Wall; Us and Them; Comfortably Numb; On The Turning Away / Chopin; Shine On You Crazy Diamond and High Hopes, with an encore just as diverse, of Linkin Park's In the End and Mozart's Turkish March arranged by Volodos. Liszt, the Floyd, Linkin Park and Mozart... it was that sort of evening!

Hopefully there are plans in the works to bring this to other venues, and as/when this happens, we will let you know.