Earlier this year, the Music Radar website, along with Guitarist Magazine published an extensive article looking at some rather interesting instruments and equipment.

They met with David Gilmour's long-serving tech Phil Taylor to examine in full detail the instruments, amps and effects that the Pink Floyd legend used to summon up the rich soundscapes of The Endless River. They note that "David Gilmour clearly likes water. His famed houseboat studio, Astoria, is moored on the Thames near Hampton. Today, Guitarist is at his other studio, Medina, near Brighton and overlooking the Channel. Aptly, it was these two venues that were employed to record the bulk of the final Pink Floyd studio album..."

Taylor takes the reader through the equipment in detail, and begins by talking of how the studio sprung from humble beginnings - a derelict storage unit - and became a bespoke, state of the art recording facility.

With 30 pages of photos and accompanying text, it makes for a fascinating look at the equipment responsible for so much of our favourite music over the years. Click here to read the article and see the pictures.

Announced this week are a set of events to mark the Belarus Free Theatre Festival, including a launch event at London's Koko, in Camden. The festival is staging a two-week festival of performances at secret underground locations in celebration of the company's 10th anniversary, but preceding this with a solidarity concert of music and play readings as part of the celebrations.

The event - Staging a Revolution: I'm With The Banned - on October 18th at 7pm, and scheduled to run until 11pm, will unite artists who live in political freedom with banned bands from Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, including Pussy Riot, performing alongside the likes of David Gilmour and Neil Tennant.

Friends of BFT, including Kim Cattrall and Juliet Stevenson, will give readings.

Tickets for the event are now on sale via the Koko website.

Toward the end of last year, Nick Mason conducted an interview with Spotify, the music streaming service. Principally to help promote the release of Pink Floyd's fifteen and final album, The Endless River, the interview is a fascinating look at Nick's views on the band, Live8, the inclusion of Polly Samson as lyricist, and more.

Peppered throughout with Nick's trademark humour, the interview (in seven parts, running at around 12 minutes or so) is well worth listening to. If you don't have a Spotify account, there is a free account option available as well as a premium, paid-for account. If you have a Spotify account, but are not logged on to it, the playlist below might ask you to just log in before it will play.

Here's the interview playlist:

Neil Warnock, founder and worldwide president of The Agency Group, booking agents which represents some 2,500 artists worldwide including The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd (when they were touring) and David Gilmour, has shared some of his experiences with the UK's Guardian newspaper. With his extensive experiences - first putting on a show at age 17 - and with such a roster of artists, the article ("How to put on a mega-gig") gives some fun and fascinating insights into putting on some of the largest shows the world of music has seen.

Included are some of his recollections of working with Gilmour and the Floyd - such as this from the band's late 80s shows. "Once, with Pink Floyd in Italy, we couldn't get their mirrorball into the stadium. We couldn't drop it in by crane – which we'd done before – because the streets were too narrow to get a giant crane down. The only way was to destroy the entrance where the footballers walk in. We destroyed it, got the mirrorball in, did the show, rebuilt it and got out. The fans had no idea. Neither did the stadium until we did it, but they were very happy – they had Pink Floyd."

Elsewhere he talks of the 1988 Versailles shows, and the 2006 Venice shows that Gilmour had to postpone for a week after a technical issue with the stage structure. To read the article in full, visit this link at the Guardian.