Some great news hit the Official Pink Floyd Facebook page late last night: Pink Floyd are finally arriving on Spotify.
The band were one of the few high profile bands who were notable absentees from the music streaming service, and since its launch, Floyd fans have been clamouring for their music to be available on it. In a slight, and typically Floydian, twist, the music isn't available in its entirety - yet. The track Wish You Were Here has been made streamable, and once it has been streamed a million times, the entire catalogue will be available on the service. Here's the link to the track: http://spoti.fi/WishUWereHere.
Spotify has over 24 million active users, and the service allows you to listen to anything in their vast catalogue of songs on demand, and also makes suggestions of music to listen to. There are two levels of membership - a free, ad-supported level, and a premium level which has a monthly fee. We know that many Floyd fans will be delighted with this news; despite already owning most if not all the Floyd's catalogue, Spotify brings convenience of playing tracks that take your fancy, without having to find the CD in your collection.
A couple of weeks ago, KLOS radio station in Los Angeles interviewed legendary producer Bob Ezrin. Their interview with Bob can be seen here:
Ezrin describes his time with Pink Floyd as "magical, challenging, illuminating and life altering". He did note that "[It] was tough. There was a lot of conflict. But dynamic tension makes for much better stuff. There was a lot of it in the making of The Wall, but it just kept making things better, and better, and better."
"Roger's a force of nature", Ezrin said about the post-Waters albums he produced/co-produced, "and a man to be reckoned with. He takes up a lot of energy, and brings an awful lot to the room. Not having him there, on the one hand, it made things slightly less fraught and less tense, but on the other hand also we missed his genius — and his spark, and watching those sparks fly between him and David and me. Somewhere in my heart of hearts, I always hoped they would bury the hatchet and get back together, and that we could do stuff together. Once Rick passed away, that possibility disappeared..."
Nick Mason drew a large crowd on Thursday evening (May 30th), at the RockArchive (RA) store on Monmouth Street in London, for the prearranged signing session we told you about last month. Jill Furmanovsky's new shop, after popping-up in April this year, burst-out this week as Pink Floyd fans flocked to see Nick.
Monmouth Street itself had organized a local shopping-night, making London's rush hour streets more busy than usual, but amongst that there was a clear buzz of excitement outside RA, with a queue forming outside the store on the pedestrianized road.
Many Floyd fans appeared – one even arrived in the morning and queued all day (Wimbledon-style) – for the opportunity to meet Nick and get memorabilia signed. Earlier Tweets about Nick's appearance bolstered numbers, and security were on hand to coordinate visitors.
It was overcast but dry and warm, and waiting the 20 minutes outside to enter the blue fronted shop only served to heighten the anticipation: through the large glass window shop-front one could see the eye-catching picture covered walls, the RA team busy dealing with the influx, and Nick in the corner at the far end...
Tickets are now on sale for the Australian Pink Floyd's 2014 Set The Controls tour of the UK.
The Set the Controls tour will draw heavily from the iconic The Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Division Bell albums, but the show will also feature an element that will allow the audience to choose the material that the band plays in certain sections. There will be 20 UK dates, including a show at The O2 London, on this tour and the band will perform a two hour set.
We know that the Aussie Floyd are a popular act with many Brain Damage visitors, and indeed, the Aussies first played in the UK twenty years ago for the first International Brain Damage fan convention at Wembley, so we've got a long history with them. Tickets are now available for all venues through this direct link at Ticketmaster. See below for the full list of dates and venues included - some of which will were used by the Floyd themselves in the 1970s!
In April, Dutch Woodstock 1970, a new look at the June 1970 Kralingen Music Festival, was released as a 2 CD and 1 DVD set.
The concert, held in a neighbourhood of the Dutch city of Rotterdam, had in the region of 120,000 in the audience, and a video giving a taste of it - Stamping Ground - has been around for many years. Other than the likes of Al Stewart, Marc Bolan, The Byrds, Santana and Jefferson Airplane, the film included Pink Floyd performing Set The Controls, and A Saucerful of Secrets live, albeit in quite an edited fashion.
But quite a lot of music was recorded that wasn't in the film, and this new set is said to include a lot more of the live material than has been heard before. We've not seen or heard this new set, so we don't know if the Floyd tracks are finally presented in full. In the concert, Set The Controls ran for some eleven and a half minutes, and Saucerful was almost twenty minutes long! We've been promised a review copy, so once that arrives, we will take a very close look - and listen - for you all.
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Some great news hit the 
Nick Mason drew a large crowd on Thursday evening (May 30th), at the RockArchive (RA) store on Monmouth Street in London, for the 
