The Closing Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games was titled 'A Symphony of British Music', to celebrate the fact that music has been one of Britain's strongest cultural exports over the last 50 years. Costing £20 million to stage, the artists were paid a token £1 to appear, for contractual purposes. As a side note, the spectacular Opening Ceremony costing £27 million. For the upcoming Paralympics, the ceremonies will cost a combined total of £34 million.

With a cast of 4,100 performers, including 3,880 adult volunteers and 380 schoolchildren from the six London Olympic boroughs, and an estimated worldwide TV audience of one billion people, the production design was by a familiar name: Mark Fisher, responsible for Pink Floyd and Roger Waters stage design over the years, most recently for Roger's The Wall Live tour (using similar technology and design that he created for Pink Floyd's 1980/81 outing for The Wall).

The evening gave a whirlwind tour through some of the highlights of British music, and - as you'll see to the right, and below - as part of the second section of music (once the Parade Of Athletes had taken place), Nick Mason helped bring a Floydian touch to proceedings, drumming on a performance of Wish You Were Here...something that the singer had (in a departure from normal protocol) leaked in advance.

Next Sunday, August 19th, William Pryor, a friend of the late Syd Barrett, will be giving a talk in the Grantchester area of Cambridge. He will be talking about Syd, as well as his grandmother Gwen Raverat and the poet Rupert Brooke.

'Rupert, Gwen, Grantchester and Syd: Romantic Heroes of Cambridge' takes place at 5.30pm at The Orchard Tea Garden, Grantchester. Tickets at £9.50 can be bought from the Rupert Brooke Museum at The Orchard, or call 01603 438603, or email: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it A buffet will follow the talk.

William Pryor believes there is something about Grantchester, the river, the meadows, and their role in so many young minds that demands the making of romantic myths. He looks at the myths that have built up around Rupert Brooke, Grantchester and Syd Barrett. As the grandson of Rupert's friend Gwen Raverat, a friend of Syd Barrett and an exile from Cambridge, William Pryor examines why we need these mythologies and how they intertwine.

On the subject of Storm Thorgerson...to tie in with his current exhibition in Ostend, Belgium, on Wednesday night the cover of Pink Floyd's 1987 album A Momentary Lapse Of Reason was brought back to life (in slightly varied style) on the local beach.

As BD contributors Jan Hollevoet and Vince Delhaye told us, the cover was the inspiration for a very special evening. Using 150 beds, a small, less expensive number than the 700 or so used in 1987, they were set up on the beach in an admittedly different orientation than Storm's original. One of the sponsors, Eastpak, was behind the event, where a few lucky people got an invitation to be part of the setting and could "sleep under the stars" for the night if they wanted to.

The picture to the right, from Eastpak's Facebook page, gives an impression of what the scene was like. The local press also covered the event, and you can read more over at the Standaard website.

Computers Have A Lot To Answer For is a new, 40-year retrospective of Storm Thorgerson’s photographic prints. Being held at the Public Works Gallery in Chicago, Illinois, between September 7th - November 2nd, it sees Storm's work making a return to a US gallery.

As one of the founders of the design studio Hipgnosis, and a key part of the Pink Floyd story, Thorgerson’s reality-bending vision and maximalist style have produced many of the defining images of music culture and the 20th-century at large, including the covers for Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of The Moon and Wish You Were Here, as well as Led Zeppelin's Houses of The Holy. As most of you know, his execution of elaborate sets, intricate image composition and complex photo montage is unparalleled. The gallery puts it like this: "Computers have a lot to answer for, and the man they answer to is Storm Thorgerson."

Since forming Hipgnosis in 1968, Thorgerson has completed over 300 album covers for Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Genesis, ELO, Peter Gabriel, Black Sabbath, Def Leppard, Paul McCartney, and more contemporarily, Phish, The Cranberries, Anthrax and Muse. Many of these covers will be on display, and as you may have gathered from various reports we've run over the last few years, Storm's exhibitions are well worth visiting if you are able to...