Just a quick head's up for all of you who have irritatingly free diaries for the end of this month...

Final production details have been completed for David Gilmour's Royal Albert Hall shows later this month, and a number of additional tickets have now been made available for those quick off the mark.

As noted on the Floyd's Facebook page, these are all premium seats – Boxes, Stalls, front row of the Circle, and Arena (the floor of the venue), and there are tickets for all five nights available.

These are now available through this link at the Royal Albert Hall website, as well as the RAH box office. As before, to make things fairer for all, the standard restrictions still apply: tickets are restricted to four per purchaser across all five nights, who will need to attend armed with their picture ID.

Good luck for all of you trying to get these prized tickets... to the left you can see the new design t-shirt which commemorates David's concerts held in recent years at the Royal Albert Hall. Click to view in more detail.

Tying in with the announcement of Gerald Scarfe's upcoming exhibition at London's Barbican, he has been interviewed for the UK's The Big Issue magazine, available now in most cities and towns across the country. The Big Issue is a weekly publication, sold by homeless and long-term unemployed people. Vendors buy copies for £1.25 and sell for £2.50, and as Big Issue puts it, "They are working, not begging".

The interview covers a range of topics, including education (where his views have some alignment with Roger Waters), but starts with his impressions of Pink Floyd. "When I first worked with Pink Floyd I was puzzled by their music. It was Dark Side of the Moon at that time. They invited me to The Rainbow in Finsbury Park where they were performing and I found it theatrically very thrilling. Finally, I found my way into inventing my own world that would run alongside their world.

"Roger Waters, who was the main instigator on the visual side, and I talked about it but he never suggested anything visually. He really wanted me to do the social and political comment I do anyway because a lot of their work is a reflection of where we all are. The hammer is obviously a force of oppression, a fascist force, controlling, and very, very hard. Naturally I thought, what's the implement and the object that is the most unforgiving and brutal, and a hammer came to mind."

Later, he compares The Rolling Stones with the Floyd. "With Pink Floyd there was no personality cult like there was with Mick and Keith. When you went to their concerts the lights would go down and they'd melt onto stage – they'd suddenly be there. The first night they played The Wall at Earl's Court in 1980, when my animation of the flowers making love (the 'f***ing flowers' as they're now called) came on there was a huge roar from the audience and I felt this amazing rush. I remember Roger came over and said: "That’s you they're cheering. You're a rock'n'roll star now!"

Read the interview in full through this link at BigIssue.com.

The combined wishes of all of us on the Brain Damage team, along no doubt with many of you reading this, go to Roger Waters, who celebrates his 73rd birthday today.

Roger was born in Great Bookham, Surrey, in 1943, moving to Cambridge when he was two years old. It was there that he met, and became childhood friends with, a number of key people in the story of Pink Floyd. We hope you have a great day, Roger. Many happy returns!

Of course, Roger has been extremely busy over the last few years, having successfully taken Dark Side Of The Moon on tour in 2006, through to 2008. On completing that, he immediately started work on a new version of The Wall - which finally opened in September 2010. That tour was spectacularly successful, wrapping up in Paris for show number 217 in September 2013. Recordings of that tour turned into the film, shown in cinemas and released on DVD/Blu-ray and as part of a mammoth, Super Deluxe Edition.

Not one to rest on his laurels, he is now getting ready for two shows in Mexico City this month, before four shows taking place next month. There is talk of his new album getting close to completion, potentially being accompanied by a tour next year, and Roger's autobiography too is also being worked on. Busy times!

Announced this morning, with another flight for Algie - proof that you can't keep a good pig down - was the staging of The Pink Floyd Exhibition: Their Mortal Remains, which will be held at London's Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) from May 13th - October 1st, 2017.

Originally planned to open in Milan two years ago, the exhibition is a collaboration of all remaining band members, and will be an immersive, multi-sensory and theatrical journey through Pink Floyd’s extraordinary world. A story of sound, design and performance, the exhibition will chronicle the music, iconic visuals and staging of the band, from the underground psychedelic scene in 1960s London to the present day, illustrating their groundbreaking use of special effects, sonic experimentation, powerful imagery and social commentary.

Tickets are now available to purchase via the V&A and other ticketing partners. Full details below...

The exhibition will celebrate Pink Floyd's place in history as the cultural landscape changed throughout the 1960s and beyond. Pink Floyd occupied a distinctive experimental space and were the foremost exponents of a psychedelic movement that changed the understanding of music forever. They became one of the most important groups in contemporary music.

The Pink Floyd Exhibition: Their Mortal Remains, with sonic experience by Sennheiser, will celebrate the band’s era-defining work in composition, staging, design, film, music technology, graphic design and photography. It will feature more than 350 objects and artefacts including never-before-seen material, presented alongside works from the V&A’s outstanding collections of art, design, architecture and performance. Highlights will include spectacular set and construction pieces from some of Pink Floyd's most innovative and legendary album covers and stage performances including The Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall and The Division Bell, instruments, music technology, original designs, architectural drawings, handwritten lyrics and psychedelic prints and posters.