A band with a very long history with Brain Damage, having travelled to the UK especially for our first International Fan Convention held at Wembley in 1993, the Australian Pink Floyd Show are old friends. We are pleased to bring you the news that they are set to return with a series of headline shows across the UK in March 2011. Tickets are on sale from 9am on 12 November 2010 and can be booked through this special link to www.Ticketmaster.co.uk or via 0844 576 5483 (24 hours). We also have details of a special presale which is starting at 9am on Wednesday morning.

The Australian Pink Floyd Show is a live touring sensation which has sold over three million tickets worldwide, and they have created their most ambitious and spectacular show ever for the 2011 European Tour. This theatre tour will see the debut of the new quadraphonic sound system and represents the first time ever that a live music production has used 3D stereographic technology. The cinema quality 3D visuals have been created by visual effects maestro John Attard, best known for his work on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. We're intrigued to see how this will work - if it works effectively alongside the music, we can see others exploring this route!

Our competition to win three copies of Gerald Scarfe's "The Making of Pink Floyd: The Wall", one of which is specially signed by Gerald himself, is now closed.

As a reminder, "The Making of Pink Floyd: The Wall" is the wonderful authorized, definitive book about the project and includes new commentaries from the surviving members of Pink Floyd: Roger Waters, David Gilmour and Nick Mason, together with the director of the film, Sir Alan Parker. Roger Waters has written the foreword. The album imagery, stage performances and film were created in close collaboration with Gerald Scarfe, and his massive archive includes original storyboards, animation cells, concept drawings, models and other three-dimensional material together with photographs of the creation and staging of the live performances and the filming of The Wall.

Three lucky Brain Damage readers will shortly have their own copy of this book - were you one of the winners? Read on to find out!

Some exciting news for the Pink Floyd historians amongst us - details of some early English appearances have now come to light, thanks to some Brain Damage visitors who've provided some documentary proof!

First, as Brian Viner (who organised the gig) has told us, there was an appearance at London's Roundhouse on July 9th, 1967, which was filmed for the BBC's "Late Night Line-Up". Looking at the invoice for this, the payment for the gig was made not to the bands involved, but to Muscular Dystrophy Research. The session, scheduled to be 40 minutes, was an evening show. Even then, the stage show was important to them, with a stipulation of a platform "not less than 8 ft in height and 30 sq ft in surface area to support artistes lighting equipment". The other band for the night was the Moody Blues ("a bargain at £60!"), and Brian recalls "dragging a piano into the Roundhouse that we borrowed from the pub across the road at the request of The Moody Blues."

There was also an appearance at the New Year Ball at Waltham Forest Technical College on December 31st, 1968. Booked by the social secretary for the princely sum of £600 (a lot in those days), Chris Hall recalls them playing Set The Controls, Saucerful, and more. He recalls there were no tickets ("they were ALL hippies, it was a stamp on the hand job..."), and his friend Dave Colli was also there. Dave recalls that the band were not playing on the main stage, but on a temporary stage at the side of the hall. He remembers "staring at Dave Gilmour in wonder from only about five feet away", and roadie Pete Watts mooching around.

Finally, January 23rd 1970 saw the band perform at the Civic Hall at Wolverhampton Polytechnic in the West Midlands. As you can see from the poster, there was an eclectic mix in the show that ran from 8pm to 2am, and included the likes of Zoot Money's Musicband and Cliff Bennett alongside Pink Floyd. Our thanks to Geoff Pearson for this info and the poster...

In today's Mail on Sunday newspaper (UK) there's a fascinating six-page article and interview with Roger Waters, looking at the spectacular $60 million live show presenting The Wall to fans in North America and Europe.

The article talks in detail about the logistics of the tour - one of the most ambitious and complex rock shows ever staged - and also talks at length about Roger's family story, in particular his father, who died at Anzio in 1944, with Roger just months old.

‘I said I couldn’t [do The Wall],’ Roger said. ‘But it wouldn’t go away and I wondered whether we could. It was incredibly difficult to do back in 1980 and we lost a lot of money, but I thought maybe it was possible now. [Production designer] Mark [Fisher] said technology had come a long way and that people spend a lot more on tickets than they used to. He thought we’d be able to break even, maybe even come out with some gravy. So I thought, “OK, we’ll do it.”’

‘Everyone said that a show like this could never be toured,’ says Fisher, who also designed the original production. The Mail note that a year ago, when Waters asked him to get involved again, he dug out his original notes, drawings and photographs to remind him how the show had been staged back then. The animations have taken the best part of a year to devise and the wall-builders rehearsed on their own in an empty stadium for a month before they practised with the lighting, sound and video crews for a week, then with the band for another week.

Read the full article here - it's worth checking out...