Now confirmed: on November 11th 2016, Pink Floyd will release 'The Early Years 1965-1972', a mouthwatering, comprehensive 28-disc boxset that sees Pink Floyd delve into their vast music archive to produce a deluxe package that includes 7 individual book-style volumes, featuring a stack of previously unreleased material. This follows an eagerly followed and dissected teaser campaign which saw cryptic 'slash' imagery hit the band's official social media channels, and a daily release of early images, all backed with the same black background and white 'slash'.

The Early Years box set contains unreleased tracks, BBC Radio Sessions, remixes, outtakes and alternative versions over an incredible 11 hours and 45 minutes of audio (made up of 130+ tracks) and live and TV performance in over 14 hours of audio-visual material. The content includes over 20 unreleased songs, more than 7 hours of previously unreleased live audio and over 5 hours of rare concert footage are included, along with 5 meticulously produced 7” singles in replica sleeves, collectable memorabilia, feature films and new sound mixes. An overview of the contents of each year's package is below, and for those who want to digest the full track listing, it can be seen here - all six pages of it, tightly packed with content! This really is a mammoth set...

UPDATE, November 5th: the package has now been swollen to 28 discs, with the inclusion of a supplementary disc featuring the Live At Pompeii concert as a 2016 audio mix. The 6 tracks totalling over 67 minutes include live versions of 'Careful With That Axe, Eugene', 'Set the Controls For The Heart Of The Sun', 'One of These Days', 'A Saucerful Of Secrets', 'Echoes' and intriguingly an alternative take of 'Careful With That Axe, Eugene'!

Live at Pompeii has never been available officially as an audio only CD - only as a bootleg in varying degrees of quality - so this is a real first for fans. To also include an alternative take of 'Eugene' is very interesting...

The Early Years 1965-1972 will give collectors the opportunity to hear the evolution of the band and witness their part in cultural revolutions from their earliest recordings and studio sessions to the years prior to the release of The Dark Side Of The Moon, one of the biggest selling albums of all time. Fans will see the invention of psychedelic progressive rock via an insightful collection that explores the Pink Floyd story from the time Roger Waters, Richard Wright, Nick Mason and Syd Barrett met at London's Regent Street Polytechnic, through to Syd's departure and David Gilmour joining, to the point just before things changed for the band for good with the release of TDSOTM.

Each individual book-style package will be released separately early in 2017, with the exception of 'BONUS CONTINU/ATION' which is exclusive to the box set. For those who just want a taster of the contents, a 2CD highlights collection, Pink Floyd Cre/ation The Early Years 1967 – 1972, will also be available. The tracklisting for this 2CD set can be seen here.

ORDERING INFORMATION:
You can now place your orders for the box set and/or the 2CD highlights collection:

It is REALLY worth checking the other Amazon stores, rather than just your local one, as pricing varies hugely; at time of writing, Amazon UK and Italy are both around the cheapest, and they will ship internationally. Amazon also offer their preorder price guarantee - if the price they offer an item for drops at any point between when you place your order, and the release date, they will automatically charge you the lowest price. Buying through our links will give a small but vital contribution toward running this site, and is much appreciated. As yet we don't know if there is region coding on the Blu-ray and/or DVD discs, so if purchasing from a different region (e.g. you're in North America, buying from Europe, or vice versa), please be cautious.

Also worth noting: the official PF store has started releasing some special products relating to the box set - t-shirts and mugs, for example - and the range of their wares on offer can be seen through this link.

Cambridge Live has announced that it is teaming up with the Cambridge Film Trust to premiere a series of films about both Syd Barrett and the Swinging Sixties at the 2016 Cambridge Film Festival, as part of its celebrations of the life and work of Syd Barrett, which we first mentioned back in February on Brain Damage.

The centrepiece will be a film, entitled 'Get All That Ant?', a free-form documentary filmed by a former school friend and fellow art student of Syd Barrett's, Anthony Stern. The documentary feature is made up of film footage, stills and archive footage taken during the 1960s and filmed in Cambridge, London and San Francisco. With the majority of footage having never been seen before, the film includes live performance footage and stills from Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, The Doors and Donovan as well as footage of friends and colleagues of Syd Barrett including former girlfriends Jenny Spires, Iggy Rose and Libby Gausden.

The film will premiere as part of a series of film screenings about Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd on Friday 21st October at the Cambridge Guildhall as part of the 36th Cambridge Film Festival which runs from 20th – 27th October.

In addition to the film premiere, Cambridge Live has teamed up with ISpySydinCambridge.com who are offering Syd Barrett-themed walking tours of Cambridge on the weekend of the concert. Led by former school friends of Syd Barrett, Stephen Pyle and Warren Dosanjh, the tours trace some of the key places in the city relevant to the life of the former Pink Floyd guitarist including his former family home, his school, as well as Roger Waters' and David Gilmour's family homes. Having been on these walks, they are fascinating and well worth attending.

The First Time With...Roger Waters airs at 1pm UK time today (Sunday, July 24th) on the UK's BBC Radio 6 Music.

In this one hour long programme, Roger talks about a youth obsessed with blues, jazz and R&B, and his early songwriting influences like Hoagy Carmichael, Bob Dylan and John Lennon. He looks back at his relationship with his childhood friend Syd Barrett, who would join the Pink Floyd in 1965. He recalls the post-Syd Floyd, the creation of legendary albums like The Dark Side Of The Moon and his uneasy relationship with the fame that followed. Roger also focuses on The Wall - the 1979 concept album inspired by that relationship - and how he revisited the album in 2010 for his epic record breaking Roger Waters: The Wall tour, which also inspired a live album and a feature movie. He also talks about his famously acrimonious split from Pink Floyd, and more positively his new material.

BBC6 Music can be heard in much of Europe, online at www.BBC.co.uk, and the show itself can be heard via the BBC's iPlayer service following broadcast. Listeners worldwide may also be able to tune in via the TuneIn app for Apple/Android devices.

The UK's Guardian newspaper has posted an online "photo essay" containing a great range of exclusive photographs taken at last week's Pompeii concerts, with plenty of glimpses behind the scenes as well as shots of the concerts themselves.

There's something for everyone in the pictures: from detailed equipment shots (including the guitar effects pedals used), to his voice treatments, to strolling the tunnels in the amphitheatre with the director Adrian Maben, looking at his fascinating exhibition about Pink Floyd Live At Pompeii. The in-concert pictures are particularly atmospheric.

In the article, there is also a short (two and a half minute) audio montage from the concerts, edited together by Gavin Elder, the director of the upcoming DVD/Blu-ray release of the concerts, and photographer of many wonderful pictures seen during the course of David's Rattle That Lock tour on David's Facebook page. As yet, of course, there is no indication when the film of the concerts will be ready and scheduled for release, but rest assured we will keep you updated on this front. We are certain that many of you will be desperate to see the show footage - and with very good reason...