The Sir Charles Blues Lab Songwriting Contest final is nearing completion - and the five winners are to be announced this month. Hundreds of outstanding song entries were received, and Roger Waters said: "Well done to everybody - a marvelous showing!"

The Sir Charles Blues Lab is a non-profit making organisation collaborating with schools and community centers across the nation to provide young people with opportunities to learn and master the Blues as an enriching after school activity. We announced back in September that a national songwriting contest for kids had been launched, with the entries judged by Ray Charles, Flea (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Alicia Keys, Willie Nelson, Sir Charles (keyboard player, songwriter, and founder of the Sir Charles Blues Lab) Willie Hill (saxophone player and President of the Music Educator's National Conference), and the one and only Roger Waters!

Full details of the contest and the work of the lab at www.BluesLab.org.

In the week that the Brain Damage office received two new versions of the 30th Anniversary edition of Dark Side Of The Moon - one on (counterfeit) picture disc, the other on a new format from the far east (more on that soon!), comes rumours that there might be YET ANOTHER version of it appearing!

Today's Guardian newspaper in the UK highlights Pink Floyd as one of the bands responsible for "the most overblown extravaganzas from the annals of rock follies"!

Inspired by Elton John playing 75 shows in Las Vegas over the next three years, the piece talks about Pink Floyd in these less than glowing terms:

We were contacted yesterday by Vernon Fitch, who has written a book about The Wall, as previously reported on these news pages over the last six months or so. Vernon's long-awaited book, not now being published by Reynolds & Hearn (who are issuing a different book as previously reported), will be released by a different publisher later this year. Here is the description that Vernon wrote in May 2003 for the back of his Wall book: