With the reunion of Pink Floyd and Roger Waters at the London Live 8 concert four days away, we've had some more international TV broadcast details, and also bring you news of an interview with Nick Mason that was published today.
And just a reminder - tomorrow sees the allocation of an additional 55,000 tickets at selected UK outlets. Just one pair per person, and they are bound to go extremely fast, but will enable clear viewing of the video screens in Hyde Park.
Turning to the interview, this is published in the new issue of TV listings magazine Radio Times (out today, cover date July 2nd - 8th), which has a 9-page special on Live 8, including interviews with many of the major stars involved in the show.
Nick says that Bob "wanted a 'novelty' act really. It was a toss-up between us and the Spice Girls. Not sure if we lost or won".
"Bob approached David Gilmour and David was not hugely enthusiastic. With good reason, I felt. He's in the middle of a solo project. Bob rang me and said, 'David Gilmour won't do it'. And I felt, well that's Dave. You can take a horse to water but you can't make him drink. In Dave's case you can't even get him near the water. But Bob then spoke to Roger and he agreed. I think he felt - we all felt, actually - that it was a shame we didn't play Live Aid, but we didn't really exist as a band at the time. So Roger rang David and that cemented it. There's not been much conversation in the past ten years. So this was a fairly hefty thing for us".
"You can't carry on World War Three forever". He concluded: "If we hadn't reformed for Live 8 we'd have done it for another charity event, I suspect. It's a good reason to do it; a way of building bridges for the right reasons rather than burning them down".
The full interview, conducted by Mark Ellen, can be seen in this week's issue of Radio Times. Our thanks to Kevan Porter for the information.
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