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VERY BEST WISHES AND STAY WELL - your friends at Brain Damage
Coming next month (on June 11th - rescheduled from May 28th) is Still Wish You Were Here - A Tribute To Pink Floyd. Whilst there are a lot of tribute or cover versions of Pink Floyd material, this cover version of the entire album features a diverse set of well-known and well-respected musicians, taking in members of Yes, The Damned, Public Image Limited, King Crimson, Deep Purple and Genesis, amongst others!
If you cast your eye at the track listing below, we've listed the musicians involved with each song, and we're sure that some of the names will surprise you. Some of these have performed with Pink Floyd and Roger Waters at various points too. There's a rich amount of pedigree amongst the assembled players, and therefore, we weren't surprised when we listened to the album this week that the quality of performance came through clearly, right from the first track (Shine On Parts 1-5).
It was a particular pleasure to hear Rick Wakeman tackle Welcome To The Machine, with this keyboard-heavy song suiting Rick perfectly. Have A Cigar is fun too. Wish You Were Here works well with the assembled musicians, with Parts 6-9 of Shine On benefitting particularly from the combos of Bootsy Collins and Steve Hillage, and towards the end of the piece, Rod Argent and Ian Paice.
Here's the track list, with the names of the musicians playing on each of them:
Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts 1-5) - Geoff Tate, Steve Hackett, Billy Sheehan, Mel Collins, Geoff Downes, Ian Paice
Welcome To The Machine - Todd Rundgren, Rick Wakeman, Tony Levin
Have A Cigar - James LaBrie, Steve Stevens, Patrick Moraz, Rat Scabies, Jah Wobble
Wish You Were Here - Rik Emmett, Joe Satriani, Edgar Froese, David Ellefson, Carmine Appice
Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts 6-9) - Rod Argent, Steve Hillage, Ian Paice, Bootsy Collins
If this has intrigued you, orders are now being taken through the following links, which help us out with the ongoing running costs of Brain Damage without costing you a thing - and we really appreciate the help! The album will be available on CD in a 6-panel deluxe digipak, and a gatefold vinyl LP in a variety of colours (which we presume means is randomly allocated).
Today we have some more new music from respected guitarist Chester Kamen. We know that a good number of you have been enjoying these songs. Amongst many other artists, Chester has toured with Roger Waters, joining his band in 2002 and playing on subsequent tours, and with David Gilmour on his 2016 Rattle That Lock tour. He first played with David back in 1985 during the Live Aid show - David and Chester were both part of Bryan Ferry's band for that show (as was Jon Carin).
Chester has, like many musicians, kept himself busy whilst lockdowns and restrictions due to Covid-19 have called a halt to many things - in particular, live performance. In October, he shared his new piece of music called Take This, that runs for over 23 minutes. Chester told us that Take This is the first side of an album he is currently working on - following, or inspired by, the old Floyd blueprint of one long piece and several songs on the flip side. Since then we've seen the first few songs on the second side of the album: Brand New Day, Swimming, I'd Love To Turn You, Lover's Lane, and Come The Revolution.
The new song from Chester - Child Of The Damned - has just arrived, with what reminds us of an early 1970s Floyd vibe to it. Chester noted that there's "not such a band feel this time. Just me in isolation in Scarborough with a 16 track tape machine and some bananas for food..."
We'll update you as he progresses with the rest of the album, as we know from feedback we've had that the songs are proving popular.
To coincide with the upcoming publication of a new book about the guitarist who was founder of Fleetwood Mac, a version of Need Your Love So Bad, which started life as a home recorded vocal by Peter Green in 1968 using a domestic tape recorder, has just been made available with additional music played by David Gilmour.
Producer Laurie Latham took the vocal track and with the full input of Gilmour created a new musical landscape for this classic blues track. Peter heard and approved of the treatment before he passed away, peacefully in his sleep, on July 25th 2020.
This is one of two tracks that form part of the book project by Peter called The Albatross Man. The other track is a new version of Man of the World by Kirk Hammett from Metallica using Peter's original famous Les Paul.
The book - in three special editions, two of which include the two new songs on 7" single - is now on pre-sale, and will be published on what would be Peters 75th birthday, October 29th 2021. Full details and ordering at rufuspublications.com, who are the only retailers of the book, but will ship worldwide.
Some important information today, particularly for those in or near California: early tickets for the next location of The Pink Floyd Exhibition: Their Mortal Remains have just gone on sale!
It was recently announced that it was going to the USA as its long-awaited next step, arriving in the country for the first time. The exhibition will open at the Vogue Multicultural Museum in Los Angeles, California in 2021. The tickets which have just become available - as a pre-sale to the museum's mailing list subscribers - are for most of August, with time slots throughout each day for people to select from.
Next Monday, May 3rd, the general sale of tickets begins so this is your opportunity to hopefully get your choice of date and time. There's a limited capacity (due to COVID-19, and to make the experience better generally) so prime time slots are bound to sell quickly.
If the new staging is anything like past iterations of this exhibition (which originally opened at London's Victoria & Albert Museum in May 2017, and has since toured selected locations in Europe) it is a wonderful journey through the years of Pink Floyd's history, even incorporating related items from the band member's lives pre-Floyd. To see instruments, equipment, props, posters, and so much more that have been key elements, is a joy, and is not to be missed!
The venue, along Hollywood Boulevard, is considered a historical landmark of Los Angeles. The building was built in 1935, and was eventually remodelled in 1959. It closed its doors in 1995. The space has been used for film locations and live performances. Now, the Vogue Multicultural Museum has opened its doors to welcome all types of cultural and artistic expressions, becoming a unique place in the heart of Hollywood, and the Pink Floyd Exhibition is the first exhibition it is hosting. This picture to the left has just been posted on their socials and shows the eye-catching frontage, along one on the most heavily visited roads in Hollywood!
Visit www.vmmla.com to join the email list for this early access to pre-sale tickets; once your subscription is confirmed, they should email you immediately with the pre-sale link. For the exhibition's own website, visit PinkFloydExhibition.com although currently there is little information on there.
They are selling tickets at half-hour intervals for entrance; they recommend you arrive fifteen minutes early to check in, stow any baggage in lockers, and suchlike, and you need to be at the museum within 30 minutes of your ticket's entry time. They also recommend you allow at least two hours for your visit. To our mind, this is the absolute minimum you should give yourself - a lot of people at past stagings of the exhibition have spent at least double that to take in everything on display.
The website also has more information including location, COVID-19 considerations for attendees, and hopefully soon, the dates that the exhibition is being staged, and potentially even an online store. We'll keep you posted.
UPDATE: The general sale of tickets has now started through this link, and the expected extent of the exhibition's opening has been revealed. It is due to run from August 3rd through to November 30th, 2021 (going by the ticketing website's date options, contrary to the new video below), and you can secure your choice of time slot now. Previous stagings of the exhibition have seen extensions to the finish date due to demand but remember this is NOT guaranteed and should not be assumed. Visit rocketpayments.events/pinkfloyd-us to buy your tickets.
Around fourteen months ago, legendary drummer Mick Fleetwood enlisted an all-star cast for a spectacular, one-of-a-kind concert, in aid of the Teenage Cancer Trust, which was held on Tuesday, February 25th at London's legendary venue, The Palladium - shortly before Covid-19 affected life everywhere, and resulted in lockdowns in many countries.
The bill for Mick Fleetwood & Friends Celebrate The Music Of Peter Green And The Early Years Of Fleetwood Mac, included Billy Gibbons, David Gilmour, Jonny Lang, Andy Fairweather Low, John Mayall, Christine McVie, Zak Starkey, Steven Tyler, Bill Wyman, Noel Gallagher, Pete Townshend, Neil Finn, Kirk Hammett and many more.
Legendary producer Glyn Johns joined as the executive sound producer and the house band featured Fleetwood himself along with Andy Fairweather Low, Dave Bronze and Ricky Peterson. Very sadly, five months after the concert, Peter passed away.
For those who weren't able to attend the concert, three different editions were announced for release - a Super Deluxe Edition Box Set, with the entire show on 4LP, 2CD and a Blu-ray in a book (and copies ordered early included your choice of name in the concert documentary credits, a reproduction signed concert poster, and reproduction signed set list); a Blu-ray and 2CD set; and a 4LP set. These were originally slated for release on October 16th, 2020, but with Covid-19 affecting the production of the release, these releases were postponed to April 30th, 2021 - the end of this month.
Just unveiled is this "unboxing" video of the Super Deluxe Edition, which may whet your appetite for this release:
To order the various editions, you can do so from the following Amazon stores (thus helping Brain Damage with a much needed contribution towards site running costs, at no extra cost to you!):
We suspect the Blu-ray won't have any region coding on it, so we think you should be fine to order if you aren't in one of the countries above. We'll try and get confirmation of this though.
As we suspect many of you are fully aware, over the years there's been more than a healthy number of books about Pink Floyd, covering the music, the personalities, the live experiences, and more. For a new book to stand out, it has to offer something a little different from the majority already on the shelves. The newly published 'Lost Souls: A Fictional Journey Through 50 Years of Pink Floyd' by Dutch music journalist and author Edwin Ammerlaan seemed to be written with exactly that in mind.
The book centres on a teenager called Matt Hallander who in 1967 accidentally bumps into Roger Waters and Syd Barrett on a ferry from Ibiza to Formentera, forming a fascination for the Floyd which expanded into friendship with the members of the band. Managing to get a job with a music publication, the protagonist builds trust with the band and is chosen to write a book about them. This necessitates spending time with them, interviewing them, and finding out how they all work and live collectively.
Ammerlaan was keen to find a new angle on the band when he was approached by a Dutch publisher to write about them. In his words "I've been a freelance music journalist since 1987 and have written many features about Pink Floyd in that time. I rejected it because I felt that most things about Pink Floyd had already been thoroughly documented. To add a new perspective to the Floyd history would be virtually impossible."
He turned away from the suggested Dutch language book, repeating all the normal stories, to write in a more personal, subjective way for an international audience. It weaves together actual events, and interviews he, and others, conducted with the band members, into an absorbing fictional narrative following his main character's "coming of age" story conflating his development with the band's. Some of the interviews have been changed to sound more conversational, and there's a healthy dose of fictitious invention thrown in to move the story along.
It's a curious concept but seems to work very well. The easy, conversational style of writing keeps the interest going, not least to see where the story goes. Having experienced some of the concerts Ammerlaan describes in the book, he captures things that I noticed and felt at times, and with his use of Matt as his main character's name, on a personal level this felt a little odd at first but I got used to it! From the reaction of others in the Floyd community who have also got the book, the attention to detail and atmosphere seems to have captured the imagination, and there's some very positive word of mouth for this book. It won't be for everyone (and don't expect a thorough biography of the band - that can be found elsewhere in numerous places) but for something quite different it could be just what some people are after.
WELCOME TO BRAIN DAMAGE, YOUR PINK FLOYD, NICK MASON, DAVID GILMOUR AND ROGER WATERS NEWS RESOURCE!
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Coming next month (on June 11th - rescheduled from May 28th) is Still Wish You Were Here - A Tribute To Pink Floyd. Whilst there are a lot of tribute or cover versions of Pink Floyd material, this cover version of the entire album features a diverse set of well-known and well-respected musicians, taking in members of Yes, The Damned, Public Image Limited, King Crimson, Deep Purple and Genesis, amongst others!
Some important information today, particularly for those in or near California: early tickets for the next location of The Pink Floyd Exhibition: Their Mortal Remains have just gone on sale!
As we suspect many of you are fully aware, over the years there's been more than a healthy number of books about Pink Floyd, covering the music, the personalities, the live experiences, and more. For a new book to stand out, it has to offer something a little different from the majority already on the shelves. The newly published 'Lost Souls: A Fictional Journey Through 50 Years of Pink Floyd' by Dutch music journalist and author Edwin Ammerlaan seemed to be written with exactly that in mind.
