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PINK FLOYD’S ROGER WATERS SET TO WED FOR FOURTH TIME
by: Joe Robinson Yesterday
Stephen Lovekin, Getty Images
Perhaps the fourth time is the charm for Roger Waters, as the Pink Floyd singer-bassist plans to tie the knot with bride number four next year. Waters and his longtime fiancee, filmmaker Laurie Durning, will walk down the aisle in 2012 sometime before Waters resumes his Wall Live tour.
Why now, after seven years of being engaged? “It just seems like a good time to do it before the tour,” Durning toldThe New York Post. And although Roger Waters certainly is rock ‘n’ roll royalty, don’t expect an over-the-top extravaganza like the (second!) wedding party recently hosted by Paul McCartney and his new wife, Nancy Shevell – Durning says she is only inviting close friends to the “private and low-key” ceremony.
Is that her way of telling us our invitation is not in the mail?
If they do plan to get married before Waters hits the road, the wedding could be happening sooner than later. Waters is scheduled to kick off a busy year of touring on Jan. 27 in Perth, Australia. He currently has dozens of dates scheduled through a July 14 gig in Philadelphia.
The couple is said to be in the market for a new engagement ring, since the bride-to-be misplaced the original ring after Waters proposed back in 2004.
Rogers has three children from his previously relationships, including son Harry Waters, who has been touring keyboardist for his father’s band since 2006.
10 Semi-Obscure Facts About Pink Floyd
(from http://blogs.houstonpress.com/rocks/2011/10/pink_floyd_facts.php)
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This week we turn our fact-finding spotlight on of the most successful cosmic rock bands of all time, Pink Floyd. The band is going through another period of rediscovery by fans young and old with a new set of remastered reissues, along with last year's extremely popular Roger Waters concert tour, wherein he performed the band's 1979 album The Wall in its entirety, complete with a wall being built onstage.
This week's Rolling Stone cover story is on the band's monolithic 1973 LP,The Dark Side of the Moon, which was among the batch of Floyd reissues out this past month. Brian Hiatt's piece delves into the theory that the album in a sense splintered the working structure of the group for the rest of their days together. After Dark Side, they would only release four more strife-baked albums before Waters left for a solo career.
We all know the stories about original lead singer Syd Barrett, that drugged, handsome madman who was initially the beating heart of the group, but was done in by the ravages of hallucinogenics on his capabilities to function in a band that was quickly gaining steam. David Gilmour was brought on board as Barrett began slipping away mentally, and ended up outlasting even Waters.
Barrett's two solo albums The Madcap Laughs and Barrett, are cult favorites, in league with that other great, damaged '60s artist, Roky Erickson, though Erickson obviously overcame the odds and thrived in later years. Barrett passed away in 2006, but was always a looming, if absent figure, in the Floyd universe.
The band's one constant member on each album was drummer Nick Mason. Keyboardist Richard Wright passed away in 2008. Wright, Mason, and Gilmour continued to tour as Pink Floyd after Waters' exit, to chagrin of the bassist, and released two albums, 1987's A Momentary Lapse of Reason and 1994's The Division Bell, and were a major concert drawl into the '90s before parting.
There exists a few different, distinct periods in the Floyd narrative. There's the early bluesy, garage work up until Barrett's exit. The middle period before Dark Side was characterized by albums like the pastoral Meddleand Atom Heart Mother, and the sprawling Ummagumma. The last track on 1971's Meddle, "Echoes" is the perfect prequel to the vast and enthralling expanse of what would be 1973's Dark Side.
After touring Dark Side, the band went into the studio to record 1975'sWish You Were Here, and this when Hiatt's article points to the exact moment when the band's daily routine became very much a case of Waters versus the rest of the group. Many fans also echo that sentiment, articulating that Waters began a tyrannical hold on the proceedings.
Animals and The Wall were very much Waters' babies, creating the concepts and structures of both. 1983's The Final Cut, the final Floyd disc with Waters in the fold, gets dismissed by fans as a Waters solo album that happens to have Floyd playing behind him. Gilmour only sings lead on "Not Now John," with Waters handling the rest.
As for this guy here, our favorite album has to be a toss up between Dark Sideand Wish You Were Here. Our first taste of Floyd would have been seeing those freaky videos from The Wallon television, and of course the hourly classic-rock radio doses. It would take us a few years to delve into that early middle era involving Atom Heart Mother and Ummagumma to full recognize the band's freaky power.
We've seen Waters twice in our career here at Rocks Off; first time back in 2008 on his tour performing Dark Side at the Woodlands where we ate two corn dogs - no comment - and almost a year ago when he hit theToyota Center while performing The Wall. Never seen Gilmour and the rest in the flesh, and they aren't the touring kind.
We compiled our usual set of ten obscure - hopefully - facts for you this week in the confidence that a few of you Floyd fanatics will come out of the woodwork with even more.
Careful with that comment button, Eugene.
At the end of Dark Side's "Eclipse," as the final voice states that "there is no dark side of the moon really, as a matter of fact it's all dark," with your headphones on and the volume up full blast, you will hear an instrumental, Muzak-y version of The Beatles' "Ticket To Ride" in the background. It was probably coming from the main offices of Abbey Road, where Floyd was recording. We haven't heard it ourselves, though.
The title of Atom Heart Mother came from a headline found on London'sEvening Standard daily about a mother was a nuclear-powered pacemaker. Also, the name of the cow on the album cover was Lulubelle III, and she was delicious.
"Time" starts with layers of clock noises that were put together by Pink Floyd's engineer, Alan Parsons. Each clock was recorded separately at an antiques store, and Parsons wanted to use the clocks to demonstrate a new quadraphonic sound system, but ended up using them for the song. You could say that Dark Side was very much an Alan Parsons project....
The opening radio hiss and blurbs on "Wish You Were Here" were recorded off David Gilmour's car radio. Gilmour ran a lead out of Abbey Road to his car and fiddled with the radio to get the ghostly intro.
Dark Side was on the Billboard 200 chart for 741 consecutive weeks from 1973 to 1988. The album has sold an estimated 45 million copies, and most of them probably have weed dander flaked on them. It is estimated that 1 in every 12 people in the world has a copy.
The inflatable pig on the cover of theAnimals escaped its handlers during the shoot for the album cover and flew into flight lanes of Heathrow Airport, causing havoc for planes and eventually landed in a farmer's field in Kent. The inflatable pigs have made appearances at most Floyd or Waters shows for the past 35 years.
Professor Stephen Hawking made a guest appearance on The Division Bell,adding the robotic vocals on the track "Keep Talking."
The chorus on The Wall's "Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)" came from a kids chorus at a school in Islington, England, very near the studio. Made up of 23 kids between the ages of 13 to 15, the vocals were overdubbed twelve times, making it sound like there were many more kids.
Syd Barrett wrote "Arnold Layne" about a cross-dresser in his town by the same name who used to steal bras and panties from clotheslines in Cambridge. The mothers of Barrett and Waters both lost underwear to Layne. For the band's tours in the '80s, they played the experimentalvideo for the song as the stage intro.
On The Wall's "Goodbye Blue Sky," that's Waters' son Harry uttering the line, "Look mummy, there's an airplane up in the sky". He was only two years old at the time.
BONUS
Pink Floyd's Houston Appearances
September 9, 1972, Sam Houston Coliseum
April 30, 1977, Jeppesen Stadium, University of Houston
November 18, 1987, Astrodome
April 4-5, 1994, Rice Stadium (With set list)
Were any of you at these? All of them? Care to break our hearts with the awesome details?
Follow Rocks Off on Facebook and on Twitter at @HPRocksOff.(from http://blogs.houstonpress.com/rocks/2011/10/pink_floyd_facts.php)
This week's Rolling Stone cover story is on the band's monolithic 1973 LP,The Dark Side of the Moon, which was among the batch of Floyd reissues out this past month. Brian Hiatt's piece delves into the theory that the album in a sense splintered the working structure of the group for the rest of their days together. After Dark Side, they would only release four more strife-baked albums before Waters left for a solo career.
We all know the stories about original lead singer Syd Barrett, that drugged, handsome madman who was initially the beating heart of the group, but was done in by the ravages of hallucinogenics on his capabilities to function in a band that was quickly gaining steam. David Gilmour was brought on board as Barrett began slipping away mentally, and ended up outlasting even Waters.
Barrett's two solo albums The Madcap Laughs and Barrett, are cult favorites, in league with that other great, damaged '60s artist, Roky Erickson, though Erickson obviously overcame the odds and thrived in later years. Barrett passed away in 2006, but was always a looming, if absent figure, in the Floyd universe.
The band's one constant member on each album was drummer Nick Mason. Keyboardist Richard Wright passed away in 2008. Wright, Mason, and Gilmour continued to tour as Pink Floyd after Waters' exit, to chagrin of the bassist, and released two albums, 1987's A Momentary Lapse of Reason and 1994's The Division Bell, and were a major concert drawl into the '90s before parting.
There exists a few different, distinct periods in the Floyd narrative. There's the early bluesy, garage work up until Barrett's exit. The middle period before Dark Side was characterized by albums like the pastoral Meddleand Atom Heart Mother, and the sprawling Ummagumma. The last track on 1971's Meddle, "Echoes" is the perfect prequel to the vast and enthralling expanse of what would be 1973's Dark Side.
After touring Dark Side, the band went into the studio to record 1975'sWish You Were Here, and this when Hiatt's article points to the exact moment when the band's daily routine became very much a case of Waters versus the rest of the group. Many fans also echo that sentiment, articulating that Waters began a tyrannical hold on the proceedings.
Animals and The Wall were very much Waters' babies, creating the concepts and structures of both. 1983's The Final Cut, the final Floyd disc with Waters in the fold, gets dismissed by fans as a Waters solo album that happens to have Floyd playing behind him. Gilmour only sings lead on "Not Now John," with Waters handling the rest.
As for this guy here, our favorite album has to be a toss up between Dark Sideand Wish You Were Here. Our first taste of Floyd would have been seeing those freaky videos from The Wallon television, and of course the hourly classic-rock radio doses. It would take us a few years to delve into that early middle era involving Atom Heart Mother and Ummagumma to full recognize the band's freaky power.
We've seen Waters twice in our career here at Rocks Off; first time back in 2008 on his tour performing Dark Side at the Woodlands where we ate two corn dogs - no comment - and almost a year ago when he hit theToyota Center while performing The Wall. Never seen Gilmour and the rest in the flesh, and they aren't the touring kind.
We compiled our usual set of ten obscure - hopefully - facts for you this week in the confidence that a few of you Floyd fanatics will come out of the woodwork with even more.
Careful with that comment button, Eugene.
At the end of Dark Side's "Eclipse," as the final voice states that "there is no dark side of the moon really, as a matter of fact it's all dark," with your headphones on and the volume up full blast, you will hear an instrumental, Muzak-y version of The Beatles' "Ticket To Ride" in the background. It was probably coming from the main offices of Abbey Road, where Floyd was recording. We haven't heard it ourselves, though.
The title of Atom Heart Mother came from a headline found on London'sEvening Standard daily about a mother was a nuclear-powered pacemaker. Also, the name of the cow on the album cover was Lulubelle III, and she was delicious.
"Time" starts with layers of clock noises that were put together by Pink Floyd's engineer, Alan Parsons. Each clock was recorded separately at an antiques store, and Parsons wanted to use the clocks to demonstrate a new quadraphonic sound system, but ended up using them for the song. You could say that Dark Side was very much an Alan Parsons project....
The opening radio hiss and blurbs on "Wish You Were Here" were recorded off David Gilmour's car radio. Gilmour ran a lead out of Abbey Road to his car and fiddled with the radio to get the ghostly intro.
Dark Side was on the Billboard 200 chart for 741 consecutive weeks from 1973 to 1988. The album has sold an estimated 45 million copies, and most of them probably have weed dander flaked on them. It is estimated that 1 in every 12 people in the world has a copy.
The inflatable pig on the cover of theAnimals escaped its handlers during the shoot for the album cover and flew into flight lanes of Heathrow Airport, causing havoc for planes and eventually landed in a farmer's field in Kent. The inflatable pigs have made appearances at most Floyd or Waters shows for the past 35 years.
Professor Stephen Hawking made a guest appearance on The Division Bell,adding the robotic vocals on the track "Keep Talking."
The chorus on The Wall's "Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)" came from a kids chorus at a school in Islington, England, very near the studio. Made up of 23 kids between the ages of 13 to 15, the vocals were overdubbed twelve times, making it sound like there were many more kids.
Syd Barrett wrote "Arnold Layne" about a cross-dresser in his town by the same name who used to steal bras and panties from clotheslines in Cambridge. The mothers of Barrett and Waters both lost underwear to Layne. For the band's tours in the '80s, they played the experimentalvideo for the song as the stage intro.
On The Wall's "Goodbye Blue Sky," that's Waters' son Harry uttering the line, "Look mummy, there's an airplane up in the sky". He was only two years old at the time.
BONUS
Pink Floyd's Houston Appearances
September 9, 1972, Sam Houston Coliseum
April 30, 1977, Jeppesen Stadium, University of Houston
November 18, 1987, Astrodome
April 4-5, 1994, Rice Stadium (With set list)
Were any of you at these? All of them? Care to break our hearts with the awesome details?
Follow Rocks Off on Facebook and on Twitter at @HPRocksOff.(from http://blogs.houstonpress.com/rocks/2011/10/pink_floyd_facts.php)
The Pink Floyd flood begins
Coins piling up.
Sales being tallied. It's what opens the classic Pink Floyd song Money and it's what is sure to accompany the rush of passionate Floyd fans emptying their bank accounts to purchase the first round of remastered reissues of all of the iconic band's catalogue and various box sets.
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As their contemporaries issued and reissued and rereissued their older material - adding a song here, a bonus there in an attempt to make this one that much more definitive and that one obsolete - it's something the band has resisted for a great deal of time. Even their "greatest hits" album Echoes was less an opportunity to cash in on their most recognizable songs than it was about making a whole new artistic statement.
But now, the time has come, the dam has been opened and the flood of Floyd has begun.
Today, under the banner Why Pink Floyd. . .?, their longtime label EMI starts the roll out with the release of the remastered versions - CDs, LPs and digital - of their 14 studio albums, from the psych Syd Barrett-led early days of The Piper At the Gates of Dawn through their '70s heyday marked by milestone recordings such as The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall, and then to their somewhat less artistically successful post-Roger Waters era.
It's the perfect opportunity for fans new and old to pick and choose and avoid the duds - the soundtrack for the 1969 film and the aforementioned David Gilmour minus Waters albums for a start - while improving on the listening experience greatly. As mindblowing as they can be in their original form, remastered they are stunning, with everything polished up to maximum headphone capacity by longtime collaborator James Guthrie. It shows why, at their best, Pink Floyd were brilliant mental expressionists, painting sonic canvasses with traditional melody and aural exploration. For Floyd, improving the quality of the sound and form only makes its impact that much greater.
Of course, for those who want the complete historical document of the band and its career or those completists who want it all again but cleaned up, there's the Discovery box set, which collects all of those albums - the good and the not-so - in one complete set.
The sound is there as well, as are the minimum liner notes - lyrics, credits - in, for this purpose, gatefold CD cases. What makes it all the more enticing for fans, though, is the 60-page booklet that accompanies it, featuring those equally iconic images that have illustrated their career, as collected by Floyd friend and designer Storm Thorgerson.
© Copyright (c) The Victoria Times Colonist
http://www.timescolonist.com/entertainment/Pink+Floyd+flood+begins/5488297/story.html
Interstellar Overdrive Video w/ Syd Barrett - Pink Floyd
From Album: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
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 Interstellar Overdrive (Barrett, Waters, Wright, Mason) 9:41 (Instrumental) | |||||
From Album: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
|
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
Produced by Norman Smith
Released August 7, 1967 Recorded in EMI Abbey Road Studios, April 1967 Frontcover photo: Vic Singh Backcover design: Syd Barrett | ||||||||||
PINK FLOYD’S NICK MASON SAYS UPCOMING REISSUES ARE THEIR ‘LAST OPPORTUNITY TO RELEASE PHYSICAL RECORDS’
Pink Floyd drummer and resident band archivist Nick Mason has said Floyd previously had no interest in ever unleashing their outtakes, demos and other rarities on the world, but now they are gearing up for a massive reissue campaign of their entire back catalog with such goodies titled ‘Why Pink Floyd?’ What changed?
“We’ve perhaps got an appreciation now that people really are interested in this stuff,” explains Mason in a new ‘Why Pink Floyd’ promotional interview with InTheStudio.net. “I think originally there was sort of a feeling that only really, really mad people, people who lived on the moon, were really interested in all this sort of outtakes stuff.”
Mason continues, “More relevant is the fact that this is sort of the last opportunity to release physical records, that within two or three years, virtually everything will be downloaded. The thing about releasing the physical product is there’s all the artwork that goes with it, and I’d like that to be available for people who want it.”
We hope Mason is wrong about that last point — we a pretty big vinyl junkies ourselves and would hate to see everything go digital — but we will agree music is definitely going in a more digital direction. But whether or not this is the last time Floyd material is issued in a physical format, it certainly is the most expansive collections of reissues — including single-disc editions of every Pink Floyd album, as well as two-disc and box set versions of ‘Dark Side,’ ‘Wish You Were Here’ and ‘The Wall’ — that will ever be made available from the band.
www.pinkfloydlyrics.com
“We’ve perhaps got an appreciation now that people really are interested in this stuff,” explains Mason in a new ‘Why Pink Floyd’ promotional interview with InTheStudio.net. “I think originally there was sort of a feeling that only really, really mad people, people who lived on the moon, were really interested in all this sort of outtakes stuff.”
Mason continues, “More relevant is the fact that this is sort of the last opportunity to release physical records, that within two or three years, virtually everything will be downloaded. The thing about releasing the physical product is there’s all the artwork that goes with it, and I’d like that to be available for people who want it.”
We hope Mason is wrong about that last point — we a pretty big vinyl junkies ourselves and would hate to see everything go digital — but we will agree music is definitely going in a more digital direction. But whether or not this is the last time Floyd material is issued in a physical format, it certainly is the most expansive collections of reissues — including single-disc editions of every Pink Floyd album, as well as two-disc and box set versions of ‘Dark Side,’ ‘Wish You Were Here’ and ‘The Wall’ — that will ever be made available from the band.
www.pinkfloydlyrics.com
Seamus The Dog - Lyrics and Facts
- The song was written by Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright one day in 1971 when they found that Seamus could bark in tune with music. They quickly recorded a twelve-bar blues backing track for the dog to 'sing' over, and David Gilmour later overdubbed extra instrumentation as well as lead vocals.
- Pink Floyd added this novelty song to round out the first side of their new LP, and hastily composed a few lines of lyrics to enhance its brief appearance on the album. Also, some stray speech leaked into the final mix. Some say that about a minute through the recording, one of the band members can be heard saying something akin to "it's better than last time" or "very theatrical". According to Vernon Fitch's "The Pink Floyd Encyclopedia," the words are "Here is the real dog."
- Pink Floyd's Seamus Lyrics:
I was in the kitchen,
Seamus, that's the dog, was outside.
Well, I was in the kitchen,
Seamus, my old hound, was outside.
Well, the sun sinks slowly
But my old hound just sat right down and cried.
More Pink Floyd Lyrics | Meddle Lyrics | pink-floyd-lyrics.com - Subscribe to @pinkfloydlyrics on Twitter for more facts and updates on everything Pink Floyd.
- Some fans who enjoy the rest of Meddle deride "Seamus" for being an anomalous case of sloppy songwriting - and appear to have missed its humour entirely. However, the band's blues roots are rarely this exposed on official recordings, and the track provides a light-hearted acknowledgment of the genre's influence on their music.
- Film director Adrian Maben captured Pink Floyd's only live performance of "Seamus" (in a greatly altered form, excluding lyrics, changing the key from D-Major to C-Major, and retitled "Mademoiselle Nobs") in his film Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii. To re-create the song, David Gilmour played harmonica instead of singing and (unusually) Roger Waters played one of Gilmour's Stratocaster guitars.
- The band members were keen to include this track in the film, and gave Maben the task of finding a dog that could duplicate Seamus's performance when they re-made it in front his cameras at les Studios de Boulogne in the Spring of 1972. A female Afghan Hound named Nobs, which belonged to Madonna Bouglione (the daughter of circus director Joseph Bouglione), was brought to the studio and Wright gently coaxed her to provide howling accompaniment as Seamus did in the album version. There is also an audible bass guitar in this recording, likely overdubbed during mixing of the film soundtrack at another studio, but, as with many Pink Floyd songs, it is difficult to tell who is playing it.
SeamusThe story of Seamus the Dog
"Seamus" is the fifth song on Pink Floyd's 1971 album Meddle, and uses a blues chord progression. Years later, the song appeared in the film version of Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. The song is named after the dog (belonging to Humble Pie and Small Faces leader Steve Marriott) who performed howling 'vocals' on the album version of the track.
Don't miss a hilarious bit on Seamus from Uncyclopedia: http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Seamus..
Seamus was a dog whose musical career spanned from his debut solo album in 1961 to his death in 2003. He was most notable for being the unnofficial 5th member of Pink Floyd, although in recent years he has also gained notoriety for his solo works.
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