Friday is Rock'n'Roll #London Day: #PinkFloyd Special

Friday is Rock'n'Roll London Day!



The Rock'n'Roll London Walk meets at Tottenham Court Road Station every Friday at 2pm.

DC Editor Adam writes…

It's all kicking off for fans of Pink Floyd. 

Next spring the V&A is hosting Their Mortal Remains, a career-spanning exhibition of Floyd's unique musical journey. Tickets are available for pre-booking and the show opens on Saturday 13th May 2017. CLICK HERE to book.

This month's Uncut magazine has an excellent cover story on The Floyd…

… to mark the release of The Early Years 1967-72, released today (11th November 2016).

There's also a 27 disc set spanning the period 1965-72 which retails at a colossal £375.99 (Dear Santa, I have been mostly good this year…).

You can order both versions directly from the Pink Floyd website www.pinkfloyd.com.

There are always Floyd fans on the Rock'n'Roll London Walk – and I always include a nod or two to Syd Barrett, their long-gone founding songwriter on my tour.

I grabbed Uncut from the shelf as soon as I saw the cover. It represeents the Floyd period with which I am most enamoured. Piper At The Gates of Dawn is, for this Floyd fan, so much more than a curio. It often gets presented as a kind of "pre-title sequence" in the overall movie of The Floyd, and I've always been rather irked at this treatment. All the seeds of Floyd's later, wildly experimental/improvisational greatness are here – nine minutes of Interstellar Overdrive, anyone? – along with a functioning Syd.

Syd's songs here are whimsical, witty and beautifully weird. We can debate Syd's potential until the cow on the sleeve of Atom Heart Mother comes home. What's left after the speculation is two solo albums which make, for this listener, a patchy at best, to downright harrowing listening experience. My preference is for the two '67 singles Arnold Layne and See Emily Play, and the bulk (eight out of 11 tracks) of the first album. Syd in his prime? Far from it: circumstance and substances conspired to deny Syd such a heyday. But for this listener, Syd's and the Floyd's achievement is to have made an album in 1967 that gets the whole picture, the global picture of psychedelia. It's the whimsy of Sgt Pepper AND the edge of The Doors.

It features in my Rock'n'Roll London Comic Book starring Pink Floyd…

So… a great album. But also, and this is always important for me, a great STORY. The Floyd's struggle to acclimatise after Barrett's departure, a brief period with Richard Wright on lead vocals and the metamorphosis engendered by the arrival of David Gilmour make for one of the most tense and dramatic yarns in rock'n'roll. You can hear that story in the sound of the faux-trippy single It Would Be So Nice (written by Wright) and the album A Saucerful of Secrets - which has one leftover Barrett track like a spectre at the feast, Jugband Blues).

I'll be picking up the 1967-72 two disc set later this a.m. Come and have a chat with me about it on the Rock'n'Roll London Walk this afternoon at 2pm meeting at Tottenham Court Road tube. If you can't make it along today, here are my other Rock'n'Roll London dates for this month…

I'll be leading the Rock'n'Roll London Walk this month (November 2016):

Friday 11th November (today) 2pm

Friday 25th November 2pm

And the Rock'n'Roll London Pub Walk on…

Wednesday 16th November 7pm

Wednesday 23rd November 7pm

Wednesday 30th November 7pm

The walk always meets at Tottenham Court Road tube exit 1.

If you'd like to book a private Pink Floyd-Themed London Walk get in touch with the London Walks office directly by emailing HERE or calling 020 7624 3978. A taxi tour version of the Pink Floyd London Walk is also available for up to four persons.

Download a FREE six page sample of the Rock'n'Roll London Comic Book HERE.

You can buy the full 20 page version of the Rock'n'Roll London Comic Book starring Pink Floyd on my walking tours of online: DIGITAL edition here or PRINT edition here.

The Rock'n'Roll London Walk is ONLY London Walk with its own dedicated comic book! 

Written by Rock'n'Roll London guide (and Daily Constitutional editor Adam) it's available in both print & digital formats at the London Bookstore online: londonbookstore.myshopify.com and on The Rock'n'Roll London Walk on Fridays!  

A London Walk costs £10 – £8 concession. To join a London Walk, simply meet your guide at the designated tube station at the appointed time. Details of all London Walks can be found at www.walks.com.