Friday is Rock'n'Roll London Day!
The Rock'n'Roll London Walk meets at Tottenham Court Road Station every Friday at 2pm.
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.
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…
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…).
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.
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!










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