Pink Floyd
graham.rickson
Britten: Cello Symphony, Cello Sonata and Cello Suites Alban Gerhardt, Steven Osborne, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Andrew Manze (Hyperion)This is a brilliant anthology, wonderfully performed and beautifully recorded. Britten’s cello music was written for Mstislav Rostropovich, whom the composer had met in 1960 at the UK premiere of Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto no 1. The Sonata was completed shortly afterwards. The reading by Alban Gerhardt and Steven Osborne is refreshingly extrovert, and Britten’s tricksy piano writing has enormous impact. Gerhardt’s boldness makes the work feel Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Dark Side of the Moon and Frankie Howerd’s Roman-era television farce Up Pompeii! aren’t as unlikely bedfellows as it first seems. The link comes from Clare Torry, whose voice opened the show each week. She also provided the unrestrained vocal on The Dark Side of the Moon’s Rick Wright-penned “The Great Gig in the Sky.”As one of the most in-demand British session singers from 1970 to her retirement in 1996, Clare sang on ads for British Caledonian airlines and Glenrick pilchards. She appeared on French iconoclast Serge Gainsbourg’s Rock Around the Bunker album and sang the gentle Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's a lot about stoner culture that smacks of earnestness, and The Dark Side of the Moon has been at the heart of a good deal of that. The number of long, dreary, late-night conversations that must have taken place over “doobs” and “munchies” about its themes of life, death, madness, desperation and all the rest doesn't even bear thinking about.But there is a whole other side to the album that was about – yes, really – fun, and also sensual pleasure; as a teenager in the late Eighties/early Nineties, for me DSotM was about giggles and immersion, about getting a stoned friend to drift off Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
There are numerous tribute versions of The Dark Side of the Moon, by everybody from jazzers to electronica merchants, but the Amazon Surf version must be the most esoteric. Amazon Surf music is one of the more curious music phenomenona I've stumbled on. You can get versions of it in Peru (check Los Chinches, the London-based group I played on this week's theartsdesk Radio Show); but a centre for the music is in the state of Para in the Brazilian North of the Amazon. On several full moons a year, you get the longest surfable wave in the world, which is called the Pororoco. Intrepid Read more ...
mark.hudson
In March 1973, John Lennon was 33. Elvis was 38. There was barely a musician, in the sense we understand it, over 40. No one with a mortgage – or hardly anyone – was into rock’n’roll. The Dark Side of the Moon changed all that. It made rock middle-aged. Not because of its creators’ ages – the members of Pink Floyd were still, just, in their twenties – but because the success of its easy listening, suburban philosophising announced that the Babyboomer Generation had reached the pipe-and-slippers phase.Us-us-us and them...I remember going round to a friend’s after school to hear the long- Read more ...
james.woodall
In 1973 certain world events carved themselves, a bit like the faces on Mount Rushmore, deep into the landscape of the late 20th century. No sooner had Richard Nixon begun to end the Vietnam War than Watergate broke. In the autumn Allende was overthrown by Pinochet in Chile; Egypt and Syria’s attack on Israel ignited the Yom Kippur war. A global oil crisis was to leave western economies strapped.In Britain industrial unrest forced a tottering Heath government towards the Three Day Week. The IRA began bombing London. It wasn’t, really, a happy epoch; but young, mainly male, slightly self- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We now know that David Cameron's favourite album is Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, although there is a theory that he only picked it to avoid having to give the true answer, which is The Queen is Dead by The Smiths. Clearly this would have been a tactless selection in Diamond Jubilee year.But perhaps the smarter choice would have been 1975's Wish You Were Here, the follow-up to the monstrously successful but patchy Dark Side..., and the favourite Floyd album of band members David Gilmour and the late Rick Wright. Once again, Wish... was the product of a band caught in the steely grip of Read more ...