VIDEOS: Watch David Gilmour Play the Songs of Syd Barrett with the Help of David Bowie and Richard Wright

by Josh Jones, Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/2017/10/watch-david-gilmour-play-the-songs-of-syd-barrett-with-the-help-of-david-bowie-richard-wright.html

Though he eventually disappeared from the public eye, Syd Barrett did not fade into obscurity all at once after his "erratic behavior," as Andy Kahn writes at JamBase, "led to his leaving" Pink Floyd in 1968. The founding singer/songwriter/guitarist went on in the following few years to write, record, and even sporadically perform new solo material, appearing on John Peel’s BBC show in 1970 and giving a long Rolling Stone interview the following year. He even started, briefly, a new band in 1972 and worked on new recordings in the studio until 1974.

Barrett released two solo albums, The Madcap Laughs and Barrett, in 1970. Like the solo work of Roky Erickson and Skip Spence—two other tragic psychedelic-era geniuses with mental health struggles—Barrett’s later compositions are frustratingly rough-cut gems: quirky, sinister, meandering folk-psych adventures that provide an alternate look into what Pink Floyd might have sounded like if their original intentions of keeping him on as a non-performing songwriter had worked out.

Assisting him during his studio sessions were former bandmates Roger Waters, Richard Wright, and David Gilmour. The band still admired his singular talent, but they found working, and even speaking, with him difficult in the extreme. As Gilmour has described those years in interviews, they carried a considerable amount of guilt over Barrett’s ouster. In addition to the heartbreaking tribute “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” Gilmour has often performed Syd’s solo songs onstage in affecting, often solo acoustic, renditions that became all the more poignant after Barrett’s death in 2006.

In the videos at the top, you can see Gilmour play two songs from Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs—“Terrapin” and “Dark Globe”—and further up, see him play “Dominoes” from Barrett, with Richard Wright on Keyboards. Gilmour has also revisited onstage Pink Floyd’s earliest, Barrett-fronted, days. Just above, we have the rare treat of seeing him play the band’s first single, “Arnold Layne,” with special guest David Bowie on lead vocals. And below, see Gilmour and Wright play a version of the early Floyd classic “Astronomy Domine,” live at Abbey Road studios.

It was, sadly, at Abbey Road where the band last saw Barrett, when he entered the studio in 1975 during the final mixes of Wish You Were Here. Overweight and with shaved head and eyebrows, Barrett was at first unrecognizable. After this last public appearance, he felt the need, as Waters put it, to “withdraw completely” from “modern life.” But the tragic final months with Pink Floyd and few sightings afterward should hardly be the way we remember Syd Barrett. He may have lost the ability to communicate with his former friends and bandmates, but for a time he continued to speak in hauntingly strange, thoroughly original songs.

This collection of videos comes to us via JamBase.

VIDEOS: Psychedelic Scenes of Pink Floyd’s Early Days with Syd Barrett, 1967

by Mike Springer, Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/psychedelic-scenes-of-pink-floyds-early-days-with-syd-barrett-1967.html

Roger Waters of Pink Floyd turns 70 years old today. Waters was the principal songwriter and dominant creative force during the band's famous 1970s period, when it released a string of popular and influential concept albums such as Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall. But today we thought it would be interesting to take you all the way back to 1967, when Waters was 23 years old and the band was led by his childhood friend Syd Barrett.

The video above is from a May 14, 1967 broadcast of the BBC program The Look of the Week. Pink Floyd hadn't released an album yet. Only two nights earlier the band had staged its attention-getting "Games for May" concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. In the TV broadcast, Pink Floyd plays its early favorite "Astronomy Domine" before Waters and Barrett sit down for a rather tense interview with the classically trained musician and critic Hans Keller. It's amusing to watch Keller's face as he expresses his extreme irritation at the band's loud, strange music. "My verdict is that its a little bit of a regression to childhood," he says with a grimace. "But after all, why not?"

Waters and Barrett manage to hold their own during the interview. Barrett comes across as lucid and well-spoken, despite the fact that his heavy LSD use and mental instability would soon make him unable to function within the band. By December of 1967, Pink Floyd would add guitarist David Gilmour to the lineup to compensate for Barrett's erratic behavior. By March of 1968 -- only 10 months after the BBC broadcast -- Barrett would quit the group.

We'll close with an even earlier video of Pink Floyd onstage. Filmed on January 27, 1967 at the legendary UFO club in London, the clip is from the February 7, 1967 Granada TV documentary So Far Out It's Straight Down. It shows the band playing another major song from its psychedelic era, "Interstellar Overdrive."

VIDEOS: Pink Floyd Performs on US Television for the First Time: American Bandstand, 1967

by Josh Jones, Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/2016/04/pink-floyd-performs-on-us-television-for-the-first-time-american-bandstand-1967.html


Pink Floyd - Apples And Oranges - 1967 American... by pentathlonstart

You may have noticed we’ve been in the midst of a mini-sixties revival for the past decade or so - what with the retro soul of Alabama Shakes or the late Amy Winehouse, the garage rock of Ty Segall, and the California psych of Australia’s Tame Impala.

That’s to name but just a few students of sixties’ sounds; many hundreds more populate events like the Psych Fests of Austin and Liverpool. And before these bands, late eighties/early nineties brought us a British re-invasion of sixties garage rock and pop like the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Chameleons, the Stone Roses, Oasis, and many other jangly, fuzzy, dreamy bands.

All of that is to say it’s nearly impossible to hear anything sixties rock with fresh ears. Not only has the incessant nostalgia dimmed our senses, but we’ve seen the ideas of the sixties evolve into myriad subcultures variously indebted to the decade, but no longer even in need of direct reference.

What would it mean, however, to hear the far-out sounds of a band like Pink Floyd for the first time, a band who may at times sound dated now, but much of whose more obscure catalog remains shocking. And it’s easy to forget that when Pink Floyd - or “The Pink Floyd” as they tended to be called - got their start with original singer and songwriter Syd Barrett, they made a much different sound than those we’re familiar with from The Wall or Dark Side of the Moon.

If you haven’t heard the sound of the band circa 1967, when they recorded their first album Piper at the Gates of Dawn, then you may nod along with Dick Clark’s ambivalent introduction of them to U.S. audiences in the ’67 American Bandstand appearance above - their first visit to the States and first time of TV.

They do indeed make “very interesting sounds”: specifically, “Apples and Oranges,” the third single and the final song Barrett wrote for the band before he suffered a psychotic break onstage and was replaced by David Gilmour. There isn’t much in the way of performance (but stick around for the interviews around 3:25).

As pretty much everyone did at the time, Barrett, Roger Waters, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright mime to a pre-recorded track. And Barrett looks particularly out of it. He was close by this point to the crippling mental health crisis that would eventually end his career.

But Syd Barrett did not disappear from music right away. The unreleased “Scream Thy Last Scream,” slated to be the next single released after Piper at the Gates of Dawn, gave much indication of the musical direction he took in two 1970 solo albums, The Madcap Laughs and Barrett.

Like later Barrett, early Pink Floyd is not music for everyone. Instead of the familiar stomping funk of “The Wall” or the soaring blues of “Comfortably Numb,” the songs meander, twist, turn, and wobble, often indicating the state of Barrett’s troubled soul, but just as often showcasing his brilliant compositional mind. Barrett is gone, as is keyboardist Richard Wright, and Pink Floyd is no more. But their legacy is secure. And we still have mad geniuses like Austin psych legend Roky Erickson to kick around, as well as all the many thousands of musicians he and Barrett inspired. 

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

VIDEO: Syd Barrett - Under Review, a Full Documentary about Pink Floyd’s Brilliant and Troubled Founder

by Mike Springer, Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/syd-barrett.html


Syd Barrett was rock and roll’s greatest enigma. Genius, madman, recluse - he was for a short time the brightest star of London’s late-60s psychedelic scene, only to burn out and disappear.

Barrett was an art school student in London when he helped found Pink Floyd in 1965. He gave the band its name, wrote most of its songs and served as guitarist and singer. He led the band to fame in London’s underground subculture.

By 1967 Barrett was taking large quantities of LSD and becoming increasingly unstable. He had always been eccentric, but it soon became clear he was suffering from a serious mental illness.

Onstage he was increasingly catatonic, strumming a single string for an entire show or not playing at all. By the spring of 1968 the rest of Pink Floyd had no choice but to replace Barrett.

They didn’t push him out of the band so much as they simply stopped picking him up and carting him around. He managed to piece together a couple of solo albums before retreating into seclusion, where he remained for the rest of his life.

The documentary Syd Barrett: Under Review (above) was released in early 2006, only a few months before Barrett’s death at the age of 60. The film is billed as “An Independent Critical Analysis.”

As such, it deals less with the more lurid aspects of Barrett’s life and focuses instead on his musical legacy.

The hour-long film rests heavily on interviews with leading British music journalists. It also includes excerpts from concerts, TV appearances and home movies.

For more on Barrett, including filmed performances of “Interstellar Overdrive” and “Astronomy Domine,” see our post, “Psychedelic Scenes of Pink Floyd’s Early Days with Syd Barrett, 1967.”

You can purchase Syd Barrett: Under Review on DVD here.

VIDEO: Psychedelic Scenes of Pink Floyd’s Early Days with Syd Barrett, 1967

by Mike Springer, Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/psychedelic-scenes-of-pink-floyds-early-days-with-syd-barrett-1967.html


Roger Waters of Pink Floyd turns 70 years old today.

Waters was the principal songwriter and dominant creative force during the band’s famous 1970s period, when it released a string of popular and influential concept albums such as Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall.

But today we thought it would be interesting to take you all the way back to 1967, when Waters was 23 years old and the band was led by his childhood friend Syd Barrett.

The video above is from a May 14, 1967 broadcast of the BBC program The Look of the Week.

Pink Floyd hadn’t released an album yet. Only two nights earlier the band had staged its attention-getting “Games for May” concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

In the TV broadcast, Pink Floyd plays its early favorite “Astronomy Domine” before Waters and Barrett sit down for a rather tense interview with the classically trained musician and critic Hans Keller.

It’s amusing to watch Keller’s face as he expresses his extreme irritation at the band’s loud, strange music. “My verdict is that its a little bit of a regression to childhood,” he says with a grimace. “But after all, why not?”

Waters and Barrett manage to hold their own during the interview. Barrett comes across as lucid and well-spoken, despite the fact that his heavy LSD use and mental instability would soon make him unable to function within the band.

By December of 1967, Pink Floyd would add guitarist David Gilmour to the lineup to compensate for Barrett’s erratic behavior. By March of 1968 - only 10 months after the BBC broadcast - Barrett would quit the group.

We’ll close with an even earlier video of Pink Floyd performing at the legendary UFO club in London.

Filmed on January 27, 1967, the clip is from the February 7, 1967 Granada TV documentary on British youth culture, So Far Out It’s Straight Down. Pink Floyd plays another major song from it’s psychedelic era, “Interstellar Overdrive.”

VIDEO: Watch Pink Floyd Play Live in the Ruins of Pompeii (1972)

by Colin Marshall, Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/2012/04/pink_floyd_live_in_pompeii.html


Tourism and historical research aside, most ruins aren’t particularly useful, least of all for their original purposes.

Yet Pink Floyd fans know of one instance when a ruin made a comeback, if a brief and specialized one, that could make you forget all about the ash and pumice that buried it nearly 2000 years before.

In October 1971, the band set up their gear in the middle of the Ampitheatre of Pompeii and blasted three songs out into the antiquity surrounding them: “Echoes,” “A Saucerful of Secrets,” and “One of These Days.”

They played not to a live audience, but to an array of studio-quality recording equipment designed to faithfully capture every layer of their sound for theatrical reproduction.

You can see and hear all the then-highest-of-the-high-tech musical equipment used to produce then-thoroughly modern rock music in this nearly alien-looking geometric setting of time-worn stone and encroaching grass in Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, now free to watch on YouTube.

Pink Floyd’s chosen venue, the oldest standing Roman ampitheatre of them all, suits their project sonically as well as aesthetically. Had the band invited an audience, the old place probably could, with a touch of restoration, have handled it with aplomb.

An article from CSO Security and Risk cites its bathroom design and placement, its queue separation, its anxiety-reducing openness, its simple stairway scheme, its lack of corners and bottleneck points, and the wide road leading to it as qualities from which today’s stadium designers can still learn.

Just last May, the surviving members of Pink Floyd happened to get back together on stage; should they launch a reunion tour, they might consider starting at the ampitheatre they introduced to so many young fans before history teachers could.

You’ll find embedded above the 2003 director’s cut of Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, the latest of several versions of the film.

It includes not just the band’s Pompeii performance, but additional songs shot in Paris, recording and interviewing sessions at Abbey Road, and a number of clips of exploding volcanoes and Earth from space.

The non-concert material further explores themes naturally raised by placing music from 1971 into a venue from 70 BC.

Considering any creation’s place in history and the danger of fetishizing the man-made, the band members talk about how to avoid becoming “slaves to all our equipment,” how not to one day find themselves “a relic of the past,” and whether or not rock would survive a vast societal collapse.

Some of this feels like a more intelligent version of the rock-documentary sensibility that This is Spinal Tap would so thoroughly lambast almost a decade later.

We all had a good laugh when that film’s hapless fictional rock group ordered up an all-too-miniature replica of Stonehenge for their live show. You may also chuckle at the grandness of Pink Floyd’s use of the Ampitheatre of Pompeii, but it also presents you with questions worth thinking about.

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Pink Floyd Channel Extends Reach

by abel, Psychedelic Sight: http://psychedelicsight.com/pink-floyd-sat-radio/

Pink Floyd’s great gig in the sky is getting even better.

Satellite radio service SiriusXM announced that the Pink Floyd Channel has won two regular slots on Deep Tracks, beginning now.

Meanwhile, owners of some new satellite radio units may join online subscribers in getting their Pink Floyd fix 24/7.

Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters said this “great news as it means we’ll all be able to get (the channel) when we’re stuck in traffic.” The singer-bassist said the psychedelic grooves might even cut down on “road rage.”

The Pink Floyd Channel hasn’t been available to regular subscribers of satellite radio since its limited run last May.

While Floyd freaks were hoping the channel would find a full-time slot - as with the mainstream Grateful Dead, Elvis and Jimmy Buffett channels - it was not to be. But the Pink Floyd channel stayed alive on SiriusXM Internet Radio (channel 711) and now it’s expanding somewhat.

Deep Tracks channel 27 - the closest thing SiriusXM has to a psychedelic music channel - will simulcast the Pink Floyd Channel Sundays from 6 p.m. to midnight ET. And there’s a new daily fix on Deep Tracks: Monday through Friday from midnight to 1 a.m. ET.

Owners of the Lynx and Edge satellite radio receivers can access the 24/7 Floyd stream on channel 311. It’ll also be available “in select vehicles” - meaning some new models with expanded channel lineups.

Meanwhile, the Pink Floyd Channel continues full-time broadcasting via the web. “We’ve been happy there online,” Waters said.

The expanded SiriusXM online service - whose goodies include archives of programs by Bob Dylan (Channel 710) and Tom Petty (Channel 712) - costs regular subscribers a couple of bucks. That streaming service also is available via the SiriusXM Radio App for mobile devices.

The Pink Floyd stream started as a limited-run special spanning the Memorial Day weekend of 2012. It was extended into midsummer due to “popular demand” and then found its slot online.

Longtime free-form radio personality Jim Ladd was instrumental in launching the Pink Floyd Channel and is its curator. Pink Floyd recently teamed with Spotify to stream its catalog. Surviving members of the band also took on Pandora over royalty payments.

"We’ve been happy there online. However, now the channel is being expanded, which is great news as it means we’ll all be able to get it when we’re stuck in traffic,” said Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters. “Reaching out in drive time, love it! It could even conceivably have an impact on road rage.”

More Pink Floyd content:

• Pink Floyd’s “Wish” comes true on SACD
• Pink Floyd: concert set lists
• “Atom Heart Mother”: Top psychedelic song No. 50
• Pink Floyd performance from 1967 unearthed

VIDEO: Pink Floyd: Atom Heart Mother (Live in Saint Tropez 1970)

by Daniela Aurora

David Gilmour: vocals, guitar
"Mick" Mason: drums, percussion
Roger Waters: vocals, bass
Richard Wright: organ, piano

VIDEO: Pink Floyd with Syd Barrett - London 66 - 67

by Pabloistify

VIDEO: Learning To Fly by Pink Floyd

Hi readers,

This is not from the 1960s but it is a beautiful classic!


Uploaded to YouTube by MattKoz10

VIDEO: Pink Floyd - The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) [Full Album]

Hi everyone,

Well ... I love Pink Floyd and, although it's not the 1960s, I'm uploading it to the site.

Psychedelic? I think so, but let's have a discussion about it? What do you think?

 

Uploaded by 8IdontGiveaFuck7

Pink Floyd - The Dark Side of the Moon [Full Album] - 1973 (EMI)

Track 1 (Speak to Me): 0:00
Track 2 (Breathe): 1:08
Track 3 (On the Run): 3:57
Track 4 (Time): 7:49
Track 5 (The Great Gig in the Sky): 14:39
Track 6 (Money): 19:23
Track 7 (Us and Them): 25:46
Track 8 (Any Colour You Like): 33:36
Track 9 (Brain Damage): 37:02
Track 10 (Eclipse): 40:49

VIDEOS: Pink Floyd With Syd Barrett - Interstellar Overdrive - London, 1966, Parts 1 and 2

Hi everyone,

Here is a rare treat - early Pink Floyd with Syd Barrett from 1966. This is really early psychedelic Floyd. Some great authentic footage as well. Enjoy!

Part 1

Part 2