Category: Pink Floyd

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Review of the Year – 2024 – Prog Rock

2024 was a stunning year for Prog Rock new and old

The Cover of Living and Alive by Beatrix Players
The Cover of  Living & Alive by Beatrix Players

The Return of Beatrix Players

Beatrix Players, led by Ms Amy Birks, made a welcome return to the progressive rock scene in late 2023 with the release of their album Living and Alive. In 2024, they brought the complete album to Manchester’s Band on the Wall and then to a triumphant home gig in the village of Barlaston, near Stoke-on-Trent. Birks was heavily pregnant and jokingly complained of ‘baby brain’; she has since given birth to a baby daughter. In the meantime, Birks and her band were superb live. Birks was a charismatic leader, her wonderfully expressive voice ranging from a warm, low mezzo to a high soprano, sometimes urgent in her delivery and at other times quietly intimate – often in the same song. She was a powerful stage presence, drawing the audience in, as their enthusiastic response showed. 

Myrkur - image by Gobinder Jhitta
Amalie Bruun (Myrkur)

Myrkur – Danish Black Metal and Scandinavian folk music

The Danish composer, vocalist, and classically trained multi-instrumentalist Amalie Bruun released her debut album under her own name in 2006. In 2011, she formed the indie pop duo Ex Cops with Brian Harding. The band split in 2014, and she started releasing music under the name Myrkur, Icelandic for darkness. In late 2023, she released Spine, which combines many of the styles of previous albums into a sophisticated whole, graced by her remarkably versatile voice. The album was partly based on her experience of being pregnant with her son Otto, who was born in 2019.

But the song My Blood is Gold, reviewed here in the ongoing Off the Beaten Track series, is a product of another significant life event: the death of her beloved father, Michael Bruun, in 2021. This profoundly moving track perfectly describes Bruun’s despair at her father’s death and her resolve for his memory to live on through her music.

Bruun brought her music to London in April 2024, demonstrating her versatility as a singer and songwriter in an eclectic set. Over the course of four albums and various EPs and singles, she has combined black metal with Scandinavian folk music, sometimes on the same album. Her latest album, Spine, her most eclectic yet, formed the bulk of the setlist, including a run of six songs at the start of the show. Bruun was joined on stage by Swedish folk singer Jonathan Hultén, the support act, in a gorgeous version of House Carpenter, a traditional Nordic folk song, attracting the most excited applause of the evening.

The front cover of SIRIN by Marjana Semkina
Marjana Semkina on the cover of her second solo album, SIRIN

Marjana Semkina and iamthemorning – a difficult but artistically successful year

Marjana Semkina is a member of the prog rock group iamthemorning with her Russian-born compatriot, the pianist Gleb Kolyadin, both of whom are now resident in the UK. The duo have released several records, the most recent being The Bell (2019) and the EP Counting The Ghosts (2020).

Semkina has recently pursued a parallel solo career, releasing her first solo LP, Sleepwalking, in 2020 and her EP, Disillusioned, in 2021. In 2024 she sang on the Moonflower EP with Zora Cock of Blackbriar, and released SIRIN, her second solo album. Semkina created this album without the support of a record label, raising tens of thousands of pounds for the project via crowd funding. She is an exceptional talent, as a singer and a songwriter, and a passionate promoter of her poetic and profound vision of the world through her music.

Semkina had a challenging year. Her bandmate Kolyadin was arrested and imprisoned in Thailand while on tour as a session musician with the Russian dissident rock band Bi-2. He faced deportation to Russia, where the band could have been persecuted for anti-war sentiments. Semkina highlighted the story via social media and an online petition.

Kolyadin was released after a week in prison and returned to England via Israel. A few days after his release, the duo performed an emotional comeback show at Piano Smithfield in London. Later in the year, the duo were joined by a full band to perform iamthemorning songs at St. Matthias Church in Stoke Newington, London. Semkina began with an evocative selection of her solo material, and Kolyadin demonstrated his supreme skill as an improviser in a solo piano set before the iamthemorning band played a superb band set.

The Cover of Harmonic Divergence by Steven Wilson

An Overview of Steven Wilson’s Year

While fans of Steven Wilson eagerly await his new album The Overview due in March, in 2024 he released a Record Store Day album Harmonic Divergence based on his 2023 album The Harmony Codex. Producer Ewan Pearson also remixed ‘Inclination’ from that album. Alexis Petridis of The Guardian wrote, ‘Ewan Pearson sprinkles sunlit Balearic euphoria’, and Wilson described the remix as ‘a hypnotic cosmic disco odyssey.’

The year also saw the re-release of Storm Corrosion, the collaboration between Wilson and Mikael Åkerfeldt of Swedish progressive metal band Opeth, in a new Dolby Atmos remix. Wilson has been making surround mixes of his own and other bands’ albums for so long now that he has been asked to do a surround sound mix of King Crimson’s Red for the second time after he did his first surround mix of the album in 2009. He decided to teach himself the art of surround sound mixing after Elliot Scheiner created 5.1 mixes of the Porcupine Tree albums In Absentia and Deadwing.

As Mikael Åkerfeldt admitted, Storm Corrosion isn’t an easy listen. However, it is certainly not as challenging to listen to as the albums Wilson has produced for his Bass Communion project, such as Ghosts on Magnetic Tape. Both albums take a while to give up their secrets and bring joy to the listener. In the Dolby Atmos mix of Storm Corrosion, the opening track makes the most startling use of the new technology. On other tracks, the effect is more muted, but when surround sound is used, it’s more effective as it is used sparingly.

Finally, in 2024, Wilson brought festive greetings to his fans with a physical release of his 2023 Christmas song, December Skies, complete with two Wilson-themed Christmas cards. The year also marked the fifth anniversary of the release of love you to bits, Wilson’s album with his no-man bandmate Tim Bowness, a melancholy disco masterpiece.                                        

Cover of Perpetual Motions by Gavin Harrison and Antoine Fafard
Perpetual Motions by Gavin Harrison and Antoine Fafard

Perpetual Change with Gavin Harrison and Antoine Fafard

Gavin Harrison, the drummer in Steven Wilson’s band Porcupine Tree, released Perpetual Motions, his second album with bass player Antoine Fafard, a collection of inventive musical explorations and collaborations from the virtuosic duo and several friends. The album’s title describes the perpetual change of musical arrangement from one of Fafard’s compositions to the next, the only constant being the playing of Fafard and Harrison on every piece. Remarkably, Fafard presented Harrison with complete recordings to add drums and percussion later; Harrison’s playing perfectly matches the pieces so it’s impossible to tell that his recordings were done separately. 

Malcolm Galloway and Mark Gatland
Malcolm Galloway and Mark Gatland of Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate

Malcolm Galloway had a more than Adequate Year

Malcolm Galloway of Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate provided deep insights into his health condition and his writing process in a fascinating two-part interview: Part One and Part Two are here. Galloway and his bandmate Mark Gatland have a new album out in March, The Uncertainty Principle. In the meantime, One Word That Means The World (Arkhipov), one of the singles from the album, was released in 2024. It’s a compelling snapshot of a moral dilemma in which one man’s brave decision probably averted World War III. Hats Off shared the bill in Camden, London with a new discovery for me, the band EBB, who have a wonderful stage presence.

Prog the Forest at the Fiddler’s Elbow

Malcolm Galloway and Mark Gatland, with the promoter London Prog Gigs, hosted a charity prog festival, Prog the Forest, at the Fiddler’s Elbow in Camden. All performers gave their services for free to support the rainforest and wildlife conservation charity, World Land Trust, which ‘protects the world’s most biologically significant and threatened habitats.’ This was the sixth year of Prog the Forest and the most successful to date, raising £2750 to protect nearly 26 acres of rainforest and other threatened habitats.

The eclectic line-up was made up of: Spriggan Mist, a ‘pagan progressive rock band’; singer-songwriter Leoni Jane Kennedy, who was hand-picked by members of Queen for the Freddie Mercury Scholarship and plays acoustic Rush covers as well as her own songs; The Mighty Handful who include a ‘former music director of Strictly; Mountainscape who play instrumental post-metal; Theo Travis of Soft Machine, who has played saxophone and flute with numerous jazz and prog bands; Tim Bowness and Butterfly Mind; and Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate.

Nick Mason's Saucerful of Secrets at Manchester Apollo
Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets

Prog History Brought to Life

The late 1960s to the mid-1970s were arguably the golden era of Prog Rock, particularly in the UK, but as can be seen from the reviews above, the genre continues to thrive, with superb new music being produced both on record and live.

New life has also been breathed into prog rock classics, with the return of Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets with live interpretations of early Pink Floyd songs. Robin A Smith continued to tour Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells – the 50th anniversary, with a stunning new arrangement of the classic album; 2024 was also the 50th anniversary of the release of Peter Hammill’s solo album The Silent Corner and the Empty Stage, from which the epic track ‘A Louse is not a Home‘ is taken.

Special Thanks

With thanks to Jerry Ewing and Prog magazine for keeping the prog flag flying, and to Chris Parkins of London Prog Gigs for his tireless contribution to the live scene in London.

For an overview of the year in classical music in 2024, click here.

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Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis) – Documentary Review

When art briefly triumphed over commerce in album cover design

****

The writer Ian MacDonald described the Beatles song Revolution 9 as ‘the world’s most widely distributed avant-garde artefact.’ The collage of sound, influenced more by German experimental composer Karlheinz Stockhausen than by Chuck Berry, sneaked into many homes under the anonymous white cover of The Beatles’ White Album in 1968. Another piece of contemporary abstract art sneaked into countless homes in 1973 and has continued to do so ever since; the cover of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. It was designed by the company Hipgnosis, founded in the late 1960s by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell. The image of light refracted through a prism has become one of the most recognisable designs of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries, not least because the album has sold tens of millions of copies across the world. As Liam Gallagher points out in this film, this was a way of bringing art to the masses at a time when art in rock music was more important than commerce.

Hipgnosis is a play on the words ‘hip’ (meaning ‘cool’ in 60s hip parlance) and ‘gnosis’ meaning mystic knowledge. There is some disagreement amongst the contributors to this fascinating documentary as to who came up with the name, but it seems to have come from graffiti written by Pink Floyd’s early singer and guitarist, Syd Barrett. Thorgerson and Powell grew up in Cambridge with members of Pink Floyd, before moving to London and dropping some ‘tabs of acid’ which unlocked their creative juices in the new partnership. All three surviving members of Pink Floyd are interviewed in the film, as are Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney, Peter Gabriel and Graham Gouldman of 10cc. This satisfyingly complete roster of rock royalty is joined by Powell himself who provides an insightful running commentary (Thorgerson died in 2013).

The film’s director Anton Corbijn, perhaps best known for his 2007 Joy Division biopic Control, films the interviews recorded for this documentary in stark black and white. This means that they match the extensive black and white photographic and movie archive footage of Hipgnosis at work which is one of the highlights of the film. The narrative is simple but effective, mostly consisting of an analysis of many of the covers that Hipgnosis designed. The covers themselves bring a particular joy, shown in glorious detail on the big screen. They were from the days before digital manipulation meant that almost any image could be created on a computer, and artificial intelligence could design limitless new ones. In the glory days of Hipgnosis, if you needed an image of a sheep sitting on a psychiatrist’s couch on a beach in Hawaii, you had to fly to Hawaii. And get the couch specially made. And borrow the only sheep in the area specially for the shoot. And sedate the sheep… All for a tiny image that was much smaller than the lettering on the cover of 10cc’s 1980 album Look Hear? Sometimes, it could be argued that all the effort wasn’t worth it, as in the case of Wings Greatest which does look as if it has been photoshopped rather than created half way up a mountain.

The cover of 10cc’s album Look Hear? Look carefully and you can see the sheep

For the music fan, part of the fun of this film lies in the tiny details; being able to guess which classic cover is coming up next by listening closely to the music which introduces it. And although many of the stories will be well known to fans of the bands, there are small but exciting revelations; we hear that Syd Barrett went to the offices of Hipgnosis before he went to the studio to see Pink Floyd recording Wish You Here when – tragically – the other members of the band didn’t recognise him at first. Another enlightening detail is not just hearing the often-told story of the flying pig escaping its moorings during the photo shoot for Pink Floyd’s Animals, but seeing it happen on archive film.

Some of the work of Hipgnosis was critical of the music business, perhaps most famously illustrated in the photograph on the cover of Wish You Were Here of a man who is being ‘burned’ by the record company executive who is shaking hands with him. But Hipgnosis became part of the music industry and its excesses, charging tens of thousands of dollars for an album cover, travelling across the world on photo shoots, touring with bands and flying to America by Concorde. Ultimately however, whilst spending so much record company money, Powell and Thorgerson created a body of work that transcended commerce and became art. The last word of the film is left to Noel Gallagher. Having celebrated the work of Hipgnosis throughout the documentary, he is asked why he never used them to design one of his own album covers. He wryly admits that he couldn’t afford them.

Reference: Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties by Ian McDonald (Fourth Estate 1994)

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Animals by Pink Floyd (2018 Surround Sound Remix) – Album Review

Cover of Animals 2018 Remix by Pink Floyd

****

New 5.1 mix places the listener in the middle of a dystopian farmyard.

Pink Floyd recorded Animals in 1976 and it was released early the following year. It sits uncomfortably in the band’s catalogue, preceded by the pristine, aching absences of Wish You Were Here and followed by the sprawling psychodrama of The Wall. The production is very different from other classic Pink Floyd albums recorded in the 1970s. The Dark Side of the Moon is warm, rich, multi-layered. Wish You Here is clean, sparse and still sounds contemporary. The Wall sounds luxuriant and epic, matching the album’s vast ambition and narrative sweep. In contrast, Animals is brutal and – by Pink Floyd’s standards – unvarnished.

So why is Animals, sonically so different from its peers? The band’s drummer Nick Mason, in his witty and revealing memoir Inside Out provides some clues. The band had just built its own studios at Britannia Row in North London. The walls were covered in lignacite, a breeze-block like material which efficiently absorbed sound but made the studio look, in Roger Waters’ words, like a ‘prison’. Mason says the studio, with its cramped control room had, ‘the grim and claustrophobic qualities of a nuclear bunker – although obviously much more stressful…’

The band had also abandoned the luxury of using a tape operator/expert engineer, hoping to bring a new immediacy to the recording process. Incidentally, when Mason and Waters engineered the recording of a guitar solo by David Gilmour they managed to erase it. The austere approach and atmosphere created, in Mason’s words, ‘a workman-like mood’ in the studio.

The simplicity of the mix was perhaps also influenced by external factors. Punk rock had launched a vicious but perhaps necessary assault on the excesses of prog rock. Pink Floyd, darlings of counter-culture in the 1960s were now seen as irrelevant dinosaurs. Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols famously sported a Pink Floyd tee-shirt with the words ‘I hate ‘ scrawled with apparent venom above the band’s name (although he later admitted that this was more a piece of theatre than a statement of fact.) Pink Floyd’s response – perhaps unconscious – was to create an album that is as dark and cynical as anything that punk produced. Adopting the anthropomorphic satire of George Orwell’s 1945 novella Animal Farm, the album divides humankind into dogs, pigs and sheep. While Johnny Rotten claimed to be an anarchist, Waters created a dystopian view of society that was equally bleak. And while Rotten sang that the ‘The fascist regime…made [the Queen] a moron’, Waters addressed moral arbiter Mary Whitehouse as a ‘charade’ and a ‘house proud town mouse.’

It is perhaps strange that Animals hasn’t been released in a surround sound mix until now. Pink Floyd pioneered the use of surround sound in a live setting – according to Far Out magazine the world’s first ever surround sound concert was performed by the band in London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in May 1967. (The band had a quadraphonic sound system which used the wonderfully-named Azimuth Co-ordinator, a kind of joystick, to send the sound flying around the audience’s heads). Eventually in 2018 Waters announced a surround sound mix of the album, which was further delayed until 2022 due to a dispute about the liner notes. Ironically, the 16-page booklet that comes with the DVD-audio of the album reviewed here doesn’t include liner notes.

As well as the 5.1 mix, the DVD includes the 2018 stereo remix, both by James Guthrie. It also features the original 1977 stereo mix by Brian Humphries. The remix strips back the original, making it at times even simpler. For instance on the two short Pigs on the Wing tracks that bookend the album, Waters’ vocals are much drier than on the original 1997 mix. This gives a greater sense of emotional intimacy to the only songs that provide an escape from the violent dystopia of the rest of the album.

The surround sound experience on the DVD is enhanced by the gorgeous photograph on the TV screen which updates the classic image from the original album cover, which looks like an Old Master oil painting perhaps from the Dutch School of the seventeenth century. It’s replaced by a luminous contemporary portrait of Battersea Power Station, which has recently re-opened as a shopping and leisure destination with new apartments. Cleverly, the lighting of the photograph gradually changes as the songs progress.

The longest track on the album is Dogs, the only one which is co-written by Gilmour with Waters, all the others being written by Waters alone. The first part of the song features one of Gilmour’s best vocal performance – raw, cynical, bleak. The surround sound mix places the main band either in front or sometimes at the sides. The mix builds on this solid platform and highlights the two double-guitar solos that appear in the rear speakers. But the visceral single guitar solo remains resolutely in front. The revelation here is Rick Wright’s keyboards – they appear in the rear speakers with a new clarity, or fly across the surround sound image. Their most imaginative use is in the extended instrumental section played as the protagonist is dragged down to his death by drowning. While Mason provides a measured rock beat, Wright’s keening keyboards provide anguished and mesmeric Tangerine Dream-like instrumental fireworks which are all the more effective for being isolated behind the listener. The track ends with Waters taking over vocal duties from Gilmour, with a repeated mantra beginning with the words ‘Who was…’ at the beginning of each line, almost a photographic negative of Eclipse the final track of The Dark Side of the Moon. The epic richness of the latter contrasts with the bitterness of the former track with Waters’ vocals so heavily compressed they leave the listener emotionally drained.

Pigs demonstrates the efficacy of the new surround sound mix – instruments are well separated, making them much clearer than in the original stereo mix. The guitar is now so well-defined that you can almost touch it, and the vocals feel much more intimate, particularly in the chorus. The sound world is unremittingly bleak; the synths as they drift downwards seem to provide a glimpse into the abyss. If there is a weakness in the track, it’s the extended instrumental section which is rather repetitive and lacking in musical interest, and now feels dated with its use of a vocoder. The track picks up again however with swirling keyboards which perhaps imitate the flying pig, and an almost funky third verse. Gilmour’s guitar solo is one of the simplest he has ever played, focused, anguished and less bluesy than his usual style.

The last long track on the album, Sheep begins with the listener in a field of those ruminant animals, soon joined by Wright’s gloriously luminous keyboards in the rear speakers. Waters provides a simple bassline and appropriately histrionic vocals which become dehumanised as they morph into synth parts. Gilmour’s guitar parts are brutally funky. The instrumental section marks a return of the drowning section from Dogs, with the ‘stone’ that drags down the dying man haunting the mix. A majestic synth duet leads to the ‘prayer’ section as the song drifts into a reverie of contemplation. The spoken prayer – much clearer now than in the original mix – is a vicious parody of Psalm 23 (‘The Lord is my shepherd…’). And while the sheep at first seem to accept that they will become ‘lamb cutlets’, it soon becomes clear that a time of quiet prayer – ‘quiet reflection, and great dedication’ – gives the humble sheep chance to rise up against the dogs. The sheep attack one of the dogs, ‘Bleating and babbling we fell on his neck with a scream’; the final word ‘scream’ is suitably terrifying in surround sound. The track ends with the death of the dogs, Gilmour’s shimmering and triumphant guitar giving the track an epic feeling of rock’n’roll celebration.

There’s a lot to admire in this new surround sound mix, which gives the album a new clarity and foregrounds many of the instrumental parts. The raw power of the album is undeniable. But perhaps it’s still a little difficult to love.

Bibliography

Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd by Nick Mason (Weidenfeld & Nicolson September 2011)

John Lydon: I don’t hate Pink Floyd by Sean Michaels The Guardian February 2010

Revisiting the moment Pink Floyd delivered the world’s first surround sound concert by Joe Taysom Far Out Magazine May 2020

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Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets – Live Review

Nick Mason's Saucerful of Secrets at Manchester Apollo

Friday 6 May 2022

O₂ Apollo Manchester

Nick Mason’s band are more than just an echo of the past

*****

Pink Floyd’s drummer Nick Mason announced that the band shared a stage in Manchester with Jimi Hendrix 55 years ago in 1967. It seems unlikely that the original band will ever tour again, not least because the band would no longer be complete – keyboard player Rick Wright went to the great gig in the sky in 2008. After curating the exhibition Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains at the V&A in 2017, Mason was worried that he would spend the rest of life as a branch of English Heritage, lovingly tending to a past that had happened decades before. Instead, he started a new band, Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets, to play some of Pink Floyd’s music. He deliberately avoided playing any music from the band’s classic run of albums that began with Dark Side of the Moon in 1973. Instead, he decided only to play songs from the early Syd Barrett era, and some material from the later albums after David Gilmour joined the band. The most recent album the band now perform is Meddle from 1971, including for the first time on this tour the epic 20-minute track Echoes which provides the title of the tour.

Mason is the only member of Pink Floyd to play in his Saucerful of Secrets band, although bass player Guy Pratt did play with the band in the 1990s after original bass player Roger Waters left. Gary Kemp from Spandau Ballet sings and plays guitar – at one point Mason joked that Kemp had expected to play with Roger Waters and that Mason himself had expected to play with Tony Hadley. Lee Harris, previously of Ian Dury’s band The Blockheads plays guitar and composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer Dom Beken is on keyboards.

It would have been tempting for the band to be a high quality tribute band, like The Australian Pink Floyd who last played at the Apollo in November 2021. They give audiences the chance to hear classic Pink Floyd songs live, played to a very high standard. But Mason’s band offer something different and fresh, bringing new life to music that is over 50 years old. The songs are delivered with propulsive enthusiasm, sometimes approaching joy. None of the band members attempt to recreate the exact sound of the original band – except Mason himself who is playing his own parts. Whilst they are respectful to the original songs, the other band members add their own touches, often subtle but always inspiring. Guy Pratt provides lovely, melodic basslines and can also drive the band to be deliciously funky at times. He also provides heartfelt vocals. Gary Kemp brings his acting skills to his vocals, colouring the sound to match each song. He’s also a fine guitarist. Lee Harris on guitar is a superb player, bringing his own style rather than merely copying David Gilmour’s soulful string-bending or Syd Barrett’s eccentric playing. Dom Beken contributes excellent keyboard solos that are more blues-tinged than the jazz stylings of Rick Wright.

The highlight of the first set was a tightly-constructed series extracts from the Atom Heart Mother suite from the 1970 album of the same name. It was bookended by If from the same album, a beautifully delicate ballad on which Kemp and Pratt shared vocals, which includes the incredibly moving line ‘If I go insane, please don’t put your wires in my brain.’ The highlight of the second set was Echoes, which forms side two of Meddle. This is a fascinating track in the original Pink Floyd catalogue, the first time they had successfully created a long-form prog track after the departure of Syd Barrett, pointing forward to the new style that would mature of the next album Dark Side of the Moon. Nick Mason’s band at times turned it into a psychedelic track so that fitted perfectly with the other songs in the gig. There was a wonderfully funky swagger to the passage around six minutes in, and near the end a lovely, spacious guitar jam. Another second-set highlight was the instrumental Interstellar Overdrive, which the original band played in Manchester in 1969. Guy Pratt said Manchester is his favourite city – his son is at university here – and for a brief moment he and Lee Harris improvised around another song associated with Manchester, Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart.

The Encore began with a lively version of See Emily Play, and a melodic Saucerful of Secrets. The final track was Bike which ends with the words,

I know a room of musical tunes…

Let’s go into the other room and make them work

Rather than sitting at home curating his past, Nick Mason has decided to go into the other room, and make early Pink Floyd songs work again.