Monthly Archives: October 2014

October 27, 2014 Monday Edition. Find out what’s happening in the world of Rock & Roll, Alternative Rock, Hip Hop, EDM, and Top 40 music every Manic Monday on the SBS Facebook Page! Have you heard any music news?

TOP 40/POP NEWS: New and Final Pink Floyd Album On Its Way!!!

Hot on the heels of their upcoming release date of November 10^th for what is being touted as Pink Floyd’s final album, Endless River, two of the surviving members, David Gilmour, and Nick Mason spoke with Rolling Stone magazine about it.

David Gilmour has tried to distance himself from Pink Floyd for much of the past 20 years, despite the release of their entire newly re-mastered catalogue of music. Pink Floyd “broke box-office records touring behind 1994’s The Division Bell, but Gilmour grew tired of the rock-star life.” “The whole thing was becoming bigger than I liked,” he says. “I wasn’t enjoying the lack of connection with the audience.”

Gilmour spent much of the past twenty years raising his young children with his wife, writer, Polly Sampson, and made an occasional solo album. In all that time, one final thing regarding Pink Floyd stayed on his mind. The band had one final jam session from their last ever recording session from back in 1993. The band –without founder and chief songwriter, Roger Waters, since his split from the group in the mid 1980’s – recorded 20 hours of music for a planned eventual cd of ambient music which was originally going to be released with 1994’s The Division Bell. They ultimately decided against that plan, however, a couple years ago, David Gilmour gave those tapes a re-listen, and was happily surprised by what he heard. “I realized there was something good to be tweaked out of all this stuff,” he says.

Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason “overdubbed new parts and turned the old material into a new record, the largely instrumental The Endless River (due November 10th).” Gilmour promises that the album will mark the official end of Pink Floyd. “Anything we had of value is on this album,” he says. “Trying to do it again would mean using second-best material, and that’s not good enough for me.”

Pink Floyd keyboardist, Rick Wright passed away from cancer in 2008, so there will be no tour behind their final release. “Without him, that’s kind of impossible,” says Gilmour. “I’m really enjoying my life and my music. There’s no room for Pink Floyd. The thought of doing any more causes me to break out in a cold sweat.”

Gilmour and Mason consider, The Endless River, to be a tribute to their band mate, Wright. “Roger and I always made so much noise on the records and in the press that Rick tends to get slightly forgotten,” says Gilmour. “But he was just as vital as anyone else in this thing. He created a whole sonic landscape in all the things we do. That is something you cannot reproduce anywhere else.”

According to Rolling Stone Magazine who must have received a prerelease copy of the upcoming cd, “The music sounds like classic Floyd, evoking the instrumental passages from “Welcome to the Machine,” “Echoes,” “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and some of their early, more experimental work from the late 1960s and early 1970s.” According to Nick Mason, “There’s a lot of throwback in there.” “It’s funny how you sit down with a blank canvas and somehow you end up retreating into familiar drum fills no matter how hard you try. Eventually you realize that’s just what feels comfortable.”

The album includes 18 tracks, which are purposely divided into four separate sections. “I Googled ‘How long is a movement in classical music?'” says Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera, who co-produced the disc. “It was almost the length of one side of a [vinyl] album, about 15 minutes, so we did four of those. At first, we were just working with the old tapes. Then David decided they wanted to play new parts. That’s when he really took command of the ghost ship of Pink Floyd.”

The new album closes with, “Louder Than Words,” the only song with lyrics. Those were written by Gilmour’s wife, Polly Samson, a novelist who also wrote many of the lyrics on The Division Bell. The arguments between Roger Water and the rest of the Floyd is old news, but its captured on the song in lyrics like, “We bitch and we fight,” sings Gilmour. “Diss each other on sight/But this thing we do . . . it’s louder than words.”

Gilmour says he never once considered asking Waters to help work on the album. “Why on Earth anyone thinks what we do now would have anything to do with him is a mystery to me,” says Gilmour. “Roger was tired of being in a pop group. He is very used to being the sole power behind his career. The thought of him coming into something that has any form of democracy to it, he just wouldn’t be good at that. Besides, I was in my thirties when Roger left the group. I’m 68 now. It’s over half a lifetime away. We really don’t have that much in common anymore.”

In 2005 the entire famous Pink Floyd lineup played a welcomed set at the Live 8 charity concert. Gilmour and Waters also played together at a 2010 charity show, and Gilmour and Nick Mason went on to play at one of Waters’ gigs the following year for Water’s successful tour of Thw All, Pink Floyd immortal double album. Rolling Stone magazine asked Gilmour, “Would anything coax him back onstage with Waters again? “I wouldn’t rule anything out,” he says. “But the likelihood of it being anything more than one little charity show is very, very remote.”

But Pink Floyd fans do have something else to look forward to: a new Gilmour solo record. “It’s coming along very well,” he says. “There are some sketches that aren’t finished, and some of them will be started again. There’s a few months’ work in it yet. I’m hoping to get it out this following year. Then I’m hoping to do an old man’s tour, not a 200-date sort of thing.”

As for Mason, “If David resigns, that leaves me in total control of Pink Floyd,” he says. “I’ll go out on the road playing the entirety of Dark Side of the Moon, just the drum parts. It’ll be quite dull. Please know that I’m joking.”

Still, the drummer refuses to give up hope that Gilmour will change his mind one day. “I believe when I’m dead and buried,” he says, “my tombstone will read: ‘I’m not entirely sure the band’s over.'”

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/pink-floyd-say-goodbye-20141024#ixzz3H7quLOBX

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