Roger Waters presents the dark side of Dark Side Of The Moon

I’ll admit to wrestling with my conscience about giving Roger Waters any airtime at all over the release, today, of his, on first consideration, bizarre remake of The Dark Side Of The Moon. 

To say that he is a polarising figure is an understatement: quite where he fits into the post-truth culture spectrum is anyone’s guess. The conventional take is that Waters has always been a troubled individual: the death of his father, a former conscientious objector and Communist Party activist, during the Battle of Anzio in 1944 when young Roger was just five months old has loomed large in his work, one way of another.

But of the various world issues Waters has been vocal about, his views on Israel have generated the most controversy, to the extent that his performances of songs from The Wall, in which he dresses in quasi-Nazi uniforms have lead to his solo shows been banned, with accusations of an anti-semitic agenda continuing. All of which, of course, Waters has denied.

Even this week, on the eve of his reinterpretation of The Dark Side Of The Moon being released, the topic was thrust back into the spotlight when David Gilmour seemingly reignited his feud with Waters by retweeting a post about a documentary produced by the Campaign Against Antisemitism, in which musicians and producers who’ve worked with Waters recall their experience of him making anti-Semitic remarks. Gilmour’s wife, the writer Polly Samson, has played her own part in the froideur, earlier this year branding Waters “antisemitic to [his] rotten core”, “a Putin apologist” and “a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac”. Which told him.

Waters has inevitably dismissed the film as a “flimsy, unapologetic piece of propaganda”, but the flare-up of antisemitic accusation provides a profoundly uneasy context for Dark Side Of The Moon Redux to be released. Because it is, in fact, genuinely intriguing. 

Remakes of anything are rarely any good. Name a film reboot or “updated” TV show that doesn’t suffer the foreshadow of the original work. Albums are no different, whether the stream of ‘unplugged’ reinventions in the 1990s or the occasional novelty reggae reworking of a Beatles record. Covers albums by the original artist are inevitably regarded as “lazy”, no matter how inventive the treatment, or feted the artist (Bowie’s Pin Ups, anyone?). 

The original Dark Side was and remains seminal, even if Waters himself once dismissed its lyrics as adolescent “lower sixth” drivel. Released 50 years ago, and providing a platform for Waters, largely, to expand upon on life, death, wealth, fame and his own complex psychology, it became totemic of 1970s progressive rock and should, today, still be regarded as one of the most important albums of the entire rock era. 

So why remake it, 50 years later? Why jeopardise the original’s justifiable legacy in what might seem a petulant attempt to reclaim it as Waters’ own? 

Waters will (and does) argue that Dark Side was his to begin with, and he can do whatever the hell he likes with it. “I wrote The Dark Side Of The Moon. Let’s get rid of all this ‘we’ crap,” he told The Telegraph recently. “Of course we were a band, there were four of us, we all contributed – but it’s my project, and I wrote it.” In the same interview he also accused his former bandmates of being unable to write songs: “They’ve nothing to say. They are not artists! They have no ideas, not a single one between them. They never have had, and that drives them crazy.” Ouch.

The origins of the Redux project date back to the pandemic, when Waters and his touring band got together virtually from wherever they were locked down to record stripped down versions of songs like The Wall’s Mother, Comfortably Numb and Vera. “When we recorded [the Lockdown Sessions], the 50th anniversary of the release of The Dark Side Of The Moon was looming on the horizon,” Waters explains on his website. “It occurred to me that The Dark Side Of The Moon could well be a suitable candidate for a similar re-working, partly as a tribute to the original work, but also to re-address the political and emotional message of the whole album.” 

He stresses that the new version is not “a replacement for the original which, obviously, is irreplaceable”, but serves as an opportunity for the now 80-year-old to look back 50 years into the eyes of himself on the cusp of 30. “And also it is a way for me to honour a recording that Nick [Mason] and Rick [Wright] and Dave [Gilmour] and I have every right to be very proud of,” a statement in marked contrast to his comments to The Telegraph. A penny, then for Gilmour’s thoughts, given that the remake is sparse and notably devoid of either his signature guitar solos, or his sweet, higher register vocals which provided a contrast to the darker, deeper sourness of Waters somewhat manic singing. 

Much of that sparsity comes from a significantly downscaled group of musicians around Waters than those who participated in the Lockdown Sessions. For the most part, Waters has worked with producer Gus Seyffert and multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Wilson as the album’s musical core, with Syrian singer Azniv Korkejian providing a very different approach to Clare Torry’s soaring vocals on the original Dark Side’s The Great Gig In The Sky.

In his reimagining, Waters turns narrator, speaking in a near-whisper instead of singing entirely new passages of words that provide the most telling reflections of his octogenarian perspective. As such, the songs acquire a poignancy, especially on the themes like mortality.

Elsewhere there is a more genteel pace to songs, most notably the original’s hit single Money, which turns into a blues shuffle, Waters’ cynical intonation possessing a Leonard Cohen-like timbre. Some still rankle at multi-millionaires like Waters and Gilmour (who has performed the song on his solo tours) singing about wealth, but it is still a unique piece of music that actually works well with Waters’ new treatment. 

Equally so with Us & Them, always my highlight of Dark Side, which takes on an even more reflective tone than the original, which ruminated in 1973 on the futility of war. Conflict, or at least highlighting its human waste, has always been one Waters’ passions, but in taking on the lead vocals (from Gilmour) on the reimagined version, Waters contemporizes its themes. Just don’t ask him about what he’s trying to say about the war in Ukraine.

That, though, does raise the question as to why Waters has remade Dark Side, beyond simply saying ‘up yours’ to his former bandmates. The 1973 release’s 50th anniversary earlier this year was marked by the inescapable celebratory box set (coming in a long line of reissues), so at least Waters has given Dark Side’s ten songs fresh thinking. In some sense, this new vision is overlaid on the original’s themes about the passing of time and human weakness with a current world view (even if Waters’ world view is somewhat jaundiced).

The Redux version, then, works as a curiosity. There is even a moment of levity on the new version of Brain Damage, in which Waters himself is heard asking “Why don’t we re-record Dark Side Of The Moon?” before responding with “He’s gone mad” (the original song, of course, was part inspired by Syd Barrett’s pychosis, opening with the spoken words of Floyd roadie Chris Adamson saying: “I’ve been mad for fucking years. Absolutely years. I’ve been over the edge for yonks, been working with bands so long.”).

Picture: Kate Izor

Musically, Waters has always been a conundrum. Technically limited (“it’s just the same bloody four chords”, a musical friend once observed, correctly, of Waters’ songwriting), he has nevertheless managed to create compelling theatre with his solo work. His first solo album-proper, 1984’s The Pros And Cons Of Hitchhiking remains a firm favourite of mine, and his last release of entirely new material, Is This The Life We Really Want? was essentially the de facto sequel to Dark Side with its rumination on authoritarianism, commercialism and greed. 

Inexorably, Redux picks these batons up again, perhaps demonstrating the political maxim that anything worth saying is worth repeating. You just wish that sometimes Waters would choose his words more carefully. At 80, that’s unlikely.

The other Quiet One

In the greater regard for Pink Floyd, a couple of things overshadow everything: firstly, The Dark Side Of The Moon and its enduring legacy, but secondly, Roger Waters’ relationships with guitarist David Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason and keyboard player Richard Wright.

The dynamic between Waters and Gilmour, in particular, has become something of a pyschodrama, with the pair (and Gilmour’s wife, the writer Polly Samson) trading barbs via social media over, mostly, Waters’ politics. But while Waters has been courting the wrong kind of publicity for his provocative world view, Gilmour has edged into what feels like semi-retirement, and Mason has sought to protect the band’s heritage through his Saucerful Of Secrets outfit (playing the music of the early, pre-Dark Side Floyd albums), Wright has largely been forgotten. 

Today, his debut solo album, Wet Dream - recorded and released between the Floyd’s Animals in 1977 and The Wall in 1979 (and in the context of a band dynamic that was starting to collapse) - is being re-released, remixed by Steven Wilson and repackaged with a load of extras, providing an opportunity to reassess The Quiet One of Pink Floyd, whose influence on the band from its very beginning can often be forgotten under the weight of the egos and internecine battles that raged increasingly as commercial success in the 1970s gave way to Waters’ dramatic exit in 1985. 

When he succumbed to lung cancer in 2008 at the age of 65, Rick Wright was eulogised by Waters, Gilmour and Mason for having had a bigger part in their musical canon than he was ever given credit for when alive. “In the welter of arguments about who or what was Pink Floyd, Rick's enormous input was frequently forgotten,” David Gilmour wrote in an online tribute. “He was gentle, unassuming and private but his soulful voice and playing were vital, magical components of our most recognised Pink Floyd sound.” Wright was irreplaceable, Gilmour wrote of his “musical partner and my friend.”

While these words might read like a carefully constructed ‘corporate’ statement, Gilmour had certainly remained close to Wright, having him play on his solo tour for the On An Island album. The Floyd-heavy set lists reminded audiences that Floyd hadn’t been just about Waters’ lyrical vision (or, in the early days, Syd Barrett’s flights of psychedelic fancy) or indeed Gilmour’s distinctly soaring guitar solos, but also of the melodic foundation that Wright brought to many of their songs from the off.

Richard Wright

Keyboard players tend to be cerebral introspectives, but also the most pivotal figures in a band, especially in the 1970s when guitar-based beat pop gave way to intricate, complex progressive rock. Tony Banks of Genesis, springs to mind here: hunched over his Mellotron, playing elaborate, classically-inspired solos, he was never the focal point (especially with Peter Gabriel charging about in his various costumes). Banks and Wright considered themselves songwriters first, and pop stars a very distant second. “Shy and unassuming” are also the mutually exclusive adjectives that sit before the words “keyboard player”, but if you were to analyse the contribution Wright and Banks’ multi-layered keyboard compositions made to the overall canons of their respective bands, I’d wager  they would outstrip the limelight chasers who sang or played the guitar solos. 

Wright’s “spacious, sombre, enveloping keyboards, backing vocals and eerie effects” were, in the words of the New York Times’ obituary, “an essential part of [Pink Floyd’s] musical identity. ” He was certainly responsible for some of the band’s signature moments: the epic Echoes, on the Meddle album, for example, but also the ambient, G-minor keyboard chord that heralds Shine On You Crazy Diamond at the beginning of Wish You Were Here. More significantly are two songs on The Dark Side Of The Moon: amid the album’s wiggy space rock and Waters’s jaded rumination about the human condition, the sonorous Us And Them and the mesmerising Great Gig In The Sky highlight Wright’s exquisite composition and piano work. 

“The blend of his and my voices and our musical telepathy reached their first major flowering in 1971 on Echoes,” Gilmour wrote in his tribute. “In my view all the greatest PF moments are the ones where he is in full flow. After all, without Us And Them and The Great Gig In The Sky, both of which he wrote, what would The Dark Side Of The Moon have been? Without his quiet touch the album Wish You Were Here would not quite have worked.” 

Despite his indelible stamp on the canon, Wright was fired by Waters during the making of The Wall album in 1979. Despite having been college friends, tension had built over the preceding decade. “There has always been friction between me and Roger,” Wright once reflected. In 2000 he revealed to Classic Rock magazine how unhappy he’d been during The Wall sessions: “Both myself and Dave [Gilmour] had little to offer, through laziness or whatever. Looking back, although I didn’t realise it, I was depressed.” At the time, he was in the throes of divorce from his first wife, Juliette. 

With some sort of divine retribution, however, Wright was rehired – on wages – to play keyboards on The Wall’s outlandish, theatrical tour. Ironically, as a jobbing musician, he was the only original member of the Floyd to profit from The Wall Tour, such was its extravagant staging. 

Wright’s exile from the band was, though, relatively short-lived. After Waters himself formerly quit in 1982, Gilmour and Mason reconvened to record 1987’s A Momentary Lapse Of Reason, with Wright effectively working as a session player. By 1994 he was fully back on board for Pink Floyd’s de facto final album, The Division Bell, on which Wright co-wrote several songs as well as contributed his own composition, the contemplative Wearing The Inside Out, a reflection of his experience of the band’s tensions prior to his original departure: “From morning to night, I stayed out of sight. Didn’t recognise what I’d become. No more than alive I’d barely survived. In a word – overrun”.

Rick Wright in David Gilmour's Remember That Night

In Mark Blake’s Pink Floyd biography Pigs Might Fly, Division Bell producer Bob Erin said of Wright’s composition: “There’s a lot of emotional honesty there. Fans pick up on the sad, vulnerable side to Rick.” In reality, the words came from former Slapp Happy keyboard player Anthony Moore, working with Wright, but there’s no doubt they came from a very personal place. Moore “had to climb inside Rick’s head to get the words out”, a band insider told Blake.

Pink Floyd’s first album, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, was released in August 1967. While Syd Barrett was seen as the band’s prime creative force, he and Wright, in particular, had formed a particularly fruitful partnership - Wright’s melodicism acting as a counterweight to Barrett’s eccentric whimsy (they co-wrote Astronomy Domine and both provided vocals for the track Mathilda Mother). But as Barrett’s use of LSD intensified towards the end of 1967, leading to increasing psychosis and his firing, the band’s centre of gravity started to shift. Gilmour - an old cohort of the band from their teenage years in Cambridge - was brought in to, initially, augment Barrett, before his eventual exit. Gilmour’s appointment as the band’s lead guitarist set in train the band’s imperious phase, evolving from London underground darlings to the stadium behemoths that The Wall somewhat self-satirised a full decade later. 

This period also became the creative arena for Waters’ concepts, with Gilmour and Wright, in particular, providing the instrumental flourishes. However, Wright’s clearly more diffident personality would never get a look in as the band became an increasing power struggle between Waters and Gilmour. As so often is the case (Steve Hackett, again of Genesis, comes to mind), solo projects become an outlet when breaking open an established hierarchy proves impossible, Hence 1978’s Wet Dream and Broken China in 1986. Both were well received, but commercially underwhelming. Wright was said to be working on a new project at the time of his death, though there is no known plan for them ever to be released posthumously. 

Today, however, on what would have been Wright’s 80th birthday, Wet Dream is being reissued as an expanded edition, with Wilson - now the go-to-master of classic album reinventions - producing new stereo and multi-channel remixes. “Most people know that Pink Floyd have always been my favourite band,” he tweeted, “so it was a real honour to be commissioned by Richard’s children Gala and Jamie Wright to remix this relatively underrated and beautiful entry in the Floyd canon. For anyone hearing the album for the first time it will become apparent just how much of Richard’s DNA runs through Pink Floyd. His distinctive rhythm patterns, signature keyboard sounds, vocals, jazz influences, and style of play exude throughout.” A vinyl version of the reissue along with a Blu-ray Disc package will be released later in the summer.

At the time of its original release Wet Dream - self-produced by Wright and featuring all of his own songs - largely flew under the radar, a symbolic reflection of his under-appreciation within Pink Floyd. Roger Waters has somewhat vacillated over his former friend’s legacy: “It is hard to overstate the importance of his musical voice in the Pink Floyd of the ’60s and ’70s,” he said in a similar statement to Gilmour’s after Wright’s death in 2008. But in an interview with the Telegraph earlier this year, Waters in more vituperative form said: “David Gilmour and Rick Wright? They can’t write songs, they’ve nothing to say,” maintaining that his self-ascribed role as Pink Floyd’s creative centre after Barrett “went loopy” was that none of the others had any ideas. “Nick [Mason] never pretended,” he said adding that Gilmour and Wright weren’t artists. ”They have no ideas, not a single one between them. They never have had, and that drives them crazy.”No wonder Wright once said: “I think, ‘Why do you have to say these things?’”.  

When Pink Floyd reformed for the one-off Live 8 charity concert in 2005 there was a visible unease on stage between Waters and Gilmour, in particular. That, though, didn’t stop the clamour for the band to fully get back together. “Everyone who loves Pink Floyd wants it to happen,” said Wright at the time. “But I don’t feel I need it, not musically and not personally,” adding, cuttingly, “Maybe if Roger comes back as a different person – charming and nice, with really good ideas.”  

While Live 8 marked the final time all four members of Pink Floyd’s ‘classic’ line-up would share a stage. Wright’s role would be further extended by the release of their final record, The Endless River, which featured unused music from the Division Bell sessions. Released in November 2014, it was positioned as a tribute to Wright, featuring Gilmour, Wright and Mason seemingly improvising on what could be described as archetypal Pink Floyd songs – in particular built-out blues jams – that all featured Rick’s hallmark keyboard infusion. “I think this record is a good way of recognising a lot of what [Rick] does and how his playing was at the heart of the Pink Floyd sound,” Mason said at the time of the album’s release. “Listening back to the sessions, it really brought home to me what a special player he was.” 

In September 2007, a year before he died, Wright performed for the last time, joining Gilmour for an unexpected jam at a cinema in London’s Leicester Square at the premiere of Gilmour’s Remember That Night film, recorded at the Royal Albert Hall during the tour for his On An Island album. The tour had, in Wright’s own words, been the “happiest” he’d “ever been on”. 

A couple of months before he died, on 15 September 2008, there was talk of Pink Floyd reforming to play Glastonbury. It had transpired that Gilmour had enquired about the possibility of playing as an opportunity for one last show with Wright, knowing that he was ill. The idea never came off. Glastonbury founder was edging towards acts with a younger profile and appeal. Pink Floyd - easily, in the context of contemporary Glastos, would have been perfect for the ‘heritage slot’.

You could argue that without Rick Wright I might never have found Pink Floyd. Like many of my contemporaries, Another Brick In The Wall (Part 3) was probably my first conscious exposure, appearing at the end of my first term of secondary school, with that grammar police-baiting “we don’t need no education” refrain offering a note of pre-pubescent revolution. It would be later in my school career when my curiosity would be fully triggered. During an English Literature lesson, we were forced to listen to a Richard Burton-narrated BBC radio production of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime Of The Ancient Mariner. It began with that opening to Shine On You Crazy Diamond before the Welshman intones: “It is an ancient mariner, and he stoppeth one of three…”. 

I was captured. I asked my English teacher if he knew what the music was. “It’s Pink Floyd,” he told me. “Opening track of the Wish You Were Here album.” By chance, my brother had a copy, which I feverishly taped as soon as I got home from school. Inevitably, my interest would be piqued by Gilmour’s signature four-note motif two minutes into Shine On. But as I replayed that tape over and over again, before exploring Wish You Were Here’s more venerated predecessor, The Dark Side Of The Moon, it became apparent there was a lot more to Pink Floyd than their lyrical narratives, soundscapes and iconic guitar solos, but also the textures and colour palettes their classically-trained keyboard player was responsible for. Quiet, he may have been, but sometimes loudness isn’t just a matter of volume.

Art of a diver

Just beyond the eastern extreme of California’s Yosemite National Park, not far from the border with Nevada, sits Mono Lake, a salty body of water formed three-quarters of a million years ago. I came across it considerably more recently than that - 1992 to be exact - but at the time had no appreciation of the cameo it had made in my musical adolescence when I stopped there for what Americans politely term a “comfort break”.

For context, I was midway through a month-long tour of the American West, albeit in December when the tourist hordes are elsewhere. Having driven from Los Angeles up the Pacific Coast Highway to San Francisco, and then north-east to snowed-in Lake Tahoe, I was heading south towards Death Valley along the scenic Highway 395, with California’s spinal Sierra Nevada mountains to my right. Just south-east of Yosemite, I came across Mono Lake and its seemingly abandoned visitor centre. Making use of its facilities, I then took in a view of the lake’s eerie stillness, framed by unique tufa formations. It would be another 25 years - and several visits further to that part of California - before I’d come to realise where I’d seen that tufa before. On a display wall at London’s V&A museum, as part of the Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains exhibition, was a blow-up of the inner sleeve of the band’s ninth studio album, Wish You Were Here, depicting a perpendicular diver performing a handstand in, yes, Mono Lake. 

The image was the idea of Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell, the photographer and co-founder with Storm Thorgerson of the Hipgnosis design studio which, from the end of the 60s to the beginning of the 80s produced some of the most distinctive album covers ever committed to 12 inches-square of cardboard. Over 15 years, they produced more than 250 sleeves for artists as varied as Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney, Humble Pie, 10cc, Leo Sayer, Genesis, ELO, Black Sabbath, Olivia Newton-John and XTC, as well as Pink Floyd, with whom they became most closely associated.

It’s the perfect subject, then, for Us And Them: The Authorised Story Of Hipgnosis, a new book by journalist Mark Blake, whose previous work includes arguably the definitive Floyd account, Pigs Might Fly. “I’d always been quite interested in the idea of doing a book about Hipgnosis,” Mark declares. “I’d interviewed a lot of their associates for Pigs Might Fly - particularly the people who were around at the beginning of their work, their contemporaries, their friends from Cambridge and London in the early days.” A book about the creative duo was a natural next step, especially as Mark had come to know Powell and, in the later years of his life, Thorgerson, in particular, working on the very V&A exhibition I’d been to see. 

Hipgnosis and Pink Floyd’s histories are intertwined: Thorgerson and Powell had been cohorts of the band’s founder members, Syd Barrett and Roger Waters, in Cambridge before they all migrated to London to attend universities. There they met Nick Mason and Rick Wright, eventually becoming fixtures of the capital’s underground music scene as ‘The Pink Floyd Sound’. 

A year after Pink Floyd - as they became - released their debut album, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn in 1967, Thorgerson and Powell established their working relationship with the band. “Storm was attending the Royal College Of Art, studying film, and Po got a job designing sets for the BBC,” says Mark. “Then Po got sacked and fell into low levels of criminal activity - bank fraud, stealing cars and so on. He got into an awful lot of trouble. It was then that they decided to talk Pink Floyd into letting them design the sleeve for their second album, A Saucerful Of Secrets.” Released in 1968, and made amidst the deteriorating mental health of Barrett (whose departure midway through recording led to David Gilmour joining the group), the album was only the second time that label EMI had allowed an artist to use designers from outside their own in-house art desk. Thorgerson and Powell took it as an opportunity to exploit the changing nature of record covers.

A Saucerful Of Secrets led to the pair designing for Pink Floyd’s labelmates at EMI and, later, its Harvest subsidiary, at first making use of the RCA’s photography faculty (even though Thorgerson wasn’t studying the subject and Po wasn’t even at the college), before being rumbled and thrown out. Instead, they turned the bathroom of Powell’s then-girlfriend into a dark room. This was to change towards the end of 1969 when the pair upgraded: “They moved into a studio in Denmark Street where they began doing stuff for bands like Argent, Quatermass, Toe Fat - all these late-60s, early prog rock,” says Mark. They also took on photographic work came for magazines and book covers. 

“Much of their success can be traced to that of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” says Mark, referring to the grandaddy of progressive rock and its ambitious pop art sleeve designed in 1967 by Peter Blake and Jann Haworth. That landmark inspired a decade of graphic design in rock which saw Hipgnosis, as well as their equally conceptual contemporary Roger Dean, taking cover art into new realms of creativity and expression. Prog bands like Pink Floyd, Yes and Genesis became fertile muses for such designers, turning cover art into an integral component of the narrative their records pursued, invariably conveying dioramic third dimensions through fantastical, somewhat lyrical and always unique imagery. 

For Thorgerson and Powell, getting their concepts across the line with some bands often owed more to the force of personality than creativity alone. “There was one slightly oddball character in Storm, and the slightly more measured character in the shape of Po,” Nick Mason tells Mark in the book. “And it stayed that way for the next fifty years.”

Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell

As their reputation grew, from 1968 and into the new decade, Hipgnosis became particularly prevalent working for artists sat on various degrees of the progressive spectrum, producing sleeves for myriad acts like Humble Pie, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Rory Gallagher, T-Rex, Wishbone Ash (for their album Argus, with its seminal cover) and even Syd Barrett, for his haphazard but still loved post-Floyd solo albums. At the same time, the relationship with Pink Floyd continued to bear fruit, with covers for the albums More, Ummagumma, Atom Heart Mother, Meddle and Obscured By Clouds.

However, the album that still defines the Hipgnosis legacy - and possibly the entire genre of LP art - came in March 1973: The Dark Side Of The Moon. Thorgerson and Powell’s brief from Pink Floyd was to produce something uncomplicated, a contrarian response to opinions amongst the suits at EMI that their previous sleeves for the band had been belligerently obscure and even unmarketable. What they came up with - with a little help from a school book - was the now singular black cover with its beam of light dissipating through a prism into a spectral rainbow.

“I don’t think there was so much foresight and forward thinking in it,” says Mark Blake. “A lot of the time it’s ‘We’ve got to get a cover out - there’s a deadline looming!’. The band wanted something simple so Storm and Po found the prism design in a physics textbook and ripped it off, getting their illustrator George Hardie to create a beautiful design.” To make up for the spartan outer cover, Hipgnosis included some visual extras. “You got the poster of The Great Pyramid and a load of stickers,” says Mark. ”That was Storm trying to shoehorn some bigger ideas in.”

Nowhere on the front or back was there any mention of Pink Floyd or the album’s name. Though not the intention, it reflected an undercurrent of growing distraction within the band (Roger Waters has, with customary misery, described Dark Side as “the beginning of the end”), and the lyrical themes of greed, fame, mortality and even the mental decline of their founder Barrett. Wrapped in a package not dissimilar to a box of Black Magic chocolates, The Dark Side Of The Moon became the standout release of 1973, a year which saw records like Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, Led Zeppelin’s Houses Of The Holy (with a cover also designed by Hipgnosis), Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells and Bruce Springsteen’s Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ amongst its pantheon.

Mark acknowledges Dark Side’s enduring success but doesn’t attribute it entirely to the legendary artwork: “I don’t think that it is just down to having the boldness of not having the band’s name anywhere on the cover. I know it wasn’t the first time Storm and Po had done that with Pink Floyd or, in fact, another band.” Music, he says, has clearly been the album’s defining character, but over time the cover has contributed to the record’s legend, albeit contentiously for Hipgnosis: “I think they got paid about 500 quid all-in for that. Years later, Storm tried to get more money out of Pink Floyd because he believed that the cover had contributed more to the sales.”

To date The Dark Side Of The Moon has sold more than 45 million copies worldwide - and continues to do so, even reaching new audiences. My 18-year-old step-daughter asked for a vinyl copy for Christmas two years ago, and even this last December the LP was selling steadily when I visited Fopp! in Covent Garden. While it contains some of the Floyd’s most revered music - Breathe, Money, Time, Us And Them, The Great Gig In The Sky et al - that cover art has found itself peppered throughout the zeitgeist of the last 50 years. “I think both Storm and Po had a complicated relationship with Dark Side,” says Mark. “It’s not their favourite work, but it is their most famous work. It’s a very simple design but doesn’t have the narrative quality that Wish You Were Here had a couple of years later, which I think was certainly one of Storm’s favourite Floyd covers.” 

That record, released in 1975 as a follow up to Dark Side, came with a significantly larger production budget for Hipgnosis, which is how Powell ended up in California for three weeks, an entourage in tow, taking the Mono Lake shot. At the same time, he captured the faceless bowler-hatted man for the back cover (shot in the Mojave Desert), and the front cover image of businessmen shaking hands on a Hollywood backlot, with one of the two stuntmen used for the picture actually on fire - a stunt that almost went very badly wrong.

The story of Hipgnosis isn’t, however, exclusively the Pink Floyd Story. Their work for other artists was equally as distinct, and sometimes just as complicated, though Mark feels they never came up with anything as singularly impactful as The Dark Side Of The Moon. “They became the hip guys to go to after Dark Side and Houses Of The Holy, and also, weirdly, Wishbone Ash’s Argus. That was the album Jimmy Page saw in a record shop: when I interviewed him for the book, he told me ‘I saw this album with a Viking on the cover. I never listened to it but I liked the cover.’ So he rang up Storm and said, ‘Come and do our next album’ [for Led Zeppelin]. After that they got the call from Paul McCartney, who asked them to do Wings’ Band On The Run.” That cover, Mark says, was entirely McCartney’s idea, and famously featured a Clive Arrowsmith picture of Paul and Linda McCartney, Denny Laine, Michael Parkinson, Kenny Lynch, James Coburn, Clement Freud, Christopher Lee and John Conteh posing against a wall, illuminated by a prison searchlight. Still, it had a domino effect, bringing many more bands to Thorgerson and Powell’s door.

Genesis was another band that enjoyed a run of distinctive Hipgnosis-designed covers, commencing with 1974’s The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway - Peter Gabriel’s final work as lead singer and a concept album about a Gulliver-like Puerto Rican street tough descending into the New York underworld. Its literal cover - including a new band logo - was peak Hipgnosis. “Storm was incredibly principled about certain things,” Mark explains. “He would go to the ends of the Earth and spend his own money on getting a cover right. There were certain ideas he wanted to do for bands that they rejected because they wouldn’t have been able to afford it. Storm would do it anyway, just because he wanted to. But by the same token, if Pink Floyd turned an idea down, he’d have no hesitation in trying to fob it off on another band.”

10cc and Genesis were, in particular, beneficiaries of Thorgerson’s ‘generosity’: “The cover of 10cc’s Bloody Tourists is actually a picture of Powell with a map across his face in the West Indies. They pitched that to Genesis for …And Then There Were Three, with the idea that they’d just lost Steve Hackett [who’d quit the band in 1977] and they’re now looking for a new direction.” Genesis, Mark says, weren’t having it, so Hipgnosis took the concept to 10cc who did.

Peter Gabriel recounted a similar experience to Mark for his first three solo albums, which had Hipgnosis covers. Every time he met Thorgerson, he’d be told: “I’ve got a great idea for you, Peter,” to which Gabriel would say: “You’ve fucking tried that on Led Zeppelin, haven't you?”. Mark reveals: “Storm would reply: ‘Yes, but it's perfect for you!’ So, there’s this sort of reject pile that Gabriel would always be confronted by. With Storm it was a weird mix of being incredibly principled and that art is everything, to ‘just have this’.” The covers Gabriel eventually agreed to were markedly different to those Hipgnosis produced for his old band and their contemporaries. While still surreal, they featured distorted images of the singer himself, but to his American record company’s frustration, Gabriel was naming his albums simply ‘Peter Gabriel’, with their covers the only means of distinguishing them. Eventually, the American label would remarket them respectively as ‘Car’, ‘Scratch’ and ‘Melt’, based on the Hipgnosis imagery, just to help the hard of thinking.

If Sgt. Pepper changed the nature of album covers, the early 1980s brought two shifts in the medium itself with industrial developments that, indirectly, altered Thorgerson and Powell’s trajectories. In 1982 Philips and Sony heralded the digital music age by introducing the Compact Disc. The 12-inch canvas that Hipgnosis had made their own became increasingly redundant. Until Gen Z’ers discovered their parents and grandparents’ vinyl collections - and a new romance began with cover art, appearing on bedroom walls and irony-nodding T-shirts - the designs that stood tall in my teenage years became minimised to fit 12cm ‘jewel cases’. Later still, with the advent of streaming, cover art would be minimised further to fit the postage stamp-sized screen real estate of online services. 

Mark Blake

To Mark Blake, the CD’s arrival marked an important pivot away from the ‘long-player’: “That’s another thing that was appealing about doing this book,” he says. “The Hipgnosis story follows the arc of the LP as a medium, which really began with Sgt. Pepper, which was a game-changer in that sense. Suddenly the LP was king. Bands made albums and didn't have to do singles. But, as I’ve been told, the arrival of the CD was one of the reasons that made Hipgnosis decide to wind up the company and go into making music videos.” 

The arrival of MTV in 1983 was the next industrial change, providing Hipgnosis with a new outlet: “All the money that might have once gone into sending them to the Sahara Desert to photograph footballs in the sand for a cover was now being spent on videos,” says Mark. “So that’s why they wound up the company and decided make music videos, which they did for a few years quite successfully…until it wasn’t.” 

While one of their first forays was the clip for Paul Young’s Wherever I Lay My Hat, the video age brought Hipgnosis back into contact with some of their older clients, who were finding new fans through the medium. “They did stuff for Robert Plant and Jimmy Page’s bands,” says Mark. “Owner Of A Lonely Heart [the hit single that revived the fortunes of Yes] was another big one for Hipgnosis. They got in on the ground floor with these older bands trying to relaunch themselves and having to make videos. And obviously, the bands went to the very guys who’d made their album covers, because they figured that they’d feel comfortable with them.”

Although Hipgnosis, as an entity, was wound up in 1983, there is a coda to their greatest legacy in designing covers for LPs. Vinyl sales grew for the 15th consecutive year in the UK in 2022, reaching close to 5.5 million - the highest growth since 1990. What began as baby boomers looking to reconnect with their long-discarded copies of classic Beatles and Bowie records has been boosted by the record-selling phenomenon that is Taylor Swift, as teenagers, moving on from raiding their elders’ records, have adopted their own heroine in the Nashville star. Visit any record shop - from independents to the few remaining chains - and a miasma of album covers will greet you. 

So, is Mark Blake’s celebration of arguably the greatest purveyors of album art perfectly timed? Not necessarily, he says: ”The 50th anniversary Dark Side Of The Moon was the main reason for writing the book. The thing about [the resurgence of] vinyl is interesting, though. I’ve got a 17-year-old son, and when he was first looking through my old records, he said to me, ’Some of these covers would look great if you had them framed on the wall,’ which I think is quite interesting. He listened to Dark Side a couple of years ago, because he’d heard a lot about it - and probably because of the cover.” The vinyl upswing does help, says Mark: “It shows there’s an interest in it as a format, but I don’t think there would have been interest in [a book] ten years ago. We’re moving on to a time where people maybe are reassessing some of this stuff a bit more now, especially after the Pink Floyd exhibition at the V&A. It just feels a bit more timely now.”

Us And Them: The Authorised Story Of Hipgnosis by Mark Blake is published on 2 February by Nine Eight Books

How many times must an angel fall?

As if things haven’t been gloomy enough this week, if you want a proper wallow, track down Francis Whateley’s David Bowie: The Last Five Years, shown on Friday as part of BBC Four’s Bowie Night, in honour of what would have been the Starman's 74th birthday. It’s not about how the documentary ends - because five years ago this morning, the world found out - but for one particular period in the penultimate act of his career. 

The time in question is, in the longer history, a relative blink of the eye, but it represents a glimpse of the real David Bowie, an individual who, for a large proportion of his musical career, was shrouded - mainly intentionally - in guises and crafted personas. In October 2003, Bowie commenced the Reality Tour, a 112-date campaign that would, over five legs, snake through Europe, North America, Asia, Australia and New Zealand in support of Reality, generally thought to be his best album since 1980’s Scary Monsters And Super Creeps. It was a grueling tour with shows lasting two and a half hours each as the band merrily worked their way through almost 40 years of music. In fact, around 60 songs were rehearsed for the tour, drawn from almost every decade in the Bowie canon, from singalong hits to a lesser known cover of The Pixies’ Cactus and Sister Midnight, originally found on Iggy Pop’s The Idiot. 

In Whateley’s film, band members, like bass player Gail Ann Dorsey, guitarists Earl Slick and Gerry Leonard, drummer Sterling Campbell, and longtime keyboard collaborator Mike Garson, speak with fondness of the David Bowie they were playing with. They enthusiastically embrace the exhaustive song catalogue, playfully finding new ways to perform it. But it’s clear that the Bowie they were touring with was comfortable in his own skin. The tour DVD shows him having fun, smiling and wisecracking his way through gigs that, night after night, appeared to be carefree celebrations. Moreover, it’s the off-stage footage that is the most revealing - hanging out with Slick in an amusement arcade, or larking about with a cutting impersonation of Paul Whitehouse’s ‘Brilliant!’ character from The Fast Show. It felt like you were watching David Jones of 40 Stansfield Road, Brixton, as any ‘regular’ bloke in the pub.

While never an aloof figure, few probably knew the real David Bowie. Even himself, something apparent in Alan Yentob’s landmark Cracked Actor documentary in 1975, when an emaciated, cocaine-addicted Bowie - The Thin White Duke - swigging from a carton of milk in the back of a limo was, by his own admission, on the road to cliché rock star oblivion. What makes Whateley’s film so heartbreaking is that the David Bowie at the beginning of his final years on this planet was the very opposite of that casualty in the limo. Rather than reject his body of work - as so many performers of a certain vintage will do - he was celebratory of it. Things weren't always so.

While he’d disparagingly referred to his ‘80s commercial success (the Let’s Dance and Tonight albums, and even 1987’s Never Let Me Down and its subsequent Glass Spider Tour, with it’s overblown choreography and theatrical bombast) as his “Phil Collins years”, the 90s proved a different decade for Bowie. Musical fashion during the Britpop age turned its attention elsewhere, despite the likes of Blur and Oasis representing a reverence for the musical legacy of Bowie’s generation. Bowie, though, had also turned his attention elsewhere. His Sound + Vision tour in 1990 had been a conscious ‘retirement’ of the jukebox (“Knowing I won’t ever have those songs to rely on again spurs me to keep doing new things, which is good for an artist,” he said). His sojourn with the punky faux-grunge Tin Machine then seemed to draw a line more fully. 

Like another Doctor Who-style regeneration, Bowie emerged with the spotlight somewhat off him with the largely electronic Black Tie White Noise album in 1993. Four years shy of turning 50, he embraced contemporary influences such as hip-hop, while also reuniting with Nile Rodgers. Some suggest this was a mild mid-life crisis, but in truth, it was simply the magpie tendency that had acquired genres throughout his career showing through once more. It also manifested itself in the understated soundtrack to BBC TV’s adaptation of Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha Of Suburbia, which remains one of my favourite collections of Bowie music. Indeed, as the 90s progressed, Bowie explored further new avenues, with drum’n’bass and a more industrial sound, as can be found on 1. Outside, Earthling and the gentle Hours…, released in relatively quick succession between 1995 and 1999.

There is no doubt that the 90s saw a quietening of the mania that had followed Bowie since the beginning of the 1970s. And, yet, it’s something of a myth to suggest that the decade saw a complete rewrite of his character. This is attested to by Brilliant Live Adventures, a box set of previously unreleased live performances from the 1990s being progressively released like those encyclopaedia collections you used to see advertised after Christmas. 

The first, Ouvrez Le Chien (Live Dallas ’95) was released in October, with the second, No Trendy Réchauffé (Live Birmingham ’95) appearing in December, both with an eclectic line up of notably hit-light content. 

The third instalment, LiveAndWell.com appears next week, and will feature tracks recorded on the 1997 Earthling tour, and again skewing away from the traditional Bowie canon, with Hallo Spaceboy the only single and even the bleak V-2 Schneider instrumental from the Heroes album included. Brilliant Live Adventures’ six entries - the final three yet to be announced - may well prove to be collectibles for the most avid of fan. 

Previously, these 90s shows had only been available to users of Bowie’s pioneering web platform BowieNet, and it could be argued that they might well have stayed there (Bowie’s choice of songs in this period was never always met with the satisfaction of audiences who’d turned up to hear pop hits - “This is bollocks! We want Let’s Dance!”, a punter was heard saying at one gig). He had, in this period, been defiant: it had been a deliberate effort to shift away from the material that had driven the first couple of decades of his career. Bowie was also somewhat belligerent over how it would land, regarding the exercise of choosing relative obscurities as educational.

However, it wasn’t just the fanbase that grew indifferent. Even sections of the press turned, with “edgy” younger hacks making disparaging remarks, seemingly for reactionary kicks. Bowie’s former press officer, Alan Edwards, relayed to The Sunday Times late last year the story of how, in personal notes he wrote during the 1999 tour, Bob Dylan had just been made a commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, but in the UK, Bowie was no longer being treated with anywhere near the reverence he once had. 

On 27 June, 2000, Bowie recorded a brilliant show for the BBC (later released as a third CD of a limited edition package of the Bowie At The Beeb compilation), during which he bound through classics like Wild Is The Wind, Ashes To Ashes, This Is Not America, The Man Who Sold The World and Let's Dance. It is still one of my treasured possessions, apart from anything else, for the vitality and freshness he brought to these songs. 

During the recording at the BBC Radio Theatre in London, Bowie enthralled the audience with hilarious stories about the set list he was performing. And, yet, Edwards couldn’t persuade a single journalist to come along. “The press wax lyrical about David now, but I had wads of tickets I couldn’t give away in the 1990s, because he was not deemed cool,” Edwards told The Sunday Times. 

Two days beforehand, Bowie had headlined the prestigious Sunday night slot at Glastonbury, delighting an enraptured 150,000-strong crowd with a 33-song romp through all the classics. Yes, the very songs Bowie had consciously rejected during his tours in the preceding decade. BBC2 aired the set in full last June, the first time it had been shown in its entirety, and almost 20 years to the day it had been staged. And it was mesmerising. The Glasto show has been rightly held up as the perfect Sunday night ‘legends’ performance, not just for the hands-aloft communal entertainment, but because we got the real David Bowie. From his baroque suit to his artfully tousled shoulder-length hair (a throwback to his late-60s folkie persona), this was a smiley, blokey Bowie. The man who fell down-to-earth, if you will. “Having a good time?” he threw out to the crowd at one point. This wasn’t the usual stage platitude. He was, genuinely, having a ball. “This is cool for us. I’ve not been here for 30 years, and it’s fucking great. I’m really hot and sweaty, I wore a stupid jacket, I’m too vain to take it off.” 

Glastonbury has been branded Bowie’s comeback, but in reality it was only a comeback from a relative wilderness. And if it was a comeback, it didn’t last all that long. For the following couple of years he withdrew into family life following the birth of his daughter Lexi. Now New York-based, he performed Heroes at The Concert For New York, the 9/11 benefit at Madison Square Garden in October 2001.  The following June came the Heathen album, another of my latter-career favourites, on which Bowie was joined by chums like Pete Townshend and Dave Grohl, as well as producer Tony Visconti, who had been a part of Bowie’s emergence at the end of the 1960s. It was a somewhat reflective record - not directly influenced by the events of the previous September, but certainly attuned to the anxious mood that emerged in America as a result. I was living in California at the time, and Heathen became a constant companion on the new contraption I was constantly plugged into. I believe it was called an iPod.

The following year Bowie released Reality which, when stood up next to Heathen, revealed a Bowie in his mid-50s and clearly contemplating the world around him. Moreover, it was an album of genuine warmth, full of ‘proper’ songs and a simpler, beginning-middle-end structure. The reception Reality met was as accepted as the comfort with which Bowie and his band went out on the road to tour it, which brings me back to the heartwarming - and heartbreaking - nature of the words at the start of this post. 

The Reality Tour, originally scheduled for ten months, came to an abrupt halt on 25 June, 2004, when Bowie experienced chest pain while on stage at the Hurricane Festival in Germany. It was a blocked coronary artery requiring an emergency bypass. And it ended his touring career. The public appearances that followed while he recuperated were few and far between, with the occasional awards show, and the odd performance, such as joining David Gilmour at the Royal Albert Hall in 2006 to do Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb and Arnold Layne. It was David Bowie's final stage performance on British soil.  

Earlier that year he’d pledged to take a year off - “no touring, no albums”. It was a pledge he stuck to, mostly. One notable exception was his blisteringly funny appearance in a 2006 episode of Ricky Gervais’s Extras. He and Gervais had struck an unlikely friendship after Bowie had become a fan of The Office. 

“He loved comedy,” Gervais has said since. “He was amazing in Extras. I sent him the lyrics and I said: 'Do something quite retro, like Life On Mars, and he went: 'Oh yeah, I'll just knock off a quick Life On Mars then…’!”. The resulting appearance, in which Bowie, sat at a nightclub piano riffs a song about Gervais’s jobbing actor character Andy Millman (“Chubby little loser!”) is a piece of comedy gold. It was also a Bowie continuing to show his true self, though, still in character.

Extras wasn’t, of course, some kind of ironic finale. But it certainly marked an absence that would only be ended on 8 January, 2013, Bowie's 66th birthday, when we read via son Duncan Jones’ Twitter account that his dad had something new to say. And, thus, the mournful Where Are We Now? - the song which gave this blog its name - appeared without warning, with its nostalgic lookback at Bowie’s Berlin residency, itself an intentional withdrawal from the madness of 1970s fame. The following March, an entire album appeared, The Next Day. The world fell in love again with David Bowie. 

Suddenly, enigmatically, he was catapulted back into near-regal seniority, a member of rock's top team. A retrospective exhibition, David Bowie is..., went on tour after its run at London’s V&A (which I saw there and again, two years later in Paris). What we didn’t know, however, was that the show's subject was in the midst of a terrible, 18-month battle with liver cancer. This was to be the muse for two more surprises: the album Blackstar, released on Bowie’s 69th birthday, and his death two days later. “Look up here, I’m in heaven” he sang on Lazarus, “I got scars that can't be seen," and in the second verse, “Look up here, man, I'm in danger. I've got nothing left to lose”. Only Bowie could have seemingly stage-managed his own demise in that way. It obviously wasn’t so contrived, but to release his most personal album ever, one clearly alluding to his failing mortality, and then dying two days later seemed, well, perfectly Bowie.

Visconti maintains that Bowie had more music in him when he went, and was as shocked as everyone else by the news. But David Robert Jones had always had a vision. He even predicted the Internet. Perhaps the Major Tom of Space Oddity and Ashes To Ashes was, in reality, his alter-ego, and the Starman was simply projecting a future echo. The upshot is that it is too easy to get maudlin today on the fifth anniversary of his death. And I won’t. His career will always be the gift that keeps on giving (and the continuous output of posthumous releases seems to underpin that point). It’s just that when I look at those scenes of the real David Bowie on tour in 2003, you can't help wishing you could sit with him, one last time, in a South London pub. Having a laugh. Bowie bantz.

The secret's out - the Pink Floyd few people know

March the 10th. Almost a fortnight before lockdown in the UK formally began. It was to be the last time this year (to date) that I would sit in front of a cinema screen, having taken myself off to Richmond-upon-Thames for a socially distanced advanced screening of Nick Mason's - Saucerful Of Secrets Live At The Roundhouse. Nick Mason’s what?

The ‘Saucers’ are a supergroup of sorts, comprised disparately of former members of Pink Floyd, Spandau Ballet and Ian Dury’s Blockheads, to revive the early music of the Floyd themselves, the period when they anchored London’s psychedelic underground at student dives like the UFO club. It's the era when  Pink Floyd were infused by the sometimes childlike whimsy of the late Syd Barrett. Like Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac, this was either a somewhat different Floyd or a very different Floyd, depending on your point of view - long before Dark Side Of The Moon or The Wall, long before the band went gargantuan, long before the inevitable dysfunction and acrimony that serves the Floyd narrative of later years - but revived, though not reimagined, in its new guise, thoroughly deserving of fresh attention.

Nick Mason

The idea came, not from Nick Mason - Pink Floyd’s constant drummer throughout its entire history - but from Lee Harris, the former Blockheads guitarist. He mentioned it to Guy Pratt - latterly Pink Floyd and David Gilmour’s touring bassist - who mentioned it to Mason himself. “Lee had this idea,” Pratt recently explained to Rolling Stone. "Nick said, ‘Oh, that sounds interesting.’” Things moved quickly. The band, says Pratt, just came together: “We didn’t even have to think about it. It’s like everyone was sitting in the ether waiting to do this.”

Before long, Mason, Harris and Pratt had been joined by Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp - a longtime fan of early Floyd - along with keyboard player Dom Beken, and within six weeks they were playing their first pub gig. Not before long they were touring, travelling (and sleeping) on a tour bus and toasting their own bagels in hotel lobby breakfast bars, a far cry from the rarified, private jet-carried life most of the Saucers would have been used to in their past lives. That it felt like a brand new band - even with Mason turning 74 at the time - was not lost on them, but it was a love of playing the material, some of which, the first time they’d been heard live for 50 years or more, that drove them.

This comes across strongly in the Roundhouse show, which is released today on Blu-ray Disc, DVD, double vinyl LP and CD. “Syd had a strange way of writing, which made it sound like a ‘normal’ pop song, and then it would lurch into something else," Mason told Billboard. "[That] makes it such a great vehicle for us.” All the Saucers have talked of their performances as having a punk sensibility, albeit in a more venerated form. “The trouble with the later [Pink Floyd] albums," says Mason, "is that we ended up with a tendency of trying to play them [live] as perfectly as they were recorded. But Syd’s writing is interesting, because it covers really quite a wide sort of genres, so this material is so much easier to wander off and do one’s own version of, say, the slightly bucolic, almost folk song-type rural idyll of Scarecrow, or the very free-form Astronomy Domine, or Interstellar Overdrive.”

Mason, one suspects, couldn’t wait to get out and play this rich catalogue of material, which largely comes from the Piper At The Gates Of Dawn and A Saucerful Of Secrets albums, the only records Barrett played on before leaving amid increasing struggles with LSD and, tragically, the eventual breakdown of his mental health. “I’ve always been interested in the idea of exploring the old catalogue,” Mason told Billboard, saying that he was always wary of “the tyranny of the ‘Big Four’” - The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall. “After the [Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains] Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition, I was reminded how special and undervalued the early period of Pink Floyd is," Mason says. "Then Lee Harris came along with the suggestion of putting a band together. It had been 25 years since I’d been out with a band playing live, but it made me realise I wanted to play this music live again, so the timing was everything.”

Guy Pratt

“Confining the setlist to pre–Dark Side songs makes so much sense,” Pratt says in the same Rolling Stone piece. “Those songs are incredible and you never hear them. To me, it’s a new band. And a lot of them have never been played before, so it feels really fresh. It’s really punk-y and Krautrock-y. It’s got all sorts of different energies in it.”

Gary Kemp concurs: “The best review was our first review,” he recalled to Rolling Stone. “Neil McCormick [Daily Telegraph rock critic] called it ‘Punk Floyd,’ which I loved, because there is that energy Floyd had before they became posh. When we got the band together, it wasn’t like, ‘Well, let’s try and emulate those records.’ Also, we’re not trying to be a tribute band. Nick is the genuine article, so we agreed, ‘Let’s make this band as fresh as we possibly can.’”

Of all of Mason’s recruits, perhaps Kemp is the most surprising addition, especially as he takes on the Saucers’ lead vocal duties, a role never undertaken in his pop star days. Live At The Roundhouse also reveals him to be a far more gifted guitarist than his Spandau past let on (not to mention playing Ronnie Kray…). It shouldn’t be forgotten, though, that he was their  principle songwriter. “I’ve known Gary for a few years before, but I had no idea how passionate he was about it – and how well he knew the songs and knew the music,” Mason explained to Ultimate Classic Rock. “I think he’s been one of the great surprises and assets to this whole enterprise. Because everyone knows that he’s a great songwriter who has written a couple of really mega hits, and Spandau Ballet was seen as the New Romantics – hardly Pink Floyd territory – but he just seemed to slide straight into it.”

Gary Kemp

Kemp himself told Rolling Stone that his route into early Floyd came via David Bowie and even the Sex Pistols. “Syd [Barrett] was definitely an inspiration for both of those artists, and they were both hugely important to me. Also, as someone who comes from London, I kind of get where Syd’s head was at. Plus, there’s the unique style of storytelling that Syd had - never in the same voice twice. That as an actor myself helped me approach the songs in character.”

Returning to songs he hadn’t played on, in most cases, for almost five decades presented some challenges for Mason. “I remembered the basics,” he says, “but what I underestimated were the complexities that Syd had written into them. I’ve always feared becoming my own tribute band. The bands who do that, I’ve never wished to stop them. But for me, rock n' roll has always been about one’s own interpretation of the music, and Syd’s music is perfect for that.”

It’s something Mason muses on in an interview with Ultimate Classic Rock, and a song dating back to 1967, Vegetable Man. Originally recorded as a follow-up to the semi-hit single See Emily Play, Mason heard it afresh as part of Pink Floyd’s The Early Years: 1965-1972 box set “It’s sort of an unfinished work,” says Mason. “In a way, it’s a nice little cameo of what Syd did. One of the strange things [about Syd’s work] is the variety of music styles. Because some people, I think, point at Vegetable Man as a sort of early punk thing in a way, which it is. It’s got that driving four-to-the-floor sort of beat. But also then there’d be the rural, almost fairy story – Gnome, Scarecrow-type of songs. Or Bike even. And then there’d be some wilder [songs like] Interstellar Overdrive, with improvised sections and, for rock 'n' roll, really unusual things where the rhythm breaks down and you’re left with a sort of soundscape for maybe five or 10 minutes.”

While Mason has found new joy in reviving the Floyd’s oldest music, there is also an underlying sadness for the man who played such an integral part to defining it, more so than Roger Waters or Richard Wright, the other original members, or Gilmour who joined as Syd Barrett was becoming ever more erratic and eventually replaced him. “I think there’s a lot of mixed emotions with the whole Syd thing,” Mason told Ultimate Classic Rock. “Because in some ways, he was so smart in so many ways. I think there’s a bit of sadness now looking back on it – and a little bit of guilt. Not really guilt, but we handled Syd very badly. We had no idea – and still don’t really know – what the real problem was, whether it was LSD or whether it was something in his character anyway. Or whether, in fact, he was probably clearer than we ever perceived and he just didn’t actually want to be in a band, necessarily. While we thought if he didn’t want to be in a band, it was a sign of madness – because we were all at that point, absolutely committed to doing it. But I think he maybe just thought, ‘Well, I’ve done that. I don’t really want to do anymore of it.’ But instead of just going ... we should have probably let him go much earlier or separated from him earlier. But as I say, we had no idea at the time.”

Picture: Facebook/Nick Mason's Saucerful Of Secrets

Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets are, then, a strange outfit to characterise. They are, in some ways, the ultimate tribute act, but nor are they a revival band, either. Live At The Roundhouse is a joy to watch because there is a profound energy that comes through songs I’d largely never heard before. That is mainly due to my exposure to Pink Floyd having been almost exclusively the 1970s-era albums, and the continuation of that legacy through David Gilmour and Roger Waters’ separate, alienated, tours and albums that have drawn on the same songs, sounds and even themes of the “Big Four”. Mason and his band are right in positioning the Saucers as almost a brand new act, even playing brand new songs. It’s a timely reminder that sometimes it’s worth revisiting music that has developed an unfair stigma over time. Some of the early prog rock albums, for example, should be listened to objectively, and you’ll hear song structures and landscapes that appear on much more recent, acclaimed material by Blur or Radiohead. Some, of course, is less easy to listen to.

And that’s the fun of Live At The Roundhouse. Far from being a snapshot of another time, the 22-song set - which includes as many obscurities as better known Pink Floyd tracks like Interstellar Overdrive, Astronomy Domine, Arnold Layne, Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun and One Of These Days - should serve as an introduction. Even, a resetting of prejudices about a band that once flew the flag for commercial juggernauts (through no fault of their own - they just made a few albums that sold in mind-boggling numbers). It just would be nice for the Saucers to be allowed out on the road to tour these songs again, but that’s a blog post for another day.

Is it any wonder?

And so the anniversary of David Bowie's death comes around again. A properly balanced individual would simply get over it, as they would the deaths of any figure they'd held in high regard but never knew personally. Bowie is, though, one of only two artists I’ve properly mourned for, the other being John Martyn. And when I say “mourn”, I don’t mean the lowering of flags and wearing a black veil for a month, but a profound reflection on - as irrational as this sounds - the loss. In the case of Bowie, it was the loss of a creative soul who’s music, and all the different phases of that music - the winsome folk, the glam, the soul, the post-punk, the pop, the grunge...the endless reinvention, basically - captured my interest almost inadvertently. 

But in the wake of Bowie dying, on this day four years ago and just 48 hours after releasing his final album, Blackstar, I discovered another Bowie, one that I have also come to miss as much as a personal and now absent friend. In the flood of archive video clips that started surfacing on social media, documenting both live performances as well as the few on-camera interviews he did, I encountered a Bowie brimming with warmth and a distinct south London charm. Unencumbered by the addictions and foibles of the 1970s, the 1990s Bowie was funny and relaxed. Indeed, backstage footage of The Dame on what would be his final tour saw not a rock deity but a bloke you would willingly want to spent time with, down the pub, in a restaurant, out on the town. 

Somehow this not only completed my picture of Bowie, but also my appreciation of him, as if the incredible body of music and the bold artistic adventure hadn’t been enough. The cap of it all was a train journey back to Paris from the Montreux Jazz Festival when I watched the entire concert film of Bowie’s Reality Tour. Recorded in Dublin in 2003, and running to almost two-and-a-half hours, over 30 songs it not only captured Bowie at his best and captured Bowie’s best, but faithfully portrayed the relaxed, funny, easy-going Bowie that bandmates like Gail Ann Dorsey and Earl Slick would later tell a BBC documentary was what typified him on that tour. 

Sad, then, that health issues ended his live career in 2004, and until the bombshell of 2013, when the single Where Are We Now and, later, The Next Day album, appeared out of the blue, his public appearances were limited to a few guest slots, such as performing Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb with David Gilmour at the Royal Albert Hall in 2006, and his hilarious cameo in Ricky Gervais’s Extras (“Chubby little loser!”).

Since his death there has been no shortage of posthumous releases of archive material and rarities, all of which this fan has been more than willing to Hoover up. Yes, I’m the record company’s dream punter, buying super deluxe editions without question, but just as I will defend most live albums (if recorded well enough and capture a genuinely great performance), the Bowie box sets have provided new opportunity to appreciate the music, the charisma and the artist anew.

And, there seems, plenty more to come. On what would have been Bowie’s 73rd birthday two days ago, Parlophone announced the next set of baubles to prise open the fan’s wallet. Over the next six weeks an EP, David Bowie: Is It Any Wonder?, will be released online in six increments, starting with - and available now - a previously unreleased version of The Man Who Sold The World. The EP’s following five tracks will be released on a weekly basis from 17 January onwards. Then, on this year’s Record Store Day, 18 April, Parlophone will release ChangesNowBowie, effectively a recording of studio rehearsals for Bowie’s 50th birthday concert at Madison Square Garden on 8 January, 1997. Track listings have not yet been released, but the concert featured classics like Space Oddity, The Jean Genie, Queen Bitch, Scary Monsters (And Supercreeps) and other more obscure gems and a cover - with Lou Reed - of The Velvet Underground’s I'm Waiting for the Man. And, of course, I’ll be in the queue at 6am to buy it.

Grace and Danger: John Martyn - ten years gone

If ever there was a combination of contrasting words which perfectly encapsulated someone it's "Grace And Danger", the title of John Martyn’s 1980 ‘divorce album’. For, as it transpired as his career unfolded up until his death at the age of 60, ten years ago today, he was grace and danger epitomised: writer of songs of an almost ethereal beauty and yet capable of the most preposterous damage to himself and those around him.

Much is made of Martyn’s self-destructive predilections, principally drink and other substances, and to look back pictorially over his musical career - a journey that progresses from beautiful, tousle-haired, slightly buck-toothed 20-year-old to grizzled, great bear of a man, performing from a wheelchair, the result of having his lower right leg amputated as the result of a burst cyst - is to watch an at-times agonising evolution. Pity, however, is the last thing Martyn would want or have expected.

He was, at times, as blasé about his condition as those things that led to it. This might sound reckless but to say it was belies the complexities that Martyn surrounded himself in, indulged and even encouraged. And that’s if you’d even heard of him. My frustration with Martyn has always been his lack of fame: despite being feted by the likes of Eric Clapton (whose cover of May You Never, Martyn’s lullaby to his son, was a useful royalties earner) and his great friend Phil Collins, amongst other A-listers, Martyn sometimes seemed to welcome obscurity, an aspect that confounds as much as it frustrates those who’d wish, now, posthumously, he were more than just “acclaimed singer-songwriter, John Martyn”.

It’s too easy to dwell on Martyn’s weaponised dysfunction as a means of labelling him, but he truly encapsulated grace and danger. Perhaps turning a blind eye to the danger, I choose to focus on the grace, and for this he remains, resolutely, my musical hero. I can’t think of an artist who, over 44 years and 22 studio albums and over 30 live and compilations, produced such a prodigious, exquisite canon of work that could both pick you up and bring you down when you are sad, as well as envelope you in a warmth much like his own lyric to Go Down Easy, “You curl around me, like a fern in the Spring”. He was also a master of reinvention and experimentation: coming out of, first, the Scottish folk scene and then, by way of the legendary London folkie hangout Les Cousins (referred to by many, phonetically, as “Lez Cuzzans”, as if run by a bloke called Leslie, as opposed to the more exotic French name it actually bore…), Martyn emerged from his first, somewhat Arran-sweater-and-fingers-in-ear folk albums, to explore the realms of jazz, reggae, rock, funk and even trip-hop. And just when you thought you knew one of his albums, along would come another live release or compilation with completely new arrangements of familiar songs, each as invigorating as the original, and often dependent on whether they were recorded as a full electric band, or a solo acoustic set, or one of many tours with his longtime sparring partner - sometimes literally - Danny Thompson.

In my first encounter with John Martyn’s music I had no idea how much it would become a predominating soundtrack in my life, more than any other artist (including Bowie). Nor would that first encounter reveal the small personal connection I had with Martyn. The encounter came one Wednesday evening in the early 1980s when Gary Crowley had Phil Collins on as a guest on his Capital Radio show. Collins requested Sweet Little Mystery, a song from the Grace And Danger album, on which they had both worked. There is something of a bittersweet irony about this fact: their collaboration came at a time when both were going through painful divorces. With his first marriage irretrievable, Collins started working at home in Shalford, Surrey, on the demos that would eventually launch him as a solo superstar. Martyn, going through a very painful divorce to Beverley Martyn (with whom he is co-credited on the 1970 albums Stormbringer! and The Road To Ruin), came down to stay and work on songs with for what became Grace And Danger. “I’d turned my master bedroom into a studio,” recalls Collins, “and there was a phone on the floor. We both took it in turns to call our relative partners. There’d be all kind of shouting matches going on. It was very creative, because Face Value came out of that.” “We were both going through the same emotional trauma,” Martyn told Q magazine. “There was vast amounts of going down the potting shed together and weeping. I’d phone Beverley and it would be ‘aaargh’, then it would be Phil’s turn. We were both making ourselves terribly miserable, and then playing and singing about it.”

Such was the raw nature of many of the tracks on Grace And Danger that Island Records supremo Chris Blackwell was reluctant to release it. In fact, it would be almost a year late when it eventually appeared ("I freaked,” said Martyn in 1981. “Please get it out! I don't give a damn how sad it makes you feel. It's what I'm about: direct communication of emotion.”). Many will say that Grace And Danger was Martyn’s last great album. It was certainly his last for Island. What followed in the 1980s were a procession of records that took Martyn further away from his folk origins. His next album, Glorious Fool, saw Collins take on production work, and there was a notable shift towards a more mainstream pop-rock sound (for which Collins has frequently been blamed, wrongly). Clapton was drafted in to guest on one track, a reciprocation for his May You Never cover. Perhaps the next run of albums - Well Kept Secret (1982), Sapphire (1984), Piece by Piece (1986), The Apprentice (1990) and Cooltide (1991) didn’t do Martyn as much justice as his more feted releases, Solid Air (1973), One World (1977) and Grace And Danger. And while there was a tendency towards 80s over-production - more synthesisers and less of the acoustic-guitar-and-Echoplex-wooziness of his 70s releases - the essence of John Martyn’s music remained throughout. Sometimes it’s better to listen to some of the many live recordings from this era to hear his soul, not to mention his gift for rearrangements that could transform any element in his body of work, to the extent that you might now own myriad versions of the same song, and yet consider them different pieces altogether.

But to return to that midweek appearance on Capital Radio by Phil Collins, his choice of Sweet Little Mystery led to my ‘discovery’ of Martyn himself, and that tiny personal connection I had. Not being old enough to have heard Martyn’s seminal 70s work, I started buying his albums in, perhaps, the agreed order - Solid Air, then One World, then Grace And Danger. And then, in 1992, a curious compilation came out, Couldn’t Love You More, featuring reworked versions of some of his best songs, like One World, Head And Heart, Could've Been Me and Man In The Station. In hindsight, the album has been slated for revisions that rendered some songs a bit too AoR. But with contributions from, again, Collins and Clapton, plus David Gilmour, it’s a lovely piece of work. It was around the time of Couldn’t Love You More’s release that I made a startling discovery: Martyn had been born, Ian David McGheachy, on 11 September 1948 in my home town, the London/Surrey suburb of New Malden. Growing up, nothing famous happened to or in New Malden, with the exception of Jimmy Tarbuck living in the posh bit, Crackerjack's Jan Francis being spotted now and again in Boots, and a backdrop of one of the town's twin 60s office blocks appearing as a backdrop to Bless This House. And yet, briefly, someone who was fast becoming a musical hero of mine was actually born there! Nothing would knock this from the top of my pile of things I’m most proud of, not even discovering that Bowie launched the Ziggy Stardust tour at The Toby Jug pub in nearby Tolworth, or that Clapton himself went to school in neighbouring Surbiton and signed his contract to join The Yardbirds in a New Malden boozer.

When Martyn’s parents - light opera singers - separated, the-then five-year-old Iain moved to Glasgow with his father. To all intents and purposes, he became Scottish, but once McGeachy became Martyn, he would flit for the rest of his life between Glaswegian and somewhat Mockney accents with impressive ease. In Glasgow the teenage Martyn developed a love of folk music, acquiring an insane talent for the acoustic guitar, and eventually falling under the influence of local folk musician Hamish Imlach. Iain gradually became John, as the prodigious youngster evolved his craft. “John Martyn” was adopted as a stage name, an adaptation of the Martin guitar company (whose acoustic instruments would become intertwined with Martyn’s signature sound in the mid-70s). “Iain David McGeachy” had been deemed too Scottish, so something more neutral was needed: “In those days there was no traditional scene as such,” Martyn told biographer John Neil Munro for his terrific book Some People Are Crazy: The John Martyn Story. “You had to be American-sounding. I was more influenced by American music than Scottish music, so the name Martyn was [friend and later agent, Sandy Glennon’s] idea - it had to have the ‘y’ in it , to sound posh.”

That, then, was the start of a career that would baffle as many as it would enlighten. Martyn’s back catalogue from the early days is worth listening to, if only to hear the folkiness gradually disappear. By the time Solid Air came along, with its title track, a paean to troubled friend Nick Drake, defining Martyn’s ethereal, weed-influenced sound, as well as uniting him with lifelong mucker and bass player Danny Thompson, Martyn was already moving into a more progressive sound. Over the years I’ve devoured Martyn’s work with every studio album he released, and every compilation and box set, some like the epic Island Years box set requiring help to bring home, such was the copious amount of material it contained. I make no exaggeration when I say that if the house burned, this - and my own Martin D35 guitar - would be the only two possessions I’d leap from the bedroom window clutching. Listening to the Island box - remember, he was only on the label for a decade or so - is like repainting the Forth Road Bridge: when you eventually reach the end you’ve got to start at the beginning again. It is that lavish, and that stuffed with live recordings and alternative takes that are the very essence of record collection curation.

There is so, so much more I could write about John Martyn in this post - good and bad - but I and you would be here all week. In some respects, I simply implore anyone who is either unfamiliar or unaware of him to go and spend an evening on Spotify. Or, better still, go and actually buy his records. His death, on January 29, 2009 was sad but, perhaps, not unexpected, even though he’d only turned 60 the previous September. Unlike the ’27 Club’ - Hendrix, Joplin, Cobain, Winehouse, et al - Martin had survived into late middle age against the odds. He’d imbibed forbidden substances copiously, worked his way into drunken brawls and escaped worse, and been appalling to the women in his life. He’d changed from angelic-voiced youth to a wheelchair-bound amputee. The cyst that had burst was, possibly, caused by Martyn having stood heavily on that particular leg on stage over the years. In that there is a bitter irony: an artist sometimes criminally overlooked and under-appreciated, whose final album - which was finished by others after his death - was Willing To Work, the ethic that ran through the 44 years of his recording and performing career, one which never saw him soar to the wealth of so many of his musical acolytes and collaborators.

Somewhere on the Internet you can hear a recording of an extraordinary piece of radio from the day John Martyn died. Danny Baker, then doing a daytime show on BBC Radio London, had just come in to the station when he was told the news. “I almost turned around and went back home,” he said when he went on air, breathless and decidedly downbeat. “This news has knocked me for a loop,” he intoned before commencing a couple of hours of playing only Martyn’s music, while reflecting on the huge influence he’d had on him. It’s extraordinary because Baker was being delightfully self-indulgent. But probably only he could get away with an improvised two-hour show featuring music from just one artist, one who could hardly be thought of as mass market, either. And yet the reverence of the broadcast matched that you’d reserve for the Queen’s passing, or a national treasure of unblemished significance.

I’d hate John Martyn to be remembered for being niche, but that’s just my own frustration that a man whose music has embellished my life like no one else’s wasn’t better known, or more successful. Yes, he was, perhaps, a muso’s musician, someone that former NME journalists like Baker can wax endlessly on, while others with their heads firmly in the clouds of broad popular music wouldn’t know him from a hole in the ground. Martyn’s music touches me today, and the happy coincidence of him being the New Malden brother I never had is nothing more than that, a happy coincidence.

But I’ll leave you with this one thought, of many more that I could commit to the keyboard: shortly before his death, Martyn received an OBE in the 2009 New Year’s Honours list. It would have bemused as much as anything. But 12 months before, the BBC gave Martyn a lifetime achievement award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, with the gong handed to him by his great friend Phil Collins. “Folk” just doesn’t do his musical canon justice, but in its award citation, the BBC described his “heartfelt performances have either suggested or fully demonstrated an idiosyncratic genius.” I’d say that nailed John Martyn perfectly. RIP.