Some of the more notable concert venues are the more unusual ones, and sometimes this is due to an unusual event. A perfect example of that is the Casino in Montreux, Switzerland. For those unaware, the Deep Purple song Smoke On The Water is about a fire that struck the venue while Frank Zappa and the Mothers Of Invention were there performing, in December 1971. The Montreux Jazz Festival was founded in 1967 and the Casino has always been a key venue for the event. In the 1970s, it broadened its scope from jazz to bring on various other musical genres (with Pink Floyd playing in 1970 at the Festival), and this year will see Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets join the list of musicians who have been fortunate enough to play the Festival! The band will be playing Montreux on July 13th, and tickets go on sale tomorrow (Friday, April 19th) at 12pm (11am BST) through Tickets.MontreuxJazz.com (https://tickets.montreuxjazz.com/webshop/webticket/bestseatselect?eventId=442). It is the final date to be added to the European tour this year, and nicely fills the gap between the Portoroz and Graz gigs.
There are two things on the UK’s BBC which may be of interest, on Saturday (20th May). The first appears on Radio 4, and is an hour long dramatisation by Roger James Elsgood of Haydn Middleton’s novel The Ballad of Syd Morgan. This sees Syd Barrett (played by Tyger Drew-Honey) encountering novelist E M Forster (played by Simon Russell Beale) in King’s College, Cambridge, in 1968. Their meeting “leads to a conversation between two men belonging to very different eras of the 20th century and at markedly different stages in their lives, about the loss and the continued absence of creativity.” More information can be found here (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001m4cx), and it airs at 3pm UK time. It will be available on demand via the BBC’s iPlayer service shortly after broadcast. Also on Saturday – and again in the UK, but potentially available worldwide online via the BBC’s iPlayer – the new series of Later…With Jools Holland starts at 9:50pm on the BBC Two television channel. Amongst the guests is Jill Furmanovsky who started photographing Pink Floyd way back in 1972, so it would be astonishing if she didn’t at least mention the band during the interview. Jill’s taken iconic pictures of numerous iconic artists, and there’s currently an exhibition of some of her incredible work at Manchester City Library, running until June 24th, 2023. Admission is free and we hear it is well worth visiting.
The debut release from Welsh singer-songwriter Donnie Wilde, ‘Ammo’ is a vulnerable, tender track in support of Black Lives Matter. A brand new face on the scene, Donnie Wilde is already showing potential as a voice of protest and reason. ‘Ammo’ is a poignant commentary on the police brutality of black people worldwide, though particularly inspired by …
Published by Omnibus Books in February in Europe, and May in North America, is The Lyrics of Syd Barrett. Featuring 52 songs and a foreword by Pink Floyd’s first manager, Peter Jenner, and an introduction by Rob Chapman (author of Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head), this beautifully illustrated and official 96-page book compiles Syd’s extraordinary lyrics together for the very first time. David Gilmour has been a key person behind this book, working his way through Syd lyrics checking them for accuracy before the book went to the printers. A good friend of Brain Damage is Dr Kevin De Ornellas, a Lecturer in English Literature at Ulster University, and he has taken a detailed look at this new book… In an era of gargantuan coffee-table books, bloated CD and DVD box sets and cumbersome multi-disc vinyl re-releases, it is it refreshing to enjoy a relatively simple and affordable artefact: a small, easily handled book. This book, an apparently official provision of what is claimed to be Syd Barrett’s complete lyrics, is beautifully designed by Lora Findlay. It comes in a tactile, attractive cloth cover: on the front, a well-known Michael Ochs portrait of Syd Barrett is encased within an elaborate psychedelic border that is tasteful because it is all done with only two colours â white and a sort of mauve-lilac colour. The endpapers are particularly lovely â they feature repeated, wallpaper-like reproductions of Syd Barrett’s renowned Tortoise. Half of the tortoises have the head facing upwards â the other half are rotated 180 degrees. There are 168 tortoises in total. It is both a bit whacky and a bit poignant â and very much in the spirit of Barrettâs later music. A fuller, page-high reproduction of Barrettâs original, subtly-coloured 1963 Tortoise work is provided inside (page 18). The book is petite and thin but the high-quality cloth, the firm binding and the crisp texture of the pages makes the book feel sturdy: it is a keeper that will weather well. The lyrics are all laid out in a clear, readable font on either one or two self-contained pages and there are many splendid illustrations and photographs: if I counted correctly there are 18 monochrome images and 8 colour ones. Every one is reproduced perfectly: most feature posed or in-performance photographs of Syd Barrett with or without Pink Floyd; some reproduce Barrett’s art works. It might have been better to have more of Barrett’s art and less of Rick Wright’s cigarette and less of Roger Waters’ understated scowl. But the text of the book is what matters â here, there is much promise but the odd problem too.